Trying to restore some objectivity/balance to journalism

Objective journalism -- particularly investigative reporting -- is labor-intensive, which means costly overhead. That means you either have to have deep pockets pushing an ideological view, or a broad-base of paying subscribers who trusted your objectivity and balance. When journalism was print-based, the big name publications strove for reputations based on objectivity and balance to build the largest circulations that brought in the advertising dollars that could fund the overhead of reporters dedicated to single subject areas, and even single stories. Early broadcast journalism did the same, until the FCC essentially eliminated the Fairness and Equal Time doctrines and news became another form of entertainment. The internet, especially social media, then gutted journalism totally by essentially picking and choosing items from the print media to fuel conflict, generating large volumes of clicks to bring in the advertising revenue with no concern for the accuracy of the content or their long-term reputations since they were only conveyors of other people's work. People who were now out of work because the newspapers were losing both subscribers and advertisers in droves, and having to cut overhead which largely was the staff.

Legislation before Congress currently hopes to balance this out. Interestingly enough, similar legislation already passed in Australia, Canada, and Europe.

[quote]The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bipartisan bill currently making its way through Congress, will help newspapers better fulfill their mission of providing news and information to the public, holding the powerful to account and ensuring government serves the people.

The bill would allow news organizations to band together to negotiate with Big Tech companies for fair compensation for use of news content in search and on social media.

Similar laws have been passed in Australia, Canada and Europe.

In the United States, this has the potential of bringing billions of dollars back into newsrooms across the country, enabling the strengthening of local reporting and access to reliable, professionally produced information in communities across the country.[/quote]
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/23/editorial-support-jcpa-to-save-local-journalism/

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CopperCicada · M

I think there are three pieces to this.

One is that we learned in Vietnam what the power of the media was. I remember being a kid watching the war through Walter Cronkite’s coverage. I remember the casualties very clearly, the mess we were in. What I didn’t know at the time was that Cronkite was erasing the political pretext for the war by showing our loss of life and fortune in a critical and unbiased way. After Vietnam I think the power of the media as a social and political tool became a high art. Journalism was less something like science, more something like an art. There is an antecedent to what is reported: What story do you want me to tell? OK. He’s the best president. No. He’s the worst. He’s not even human, he’s a lizard alien!

The other part is that the internet made it easy and cheap to publish. Really anything, but also the news. And the business model of internet news publishing demanded generating traffic to generate advertisement income. People watched Cronkite because he was the man. But if I am going to select this hyperlink over another, there needs to be a psychosocial benefit. And that’s really getting neurotransmitters from getting trigger, feeling kinship, being part of something— but also having all our cognitive biases satisfied. It’s a complex world with more colors and grays than ever. We want a site that is all blue. I call them reality boutiques. We want news sites that validate what we already believe is how the world works.

And the third but is MacLuhan’s adage: the medium is the message. The relativism of having a Whitman Sampler of reality boutiques that spin and sell comfortable and familiar realities is something we’ve come to rely on. It is a symptom of the sickness, but it’s also a tool. We get to just absolve ourselves of intellectual challenges, because, after all— these are alternative facts. Your facts are as valid as your lack of biases, and like anyone, you have biases, interests, goals, so you can’t be trusted. So I have some alternative facts. And no, I don’t have the burden of proving they are true, you have the burden of proving they aren’t.

We really can only really rely on long form research and dialog, but that’s on timescales much longer than any news cycle. Beyond the scope of any reality boutique.

dancingtongue · 80-89, M

@CopperCicada So basically you boil it down to an audience with the attention-span of a gnat and conveyor belts shoving bits of candy snitched for free by algorithms to feed these gnats whatever they want to hear/see without regard to validity or accuracy as long as it breeds conflict to build audience. We get what we pay for, and nobody is paying for objectivity or truth anymore; only glitz and conflict which is available for free and can be monetized at no cost by social media.

CopperCicada · M

@dancingtongue We are creatures of habit. We are going to eat what we are fed. Going against that flow takes a great deal of energy and discipline.

There is a corollary to my third point, for most people, knowing the truth matters less than accepting a reality that they share with their peers. Specifically peers they feel have similar values and so on.

You are correct about we get what we pay for. Real information has a significant cost.