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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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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.

Hanania's piece wasn't meant to convince you to love the media, it's meant to counter stuff like "the liberal media is evil and lies constantly! I read Rebel News instead!" and point out that conservatives don't have anything close to a good alternative.

Best I can give you is "all media is evil and lies constantly, so I read no news at all". Except for you lot.

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