Medium:
No matter what media stream you depend on for news, you know that news has changed in the past few years. There’s a lot more of it, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s true, what’s biased, and what may be outright deceptive. While the bastions of journalism still employ editors and fact-checkers to screen information for you, if you’re getting your news and assessing information from less venerable sources, it’s up to you to determine what’s credible.
Even if we didn’t find ourselves in these challenging times for accuracy in the media, this is still good advice.
Wish there was someone between CNN/MSNBC and Fox News. They each have their biases. Kinda have to flip back and forth and realize the truth is somewhere in between. Those that stick to just one or the other as a source of truth need help.
If it can’t be accurate, atleast it should agree with your pre-conceived notions. 😉
I go with Reuters, which seems to be pretty much just the news, rather than much pre-digestion and “curation”.
It has always been the case that active, involved citizens have been their own fact checkers, applying critical thinking and analysis to whatever information crosses their transom. Hasn’t it?
If you quit listening to the echo chamber, you will find that the traditional sources of news are still there, still doing their job. Sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but Fox News and the new Drump clan, trying to discredit the “mainstream media” are doing so because the “mainstream media” spends considerable effort getting things right, with solid reporting, fact checking and (hopefully) calling out of this fraud.
You know that the “mainstream media” has credibility, when the a-holes who are attempting to take over the government try to silence reporters and the organizations they work for. And no, CNN and Fox are not “mainstream media”.
It was until the Republicans spent 40 years building mistrust in institutions. Now, Drump can waltz in and $h!t all over everyone.
That’s some critical thinking and analysis…
This is just more BS excuse-making for Trump getting elected.
Journalism is more reliable than it has ever been. Journalists have more resources for fact-checking than ever before. If you are consuming the work of actual journalists, it is much more likely to be true than it ever was before. We are in a golden age of journalism.
But wait, why haven’t you heard about this golden age of journalism? Why is the general public so fucking ignorant?
BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE TODAY ARE NOT CONSUMING ANY JOURNALISM.
Today there are a lot of fictional TV shows (e.g. Fox News, MSNBC) that are set in fictional news rooms and who draw their fictional storylines from the news, but who are not in fact journalists and do not at all keep to the precepts of journalistic integrity or truth or fairness or any other concept like that. They are profit-making storytelling and that is that. They are soap operas set in news rooms, and when you are done watching them, part of the appeal is they basically tell you “you can consider the past 3 hours to have been high-minded journalism-consumption you smart person you, you informed person, you caring person!” IT IS TOTAL BULLSHIT. All you just did was waste 3 hours watching fictional soap operas that actually made you more stupid because their fictional President Obama (for example) had almost nothing to do with the real President Obama, whom most US Americans know almost nothing about. An example of that is the millions of people who get their health care from ACA but who are against “ObamaCare” until they find out ACA and ObamaCare are the same thing.
There are also fictional magazines that do the same making-you-stupid with their fiction stories based on the news. For example, everything on the MSNBC-approved reading list like Vox and the Huffington Post, or everything on the Fox News -approved reading list, the names of which I will not even repeat in order not to risk calling up any actual demons from the actual confines of an actual Hell.
So it is not at all about “venerable sources [of journalism.]” It is about whether or not you actually consume any journalism at all or whether you do not. It is about whether your conception of the world is based on the reality of journalism such as The Intercept or on the fictional Reality TV of Fox News and MSNBC and all the other corporate candy machines who put you to sleep on the couch with their sugar and bullshit.
Here are some tests:
if you think that President Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton are “left-wing” then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think that Chuck Todd is a journalist, then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think Edward Snowden is “a hacker” then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think that Chelsea Manning deserved to be in jail for a single minute, then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think “Russian Hackers” significantly influenced the 2016 Presidential Election, congratulations on your not consuming any actual journalism
if you thought at any time that Secretary Hillary Clinton had any kind of chance to win the 2016 Presidential Election as a Democrat, then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think that US Presidents and Senators and Congress people cannot or do not do things that are outlawed by the US Constitution, then you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think that “illegal drugs” do more harm than legal, prescription drugs, then you are not consuming any actual journalism — it is not even close, by the way
if you think there is a scientific debate about climate change, you are not consuming any actual journalism
if you think there is a scientific debate about how to pay for the health care of the population of an industrialized country, then you are also not consuming any actual journalism
if you think that Muslims kill more Christians than Christians kill Muslims, then you are not consuming any actual journalism (it is not even close)
if you think the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution removes community restrictions on gun ownership rather than places additional restrictions on gun ownership, then you are not consuming any actual journalism (notice it says “well-regulated” right in there)
if you think immigrants are bad in any way for the US, you are not consuming any actual journalism
… all of the above things are fictional storylines from Reality TV. All of the time you spent on them was like time spent thinking about Hulk Hogan fighting The Iron Sheik. I hope you enjoyed your candy and your entertainment time, but you have to admit now that Fox News and MSNBC do not contain any actual news, same as pro wrestling did not contain any actual sports. Both are entertainment, pure and simple.
We all watched that Nazi get punched on video. He was walking around in public because he has no idea about the real world. His concept of the world is shaped by the entertainment he consumes, which is 100% of his information consumption, pure entertainment. And his entertainment is stuff that tells him he is not a baby-faced little mama’s boy with no skills or practical value to any community, that tells him he is big and strong and right and wise and hip and cool — until he got punched in the mouth like a guy walking out into an intersection with his eyes closed. Same exact thing happened recently to all the right-wing people who have taken over the Democratic Party over the past few years, when they got beaten by Donald Trump like they walked out into an intersection with their eyes closed. The thing is, the same thing is probably going to happen to you at some point, if all you consume is entertainment that kisses your ass all day instead of doing the actual work of finding out WTF is actually going on, even if it is uncomfortable to find out that President Obama murdered thousands of people while he was in office. That is really uncomfortable. It’s more fun to hear a corporate robot tell you that President Obama was undeniably at least twice as good a President as George W. Bush. Feels better. But then when you lose your kids in the Global Drone War in 2025, you don’t really have a right to complain, do you? Because you didn’t speak out when the US started and then escalated the Drone War, and you didn’t have any journalists to tell you that the cost of a drone falls as fast as the cost of computing, such that the poorest country in the world will be droning Texas within a decade. But you don’t know that, because you don’t consume any actual journalism.
So what is needed is not to fix journalism, it is just to stop babying all the people who want to eat candy all day and call it salad. Tell them no. If you want to eat candy all day, you have to call it candy, and you can’t bring up any of your crazy Fox News or MSNBC storylines at the local council meeting. When someone says there is a War On Christmas or Hillary lost because of Russian hackers you have to treat them like they just did a Gollum impersonation and they want everybody to talk about The Lord Of The Rings for the next hour. It is the same thing. When someone quotes “Bill O’Reilly” that is like quoting Darth Vader. They are both fictional villains you spend your entertainment time with. If you have lost the line between reality and fantasy, then that is not the fault of actual journalists. Who as I said, are doing their best work ever. Most people don’t know about it. But journalists are doing their best work ever.
https://goo.gl/8WKAHz&kekud
Read the New York Times. Subscribe and support honest and decent journalism. Read The New Yorker. Read the Washington Post. Stop watching so much television.
Brilliant. Agree 100%. People need to turn off the television and read, simple as that.
Maddow on MSNBC, whatever you think of her bias, does historical research and puts current news in context. And she isn’t so beholden to the DC Beltway culture that she refrains from criticizing either side of the aisle.
Once upon a time, journalism was widely regarded as something that should be protected from the pressures of a channel’s or publication’s marketing and sales divisions. Sure, there were beasts like Hearst who imagined themselves kingmakers, but there was also much more of a common regard for the civics of what constituted the public good. While such things were still being taught in decently-funded public schools, anyway.
We had, for example, a decades-old institution called CBS News, which had been founded by individuals who’d helped define the standard of news reporting while under fire in World War II Europe. Many of them who’d created that high-water mark in radio reporting then moved into television and did pretty much the same.
They were regarded as the gold standard of serious reporting for an audience that preferred their news in half- and one-hour chunks. Yes, they were subject to ratings and advertising revenue, but they weren’t controlled by the Entertainment division of the parent company. That would happen later.
Their organization helped bring down a thoroughly corrupt president (along with most of his senior staff) and turned the tide of public support for a ridiculous, unnecessary war that had never been ours to begin with.
And so it wasn’t long after Watergate and Viet Nam that conservatives started buying up newspapers and radio/tv stations, consolidating them to remove genuine local content, and bowdlerizing the messages that the public would be permitted to see. The message was controlled, and the national conversation gradually shifted to the right. It took decades to boil this frog, but it happened.
This is, for example, why we didn’t see body bags coming back from Iraq, and why the press had to be “embedded.” It’s how government programs that we’ve all paid for are now called “entitlements” by billionaires.
All this happened before the Web commoditized news and drowned it in noise.
While critical thinking was still being taught in public schools, yes it was.
You didn’t see body bags coming back from Iraq? They were sure hard to miss, as well as the daily body counts, montages of faces of the fallen, and so much more.
Well, hard to miss until Obama came into office. Then they disappeared. Good to see they’re back now, with WaPo breathlessly reporting about “Trump’s first casualty.”
Having said that, I agree fully that media of all stripes are driven by profit, and certainly not “sound” journalistic practices, if they ever were. Which causes them to stir up divisions and keep the audience in a perpetual state of agitation. Which is not good for civil society or the country.
To be fair, I don’t watch tv news much any more. But I sure do remember what I saw in the 70s. It was horrendous, and we wouldn’t have seen very much of it from reporters who’d been “embedded.”