Posted on 02/10/2023 5:58:48 AM PST by devane617
It is hardly a secret within America’s newsrooms that our profession has lost much of the public’s trust. Gallup, which has polled “Confidence in Institutions” for decades, found that, as of last summer, just 16 percent of Americans had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers — down from 25 percent a decade earlier and 35 percent in 2002. For TV news, the latest results were even worse. Eleven percent of Americans trust it. Fifty-three percent don’t.
Most of us, in or out of the news media, would surely agree that this is a bad thing: We were a saner country when we could argue from a common set of uncontested facts. But we have a harder time agreeing on why trust in media collapsed and, more crucially, on how it can be restored.
Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, has an idea.
In a guest essay last week for The Post, Downie made the case that newsrooms must set aside journalistic objectivity because a new generation of journalists “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘both-sides-ism.’” He added, “they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.” He even claims that objectivity was never a standard he upheld, even though the principles he says were the goals he pursued as editor — “accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth” — are the same as those upheld by most objective journalists and little different from what he elsewhere says is the dictionary definition of objectivity — “using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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The media is not interested in giving us facts. They are interested in telling us how to think and feel about issues which we know little about.
Journalism has never been unbiased.
The only difference between journalism today and a hundred years ago is competition. Up until the end of WWII every city of any size had a newspaper (often more then one). These newspapers not only had a bias they were so proud they included it in their names “The Democrat Daily” or “The Republican Daily” (or variation on the names). Everyone at the time knew from which political corner came the reporting. Both were biased but at least you could get an opposing view point if you were interested (and the crimes and corruption of one side would be exposed by the other). That is fairness in action.
Today there is not competition and almost every media outlet speaks with the same point of view.
Because all media is owned by the same people.
LOL, total disinformation.
There is no way the cabal of woke, partisan hacks has any hope of being a Profession. No Way.
Yes they do, their profession is one of the oldest ones.
Because most people believe “the news” is about events that have just occurred.
What’s wrong with who, what, where, when and how?
That’s ALL I want to know.
Like Joe Friday, just the facts.
If I want to hear you wrap a narrative or YOUR life story into the events of the day, I’d seek that out. But I don’t want that.
What’s so hard about this?
I believe there’s still a market of people like me who would pay for that type of reporting. It’s not for lack of money.
There’s something else they’re doing this for.
The mere fact that they have a “hard time” figuring out why trust in the media has collapsed, demonstrates that they are blind to their own biases and prejudices. So it is unlikely that they will ever restore the trust they’ve lost. As they say, once broken, trust is all but impossible to restore. Just ask anyone who’s spouse cheated on them.
They don’t care what we think. All that matters is that they earn their government and WEF paychecks. The government and he WEF pays them much better than the peons do.
Historically, the ideal of objective media is a fantasy that rarely if ever happens. In colonial days “news” was disseminated by pamphleteers, precursors to present day bloggers. Remember Thomas Paine and “Common Sense.” They always had an agenda. Later as newspapers developed, they generally had well known, undisguised partisan loyalties. The Washington Post, eg, began as a party newsletter for the democrat party. Everyone knew it, they didn’t try to hide it. If you were a democrat you read it, if not you ignored it, and life went on.
The malignant aspect of today’s media is that they deny their agenda, posture themselves as arbiters of truth, and wield unwarranted influence. They are
partisan as usual, but also dishonest. And that is why nobody trusts them.
(Music sting)
From looping the tape of Rodney King
To showing pictures of pre-teen Treyvon
The main stream press has been lying and muckraking
Far Leftist causes to push on
Lying to push false narratives
And Marxist comprehensions
To queer up the country
To reduce all to a cesspool
Wow 16 percent have confidence in the media. I did not know it was that high.
Agree. Actually human objectivity doesn’t exist. Even a simple recitation of observable facts is colored by the observer’s life experiences. Each person will see some of the facts and assign their importance differently from any other observer of the same facts. I used to get so irked at Walter Cronkite’s 30 minute tv news broadcast sign-off “And that’s the way it is this (blank) day of (blank) year” which assumed omniscience on the part of CBS.
Everyone is better off if they remember that the purpose of the media is not to be objective and unbiased or to speak truth to power; the sole purpose of mass media is to sell advertising.
The elephant in the room is that there is absolutely NO disagreement allowed.
The irony is strong in this one.
Yes, they are still unaware of their bias, and believe that their advocacy for progressive policies represents some sort of truth. At that stage, they are unfixable.
Media is owned or controlled by members of the Democrat Party. One main goal of the media is to convince voters that Republicans are bad people with bad ideas.
They are doing a bang up job.
They are all basically left wing Nazis at this point.
Did you read your own post? His solution is to shoot for even less objectivity.
“In a guest essay last week for The Post, Downie made the case that newsrooms must set aside journalistic objectivity because a new generation of journalists “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘both-sides-ism.’” He added, “they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.””
They did a poll a while back asking journalism majors why they chose that profession. The most common answer was that they wanted to change the world.
Reporting the truth was not a key concern.
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