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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.
Hard disagree.
Have you seen the recent CJR reporting on the Press' coverage of Russiagate? https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
If you listened to and believed those news organisations you were not just uninformed about the state of the world but actively misinformed. They lied about Trump, they lied about Biden (and his laptop), they lied about Russia, they lied about Syria, they lied about Iraq. I cannot point to a single period of my life where those mainstream news organisations have not been staking their credibility on claims which have later been proven to not just be false, but so easily demonstrable as false that ignorance cannot be an excuse for their coverage (unless you wish to make the argument that all those journalists are extremely incompetent). Beyond that, there are even multiple instances where journalists have spoken about how their political mission is more important than actual journalism.
Even now, I can just go and compare the NYT's reporting on the Ukraine war to the reports recently put out by the RAND think tank, and the observable gulf between reality and what is reported in the NYT is so vast that I cannot understand how you can believe that the NYT is actually practicing journalism and not manufacturing consent. It doesn't matter how many bureaus they have when on any issue of substance it is nakedly obvious that they are lying to you.
The idea of the piece is that they're right and honest about most things, not that they're right and honest about every thing. Yeah, wrong about russiagate, but right about most of the ukraine invasion, 'who won the presidential elections', TSMC's american investments, china's lock downs, and tens of thousands of other things, small and large.
Since the media reports on many things during year-long time periods, this is entirely compatible with 'most'.
From Hanania's original article:
Someone who wants to "reform" the media to fix their blindspots on race, right-wing politics is not endorsing those stances.
And can you give an example of NYT/Rand differences in ukraine that are so 'vast'?
But this is meaningless - the actual importance and weight of their "mistakes" (I am honestly unsure as to the precise blend of incompetence/malice responsible) vastly outweigh their accuracy when it comes to talking about how the fire brigade rescued a kitten or a dog was trained how to surf. If a financial manager made a thousand trades which earned one or two dollars in profit and a single trade which lost seven billion, "they were right most of the time" is not an argument that would convince me to give them my money or support.
Additionally, I don't think they have been right about some of those things - their coverage of the Ukraine war at the very least is something I'd consider highly misleading, but that would be a separate topic that multiple essays could be written about and I won't go into it here.
I do not want to reform the media - I want to replace it, and that replacement is currently ongoing. There's a huge variety of alternatives to the media that don't just try to target a different segment of the market but actually outcompete them on the quality of their analysis. Ultimately I don't think it is possible to reform the media without effectively destroying it - the existing incentive structures and culture ensure that the media cannot actually do the job they claim is their raison d'être. Of course, the Hanania article doesn't apply to me anyway - there's nothing blind about my distrust or hate of the media, nor are my complaints hysterical.
Sure. Read this report https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html and then go read the NYtimes coverage of the war - I cannot give you any specific articles, however, because I have hit my limit of "free" articles from the NYtimes and hence cannot actually do the due diligence required to make sure I'm not sending anything particularly egregious. As I'm sure you can probably guess, I'm not interested in paying them any money, so I'm not going to be subscribing any time soon.
you can bypass a nyt paywall by prepending archive.is/ to the ur fyi
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It's a saying, not an ironclad rule to build your life around. If you're expecting perfection all the time you're going to be sorely disappointed.
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Sorry, not buying it. That's like the Gell-Mann amnesia squared. We know they purposely and knowingly lied in many topics, but we're supposed to assume that in topics we haven't caught them yet they wouldn't lie to us, and not only that, but praise them for it as the best truth-spreading vehicle humanity can offer? That's like telling a battered woman "well, he doesn't beat you all the time, right? Only occasionally, maybe once or twice a day? So he's actually a great guy, what is to complain about?!"
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