Why the Mainstream Media Really Sucks

[Ari]

John Oliver's segments pretty much nail it.

The main reason mainstream news media sucks is money, in a couple ways.

First is basing their profits on advertisement, you need clicks or viewers to make advertisement pay and the best way to do that is to psychologically trick viewers into watching, from clickbait headlines to puff pieces to scare tactics designed to keep you glued to their channel. This started with the advent of 24/7 news and the screaming heads you see on many cable news networks. Working people into a furry and convincing them they need to stay tuned or else means more ad views.

Second, profit first means paying your staff as little as possible. A lot of news is outsourced to only a few groups and to the cheapest in those groups. Why pay a reporter to investigate a story when you can grab from others and pay an monkey at a keyboard bananas to copy pasta from others. Failure to monetize news has led to massive layoffs resulting in substandard reporting and editing.
Photographic journalism for example is practically a dead profession and beyond a small few many stories choose from stock images, steal from social media, from social media for 'exposure' or pay pennies for social media. Why pay a professional when there's someone on scene already that will give you a poor but good enough image for their name under it.

Third, is corporate profits. Many news organizations have a larger financial interest than just reporting the news, and this interest can be far reaching. Promoting the status quo is good for other businesses. A quick example, bombard women with false body images, and societal expectations and you convince them to consume more of your other media and products you advertise. Many corporations are invested in other corporations and even if they don't make product x, they have money in promoting its narrative. Investing in something like a weapons manufacture is less of a risk if you then stoke the drums of war.

[The Man]

Ari sums up a lot of it but I would like to add that corporate pressure and interest in maintaining the status quo goes a lot further than already indicated. There is a range of opinions that are considered acceptable to express in the media, due to, as George Orwell put it in an introduction to Animal Farm that was suppressed for decades after he wrote it (thereby proving his point), a “general tacit agreement” amongst intellectual elites and the press that “‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention [a] particular fact”. A reporter who would think to express these opinions is not only unlikely to be able to express them due to oversight from editors and corporate overlords, but is unlikely to be hired in the first place.

Thus you have a media that largely toes the corporate line on issues like taxation and workers’ rights, that manufactures controversies where none exist on issues like climate change and the environment, and that is unduly deferential to state power and the military. The definitive overview of this tendency is still Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, despite being nearly thirty years old. Frustratingly, the tendencies Herman and Chomsky observe have not improved in the slightest amongst the mainstream media despite the advent of the Internet; this can in no small part be blamed on the consolidation of media corporations and the rise of cable news. Indeed, the right-wing fever swamps have gotten dozens of times more virulent since Herman and Chomsky wrote their book, so if anything, their case in the book may be somewhat understated when applied to today’s media.

Chomsky has discussed the internet and the ways blogs differ from and conform to the propaganda model several times; an example can be found here. It is perhaps due to the independence of blogs that I sometimes rely more on them for news than mainstream news sites, although I try to read news sources as well when possible. (The Washington Post has produced generally good journalism in the past few years, though it could still be better and is still largely limited by the propaganda model.)

Apart from that, Oliver basically summed it all up in the videos I posted. An important addendum to what Ari mentioned is the fact that people want free shit. This has forced media to become ever more reliant on advertisers and to cut back on investigative journalism because advertising profits have plummeted in the Internet age.

[Angakuk]

Thank to both Ari and The Man. I have watched the John Oliver clips. We can now all return to the regular programing and talk about the many ways in which the Mainstream News Media sucks. The question in the thread's title has now been addressed.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by The Man

is the fact that people want free shit. This has forced media to become ever more reliant on advertisers and to cut back on investigative journalism because advertising profits have plummeted in the Internet age.

It's not just that people want free shit, it's that once you start giving it to them free it's hard to convince them they should pay. This leads to a downward spiral as things must be cut to keep it free, but then try to convince people they should pay for your low quality product and you don't get very far. I certainly laugh when I see news sites claim I've read 1 of 10 free articles, when the article itself was poorly written, contained spelling errors and is partly copied from elsewhere.

News media keeps following the old ways down the drain and wondering why no one want to pay.

[JoeP]

We should start charging for free thought.

[erimir]

Could've put this in the 2016 election thread, but...

Apparently it's now a scandal that Hillary Clinton met with world-renowned* philanthropists (such as Melinda Gates) and Nobel Peace Prize winners (Mohammed Yunus) as Secretary of State because they also donated money to the Clinton Foundation. Which, you know, takes that money and lines Clinton's pocketses uses it to help provide HIV treatment to poor people in Africa.

Then there was that time when a Estee Lauder's charitable arm donated money to the Clinton Foundation and then was also involved with a State Dept initiative to fight HIV and then the head of their charity met with Hillary Clinton as part of that.

These are actual things included in the AP's story about the "troubling" connections between the State Dept and the Clinton Foundation.



*Leaving aside the issue of whether that renown is justified

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Related:
Donald Trump breaks the conservative media - Business Insider

The Trammps - Disco Inferno - YouTube
Burn, baby burn!

[The Man]

A cloud hangs over the NYT's coverage of the Clinton campaign.

Related, this tweetstorm from Matthew Chapman is worth reading in its entirety. You'll need to click the "show more tweets" thing twice.

[erimir]

This afternoon, they were praising Trump for not shitting his pants or vomiting on the President of Mexico. Trump did say he didn't discuss the wall with Peña Nieto, which seems a bit of a cowardly move. Then Peña Nieto said that at the beginning, he made it clear that Mexico will not pay for any wall.

But still, he stood, spoke off a teleprompter instead of pulling stuff out of his ass, and was polite to a brown person, so that was "presidential".

That's already pretty shitty as far as the media goes, normalizing Trump's bullshit and grading him on such a curve that something which would launch a hundred articles on Hillary's "dishonesty" is seen as a win for him.

Not to mention all the talk about his "softening" and minority "outreach", like they're desperate to be able to pretend he's not a racist.

Tonight he said anyone here illegally will be subject to deportation, including Dreamers. He said there will be an "impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful" wall with above and below ground sensors, towers and aerial surveillance (when it was just a wall, people estimated it would cost $25 billion... now it sounds like it will cost many times that) and Mexico will pay for it. Oh, and suggested that maybe they'll deport Hillary too.

So the good part is that all their bullshit from this afternoon was immediately contradicted by Trump's own words showing they were just credulously buying his transparent bullshit... Or just talking about optics, as if they have no ability to look beyond optics to see the truth.

[The Man]

Article on the possibility of Fox News sucking less without Roger Ailes in charge.

Is Shep Smith the Future of Fox News? | Huffington Post

Shepard Smith has always been one of the few people on the network who actually seems to be a legitimate journalist, and he comes across as quite thoughtful in this interview. Smith never stuck to the party line as much as some other Fox News anchors, and I've noticed that others, Megyn Kelly in particular, have been deviating from the party line more often since Ailes' departure. If the article's speculation about Murdoch's intentions for the company are correct, it could move towards becoming a somewhat legitimate news source - it would undoubtedly be still somewhat right-leaning, but maybe there wouldn't be so much opinion masquerading as fact.

With nine producers and editors behind him in a futuristic-looking, state-of-the-art studio built only for Shep ― and let’s just call him Shep for this article, since that’s how he’s known ― he launches Thursday’s show by reporting on the five new sexual assault accusations against GOP presidential nominee Donald Drumpf. He notes that Drumpf is denying the charges, but then gives critical context: Drumpf has bragged about committing sexual assault. “Again, he said that,” Shep adds, in case any viewer wants to think he’s editorializing rather than just delivering the news.

After giving some gory details about some of the alleged assaults, he pauses to underline just how far a departure from normal the news is that he’s reporting. “The GOP candidate for president,” he says.

I asked Shep about that moment after the show ended, and he said it was important journalistically to take that extra step. “The juxtaposition of the two things is striking, noteworthy, and, I believe, news. I don’t add feelings about it,” he said, conjuring up this analogy: “This is something you should think about: It’s going to be 4 degrees tonight, and your cat lives outside. You should think about this.”

He paused and added, “Not my cat.”

Shep wants you to bring your cat indoors, but he wants you to do it because you realize, with the help of his reporting, that it’s the right thing to do. Not simply because it’s his strident opinion you should bring that furball in before it freezes to death.

Shep’s approach represents one potential path forward for Fox News ― undeniably conservative, but grounded in reality, observant of American traditions and democratic norms, and partisan only when a standpoint fully aligns with conservative and American values.

Since the forced departure of Roger Ailes ― who has now gone on to advise the spawn of Fox News, the Drumpf campaign ― Rupert Murdoch’s two sons, James and Lachlan, have taken a bigger role inside the network. If they get their way, some of the knuckle-dragging, opinion-heavy approach to politics may be less welcome at headquarters, clearing the way for journalists like Smith, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly. The brothers are reportedly working hard to woo Kelly, hoping she’ll stay at Fox past the election and help shape the network’s post-Ailes identity.

In a more grounded Fox, Shep would take on a much greater role. In his most recent meeting with Rupert Murdoch, he asked where Murdoch felt the center of gravity was going to move post-Ailes, whether toward news or toward the opinion side. “He said, ‘I’m a newsman. I want to be the best news organization in America,’” Shep recalled.

I would certainly welcome a development in this direction. I do have to wonder if some of the knuckle-draggers who make up some of their audience would abandon them if they went in this direction, though. I hope it would help drag this country back from the brink, but the genie may be already outside of the bottle at this point.

[erimir]

Others have tried to compete with Fox News on conservative news, but none have achieved anything similar in terms of success.

It seems certain that some others will try to take the place of Fox in the conservative media sphere, but I'm guessing it'll be a lot more fractured as infighting happens in the wake of Trump's loss. And Trump himself seems likely to be one of the competitors.

A fortunate aspect there is that Trump is quite old, and Limbaugh is getting up there in age as well. And I would assume the market for conservative talk radio would be declining due to the olds dying off and radio being superseded by newer media.

On the other hand, there are plenty of conspiracy theories hatemongers who can have a megaphone on the internet, with YouTube channels and sites like Breitbart and Infowars. So who knows whether it will be an improvement.

I do feel like Fox News has a veneer of respectability that newcomers won't have though.

[The Man]

I promised an overview of media malpractice in this year's election, and here it is.

First off, there are three separate posts on this topic from Lawyers, Guns & Money. I'm going to summarise some important points, but they are all honestly worth reading in their entirety, as are many of the sources they link (Perlstein in particular, who is going to be an invaluable resource in the coming years). Some highlights follow, though.

The primary thing to note here is how absurdly lopsided the coverage was. We all know how much coverage Clinton's email server got. By contrast, any number of scandals that should have been singlehandedly disqualifying were at best glossed over. For instance, the shitgibbon called for the Central Park Five to be, effectively, lynched. This received a mention in one op-ed in the NY Times. Perlstein's search may not have been exhaustive, but did not return any other references to this event, and one can safely conclude that it was not covered to the extent it deserves. Similarly, the context of the fact that the GWB administration erased literally 22 million emails may have been helpful in contextualising Clinton's email server story. Perlstein was only able to find seven references to the email server in any newspaper, and two of those were foreign. (By contrast, Perlstein found 785 references to Clinton's deleted emails.)

The list goes on. Clinton was perceived to be more corrupt than the shitgibbon, despite the exact opposite being the case, and it's difficult to conclude that anything other than media coverage can be blamed for this. But, of course, there's more to it than that, as well.

Campos reports on a Harvard Kennedy School study of press articles that finds that the shitgibbon's coverage was overall more positive than Clinton's if one considers the entire campaign. If one considers only the general election, the shitgibbon received more negative coverage than Clinton did, but there's a caveat, since if one disregards horserace, they had exactly the same level of coverage, namely eighty-seven percent negative to thirteen percent positive. With this level of coverage, it is unsurprising both that both candidates were uniquely disliked and that voters were completely misinformed as to how truly dangerous the shitgibbon is.

The final post is about a Shorenstein Center analysis, which finds that after the Comey letter, Clinton's coverage was more negative than Trump's. It's almost impossible to look at this analysis and not conclude that the combined factors of Comey's letter and the media coverage didn't swing the election.

Overall, I'm not entirely certain I would oppose characterising the media's coverage as outright treasonous. It is certainly a national disgrace on every level.

[Ari]

Trump stumbled onto a rather effective campaign strategy. It turns out controversy needs time to ruminate, to bubble, to spread, so that it can be hammered into people's heads as not only fact but evil and diabolical. The right stuck with a few controversies and really hammered them home. On the other hand the mass of controversies around Trump lead the attention deficite media to bounce from one to the other, never giving any single one enough time to spread and take hold, while at the same time playing into the right wing propaganda that the liberal media is just on a witch hunt, and when all they do is publish one headline after another, it can easily seem that way.

Originally Posted by The Man

the context of the fact that the GWB administration erased literally 22 million emails may have been helpful in contextualising Clinton's email server story.

I think it's pretty clear by now the right doesn't care at all about hypocrisy. The amount of things they attack the liberals for while allowing their side to get away with is just to high, it's clear this has more to do with hating the enemy than hating the actual accusation. The fact a man who cheated on multiple wives, including both while prosecuting Clinton for the same and doing so while one was on her death bed, is still considered a big time player in christian conservative right wing politics shows pretty handily that they don't care at all about the issues, only that it's proof their enemy is morally bankrupt. (These are afterall the same type of people who call Muslim's barbarians while supporting torture and mass killing of civilians).

[Watser?]

Here's an Iranian paper actually fact-checking US/Western media on Aleppo. It's really fucking unbelievable the kind of crap they come up with this week.

Incapable of Shame: Top Ten Western Lies About Liberation of Aleppo

Not that they get everything right either, just way more than the Western Press.

[Watser?]

Although this article by an Australian mainstream medium is pretty good, a lot better than the above: Syria war: Aleppo evacuation planned after second truce deal struck with rebels - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

And Google is treating Breitbart as a news site.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Follow up:

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

This might actually make mainstream media really rule.

[The Man]

Robert Osborne obituary, Washington Post:

His life partner, theater director and producer David Staller, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.

Osborne obituary, New York Times:

David Staller, a longtime friend, confirmed the death.

All together now: Fuck the fucking New York Times.

[Jerome]

Of course your little chart would have the New York Times in the center!

[mickthinks]

Er ... no. And lol.

Did the New York Times Contradict Their 20 January 2017 Report About Wiretapping?

Jerry, you are a posterboy for lolbertarian credulity. Is there nothing you would check before reposting it in deluded triumph?

[Jerome]

The site has previously been shown that Snopes is full of shit regarding political stories. Thus for you to use them as a source shows you have no interest in facts and truth.

[Jerome]

It is mealy mouthed bull.

'didnt say wire tapping trump specifically at trump towers .. only that the investigation into trumps associations with russians was wire tapped'

lol

[Jerome]

Crazy that Clinton seemed to think Trump had been tapped.

[Jerome]

How about Clinton's campaign manager admitting Trump was tapped?

lol

Robby Mook: Trump Was Wiretapped - YouTube