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Link from my blog The media is honest, except when it isn’t in response to Richard Hanania's article about how the media is honest and good.
My main disagreement is that Hanania's argument amounts to a sort of bait and switch: making a generalization that 'the media is honest and good' and then later equivocating that it's only honest in select cases (matters not pertaining to race, ideology, gender, etc.), although even that is questionable such as regarding global warming, which is also highly political despite not being about race or gender. Second, let's assume that the media is honest, but if the reporting is so bad that for all intents and purposes there is no difference between incompetence or deception, then I don't see how this supports Hanania's thesis that the media is also good.
Regarding the NYTs, the NYTs is popular in part because it produces so much content, which is not specifically news-related but includes op-eds, general interest pieces, and such that are of a less topical nature. This is not the same as the NYTs being honest, because it's not news. Reading an article about cooking in the NYTs does not mean I endorse its reporting of foreign affairs.
The financial incentives encourage clickbait. Even bloggers are not immune to this. Clickbait offers very high upside (virality, ad dollars, subscriptions, etc.) and little downside (small reputational loss), the latter which can be mitigated by mixing clickbait with non-clickbait. If people stopped following the media because of getting stories wrong ,even on occasion very big ones, no media company would still be in business. So people trust the media, yes, but this does not necessarily imply it's trustworthy. I think the media cannot be fixed until these incentives change.
The NYT is also one of the few publications that still actually produces news content. News gathering is expensive, and a lot of publications are cutting back on anything that requires more work than paying a 24-year-old 35k/year to sit in an office and and of course their main office in New York. CNN has 19 domestic bureaus, 49 international bureaus, ant their Atlanta headquarters. NPR has 18 domestic bureaus and 17 international bureaus in addition to their DC headquarters, plus the news departments of the various member stations. The only conservative news organization that even comes close is Fox News, but at 9 domestic and 3 international bureaus plus the New York headquarters they aren't quite in the same league. Most conservative outlets have nothing that isn't local. The reason the "liberal media" continues to dominate is because the reputational advantage gained by having real reporters writing real stories is difficult to match. Any hack can paraphrase a wire story but it takes actual journalistic skill to spend time developing sources and going through the drudgery of, say, sitting through court proceedings or city council meetings and coming out of them with an interesting story. So I'm inclined to believe that these news organizations are "mostly right" because they have entirely too much invested in being mostly right. Fox News can certainly afford to spend as much on actual news gathering as its peers but it won't because it doesn't need to; people who turn to Fox do so not because they expect it to be right but because they expect everyone else to be wrong, and aren't looking for news so much as invective. That being said, their news department still invests enough in actual journalism that they're mostly right. The other conservative outlets are purely bush league or worse, almost without exception. They don't have the money to actually invest in real news gathering, but either way no one is tuning into OANN for news anyway.
I think that sounds reasonable. If there is a wildfire, for example, I will assume that when CNN reports on it they are telling the truth of the existence of a wildfire. But taken at face value, that is like saying the SPLC exists for fighting poverty in the south, but overlooking everything else.
Does it? Fox News' ratings are equal to cnn+ msnbc combined.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2014/03/1-cable-tv-viewership.png
CNN dominated in the 90s but not anymore
Neither CNN nor Fox News are really news stations w/ reported, at least during primetime. They're opinion states.
Also, the liberal media does dominate in someplace people forget about - the nightly news. Twenty million people still watch the nightly news daily. Yes, most of those people are over 55, but even w/ that 3.4 million in the demo (25-54) still watch it daily averaged, which dwarfs even Tucker's 25-54 ratings.
(https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/week-of-jan-16-evening-news-ratings-world-news-tonight-continues-to-outpace-competition-despite-week-to-week-losses/522615/)
Throw in newspapers, and the fact the conservatives just can't create a right-leaning version of the NYT (or frankly, considering the actual make-up of the reporters there, the Wall Street Journal's news pages, as opposed to it's opinions pages), I think that's going to continue, until conservatives can learn how to write-up news stories to sound even to the normal person, but be biased as we on the left have.
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There are lots of things on top of that that lean overwhelmingly liberal. My go to example is the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes is a boring show that almost no one would watch...except that it is on CBS directly after the CBS football broadcast, so it averages 10 million viewers.
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