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Given the following: 1. There are way fewer jobs in journalism in the U.S. than there used to be, and those jobs pay worse. 2. Jobs manipulating the news pay better, offer better benefits, and are steadier than jobs reporting the news. 3. There are way more jobs doing 2 than 1, with demand growing for 2 and shrinking for 1 And with 1-3 caused by: 4. Increasingly people choose their reporting not based on perceived accuracy, but on ideological reinforcement. 5. The era of on-demand information makes it possible to choose never to be exposed to ideas or facts you dislike. 6. As a result of 3 and 4, many people take distrust of media - as in the full apparatus of reporting and the standards of journalism - as a matter of personal identity and ideology. Is journalism - not just as an industry but as an idea - just hosed? What are the solutions? Are these premises even valid?
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Aug 19, 2016 20:20
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don't worry, there will always be smug liberals willing to write op-eds for the Atlantic actual journalism? they're hosed
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Aug 19, 2016 20:27
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Something else to consider: You could argue that journalism as we know it today, with defined standards of objectivity, ethics, etc., is only a centuryish old, give or take a couple decades. I'd credit it to the aftermath of the industrial revolution newspaper boom, as real reporting started to emerge from the Hearst era, coupled with the rise of radio and the ability to widely distribute newspapers in a way that was never possible before. So are we seeing real change to the fundamentals of journalism, or just the end of a particular journalistic era?
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Aug 19, 2016 20:30
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Legitimate Journalism has taken a bad hit in recent years, for a multitude of reasons. Ideological Reinforcement is a large part of that, with Fox, Brietbart, and other various "news" agencies popping up, but people tend to forget that another part of it was that some major news organizations have suffered some rather embarassing breaches in standards of journalism, From the Killian documents which brought down Dan Rather, through the Reuters photo frauds in the Lebanon wars in the mid-2000s. Now mind you in both cases once they were proven to be fraudulent the people involved were punished/fired, but at that point the damage was already done - people stopped trusting "mainstream" news because those were two of the largest names IN the news, and people had trusted them explicitly up to that point. The addition of smaller, internet-based news has also destabilized the more established, traditional journalism in both Print media and even televised media at this point. But I would argue that that destabilization was made possible due to the breeches in ethics in the 2000's.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:42
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It's hard to say. The negative changes you mention are definitely real, but at the same time modern technology also allows access to far more information in general. The current backlash against police brutaility is a good example; it never really came to light to the public at large until the technology existed to reveal it. So if an intelligent person decides they want to learn about the current world, they're better off today than they were, say, 50 years ago. But it's possible that your average layperson is getting access to worse news. In terms of overall political ramifications, my gut feeling is that things might be getting worse. My main reasoning is that a more pervasive and sophisticated media makes it more difficult for movements that the people who own media corporations disagree with to come about. Stuff like BLM is okay because the wealthy individuals and organizations who own media corporations don't really have anything to lose, but we saw what happened with Occupy; as soon as they were no longer forcing themselves into the spotlight (through occupying the parks), media coverage drastically dropped. I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy or anything; it's just that most wealthy people share some of the same interests, and among those interests is "stuff that hurts or insults the wealthy is undesirable."
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Aug 19, 2016 20:44
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The shift from newspapers to online content is probably the most significant factor. You could always pick and choose which news sources you read before internet dominance, whether it was politically biased or just insane nonsense like the National Enquirer. You still had to at least buy the magazines or newspapers from whichever source instead of getting it for free. Now you go to the corresponding website for any given paper and they have to try and make up for the lost revenue by looking to advertisers. Competition for stories means that if a particular publication has a paywall, you can likely get the same information from a site without one. John Oliver did a good bit a week or two ago about how newspaper revenues are down tens of billions of dollars over the last few decades, since nobody wants to pay for it anymore. I don't know if that should be called "entitlement," but it's a clear existential threat to journalism as a whole without even getting into how the quality of the actual reporting is negatively affected by competing agendas of the advertising companies or being bought out by Newscorp or Sheldon Adelson. This inevitably leads to a decrease in quality journalism, which makes people more skeptical of newspapers on the whole, which decreases their sales and quality even further. I suppose I'm guilty of perpetuating it as well since I've never bothered to give The Guardian the $5 they occasionally ask for on their site popup despite reading it daily. My other main source is The Intercept, which as far as I can tell can only exist because Greenwald was lucky enough to get bankrolled by an Ebay billionaire. I'm not even sure how or if they actually make any profits since the site has no ads at all and no print version.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:54
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This is timely for me, given I just left journalism for good last month. I do think journalism is transitioning, although I can’t say with certainty that it’s going from one clear “era” to another. I don’t believe that journalism, as an idea, is completely hosed but from an industry standpoint it has done itself no favors with the 24-hours news cycle and the complete fuckwits that have been in charge of newspapers big and small over the last 20 years or so. I spent over six years fighting the good fight as a community journalist but I couldn’t take it anymore. Most news rooms are skeleton crews, and at my last job as an editor I was expected to write and edit 10-12 articles a week, shoot photos, edit video occasionally, provide layout and design for multiple pages, attend tons of civic club and other meetings in the evening (so long, personal life), write advertising content, mentor a few interns, and also post to our website and promote content on social media platforms. All while making a little over $30k a year. The industry is loving brutal, and I grew tired of other journalists rationalizing dealing with absolutely horrendous pay, a terrible work-personal life ratio, and a complete lack of job security by idolizing their job as a public service to the community. I actually pity them now as they still haven’t quite realized that the communities they serve not only don’t give a poo poo, but there’s a particularly loud and large number of people that are convinced reporters are actively working against them and publishing nothing but lies. All of those issues with pay and job security leads to an awful revolving door where people who would otherwise be focused on keeping a watchful eye on local government and judicial proceedings end up doing bullshit like paid advertorials and stressing over how to bump up Facebook likes and Twitter followers. It's hard to create solutions to problems from inside out when people are jumping ship so quickly. Journalism, both as an idea and an industry, can’t survive when even Pulitzer prize winners are having to leave it because it’s not a sustainable career: quote:Suraci, who joined the Daily Breeze 41 years ago, couldn't recall a time when the paper submitted a story for a Pulitzer. I remember when a local high school here asked me about coming to speak about my career in front of students and I laughed and thought to myself, "I'm just going to stand up and go, OK guys, if you're thinking of getting into journalism - don't."
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Aug 19, 2016 20:58
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Real journalism costs money and is threatening to powerful interests and has no guarantee of performing better than infotainment bullshit anyway so it's hardly surprising it would be undersupplied in a society completely oriented around short-term profit. The selection pressures of the last decade have also produced a generation of reporters who only really know how to type up "stories" that amount to press releases. The change has been pretty dramatic. quote:You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
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Aug 19, 2016 21:06
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Journalists are required to do more than ever in order to ensure that they have a career at their place of work. You are required to be able to canvass, interview, and edit your own stories if on a severe time crunch; for multimedia packages, perfunctory knowledge of video and audio editing is necessary to create, at the very least, one minute of context. Awesome Welles posted:I spent over six years fighting the good fight as a community journalist but I couldn’t take it anymore. Most news rooms are skeleton crews, and at my last job as an editor I was expected to write and edit 10-12 articles a week, shoot photos, edit video occasionally, provide layout and design for multiple pages, attend tons of civic club and other meetings in the evening (so long, personal life), write advertising content, mentor a few interns, and also post to our website and promote content on social media platforms. All while making a little over $30k a year. This quote is the sum of the other point I'd like to make: the pay is horrible for what you put into it. Earning as much to constantly interview the victims of shootings and stabbings, as well as b-reel photography of bloody corpses is not enough to offset the soul-crushing aspects of crime journalism. It helps less that most crime journalists are slacking to the point of paraphrasing whatever the police blotter states the next day, but that's for another post. This one's far less serious, but the Tribune's content nowadays? That's known as tronc. Well, it was: the print publishing arm is now known as troncM while its online publishing component is troncX. There's not a whole lot of confidence to be had when you're working for a place that rebranded itself into the laughing stock of the industry.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:07
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How do we bring journalism back to a point where it's valued enough to actually pay reporters? I think we need to start thinking about media literacy in education. Obviously literature is valuable in school, but I think that we need to teach children to analyze all the media they consume - music, television, film, everything - by the same standards of critical thought with which they approach literature. But will a stronger foundation of media literacy mean the coming generation will value news?
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Aug 19, 2016 21:22
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The premise is incorrect because there never was a time of objective & balanced journalism, the field has always been ideologically shaped. What makes it seem different now is the twofold loss of ideological consensus within the profession and the fragmentation of the industry.
The Kingfish fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 21:30
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The Kingfish posted:The premise is incorrect because there never was a time of objective & balanced journalism, the field has always been ideologically shaped. What makes it seem different now is the twofold loss of ideological consensus within the profession and the fragmentation of the industry.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:35
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do we bring journalism back to a point where it's valued enough to actually pay reporters? I think we need to start thinking about media literacy in education. Obviously literature is valuable in school, but I think that we need to teach children to analyze all the media they consume - music, television, film, everything - by the same standards of critical thought with which they approach literature. But will a stronger foundation of media literacy mean the coming generation will value news? basically there needs to be a union for article mill writers buzzfeed, of all places, is doing some decent journalism mixed in with all the other poo poo it does. hopefully the future of journalism is big article mills devoting 10-20% of their resources to actual investigative journalism along side the 10 celebrity nip slip articles that keep the lights on
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Aug 19, 2016 21:39
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Popular Thug Drink posted:basically there needs to be a union for article mill writers
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Aug 19, 2016 21:41
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Ironically, what is supposed to be journalism's greatest asset (the creation of a marketplace of ideas) has become a weakness when there is no ideological consensus as someone pointed out above. Some people call it "truth is in the middle-ism" but there is an obsession with wanting to seem unbiased and non-partisan in the mainstream media, something that is theoretically good but in practice has led to "Now let's get this Trump supporter on screen to explain his point of view" and "Let's just repost this Chinese and Russian state propaganda, don't want to appear biased!" Ironically this seems to create a sense of eternal conflict in the media which I think contributes to the "world is going to hell in a handbasket" attitude that's extremely prevalent right now. And this drives clicks which further reinforces it. Of course it looks like Trump is about to become President, the media trots out a Trump supporter every hour to yell at you and then hires an intellectual looking fellow to grimly express that his models give Trump a 95% chance of victory. Of course it looks like America and Liberal Democracy in general are on the decline when every time you publish about the non-Liberal world you uncritically do it through the lens of authoritarian propaganda. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 21:49
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FactsAreUseless posted:This is an interesting idea. Something like the Writers' Guild for news writers. Given the dwindling supply of jobs, how do reporters get the leverage to establish this? no idea, and it probably wont happen, but instead of newspapers tied to a specific location (some will probably survive, the Times for sure, the LA Times also) it'll be a collection of magazines and article-publishing websites and the people who write for those sites are the ones who are going to have to organize somehow also incase anyone in this thread hasn't seen it this website is super great https://longform.org/
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Aug 19, 2016 21:52
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The issue is that especially over the last three decades, journalism has been refined and improved as a commercial product sold for product in a Capitalist society. It is possible to have well run journalism in the internet age, but the drive for profit pushes media organisations in a direction which maximises efficiency in terms of profits but minimises it in terms of useful investigative reporting. Although I'm not that well informed on the media in the USA, I believe it's followed the pattern of the UK a good deal anyway. Over here the network of journalists that are the essential to reporting news just don't exist any more in the same way they used to and in large part this is down to Rupert Murdoch. Before 1986 the printers unions and the National Union of Journalists did a fair enough job of holding off commercial interests, standing up for their principles and ensuring high quality, although they relied on the printers union for support. An example of them fending off commercial interests came a couple of years before 1986 when the miner's strike was going on. The Sun tried to run a front page photo of Arthur Scargill waving to miners in a way that had been captured in a way looked kind of like a nazi salute with the headline 'Mine Fuhrer' in a fairly obvious attempt to slur him. Well I don't know if anyone's seen the front page of The Sun from the day they went with the story, but there's no photo and no headline. The printers just weren't willing to put it together. Instead there was a large print statement saying that the Sun production chapels had refused to print the headline or picture. It wasn't just basic morality and a sense of decency which lead the printers to do this, but also a recognition that if Thatcher succeeded in breaking the miner strike then they could be next and that's basically what happened. Murdoch built a new print plant in Wapping and tried to reach agreements with staff which would limit their ability to organise as a union, like the end of the closed shop and a no strike clause. After months of negotiation the employees eventually went on strike and with military precision Murdoch, after asking Thatcher to confirm she would support him, had all 6,000 of them fired, convinced enough journalists to work as scabs to carry on publishing and got new workers in from EETPU to run their new presses (EETPU being this catchily named electricians union that got expelled from the TUC a couple of years later). The strike managed to last over a year under a lot of criticism from the government and newspapers as well as police suppression, but in the end it was broken, thousands of people were out of work, the union's strength was destroyed and Murdoch was making more profit. After that, the rest of the Fleet Street papers followed suit. From there there was little resistance as journalists were fired and not replaced on a massive scale. Before the Wapping change Murdoch's titles made £35 million in profit. Three years later and this had quadrupled but during the same period their total staffing had dropped from 8,731 to 949. Again, the other papers were quick to follow him. It's this breaking of the unions that has really accelerated commercialisation of news, because they were the big barrier against the focus purely on profit. Before then you couldn't lay off a load of staff in downsizing because you'd have a horde of journalists and printers mobilising against it. After Wapping, they couldn't It's not news to me and I hope it's not new to you that in every privatised industry, the drive for profit will turn the focus towards increasing earnings and away from the social benefits which become incidental side effect of the profit motive. The energy sector is pursuing short-term profit while causing massive long-term term problems for the entire world by continuing with their use of fossil fuels, with trains the rail infrastructure of the country has gone to rot since it was privatised and with housing there are millions of people who can't afford a home because the housing industry's focus is obviously on making the most money rather than housing the most people. With journalism, I'd say that ideally what they're meant to be supplying is a truthful representation of the important events. If we look at how the system has changed, especially in comparison to how things were pre-Wapping, then we can see a lot of ways in which the current set-up has really got in the way of that goal. This isn't just just because there are a few bad eggs who'll break laws if it gets them a good scoop and some money, it's a systematic failure of the media's ability to accurately report the truth. 1) The Workers Firstly there are simply far far less journalists out there. There aren't and have never been tens of thousands of Guardian, Daily Mail, Mirror, Independents and Times journalists out there digging up stories all across the UK for the big top tier nationals. Instead they and all the major TV and radio stations relied upon a network of smaller local papers and specialists scattered about the country that formed the essential infrastructure of news gathering. These organisations just no longer exist in the same way they did a few decades ago. A third of the local newspapers that used to exist twenty years ago have simply disappeared, while the number of journalists at the local newspapers still up and running has gone down with more than half of the provincial NUJ members having lost their jobs in the decade and a half after Wapping. The local freelance agencies that didn't publish their own paper but simply rooted out stories and sold them on were the other place that journalists could go to to get news from across the country, but these are even worse off as the big papers cut their budgets for buying stories and froze the prices of those they did get meant the agencies had to shed staff and close. There were five agencies in Leeds, now there is one. Around Merseyside three of the four agencies closed and the one that did remain shrunk to around half the number of staff. The same thing happened in Stoke, Manchester, Derby and pretty much every city across the country save London while in rural areas, the smaller towns and villages, the one-man-bands that had covered them simply went bust. The story is the same wherever you look, like the specialist court reporting agencies that used to dig out several national news stories every day, including some fairly large scandals like when they caught the Chancellor Nigel Lawson's wife being snuck into her drink driving hearing which had been scheduled for before the courts would normally be open. Practically every supply line of national news and information to the major new organisations, not just the papers but TV and radio too, has collapsed in a bid to save money and cut costs. Meanwhile, at the big well-known news organisations things aren't much better. Although they haven't suffered cuts as massive as the ones faced by smaller newspapers because, for instance that 8000+ employees being reduced to less than 1000 I gave for Murdoch's papers after Wapping was mostly normal working people like the printers rather than journalists who are involved in finding and reporting on news, the numbers of journalists at the major Fleet Street organisations has still dropped. The big problem they face though is completely different; it's the workload. Although there are almost as many journalists at major papers as there used to be, they space they're expected to fill in a paper has trebled and that's before you take into account more recent innovations like free sheets, websites, blogs, podcasts and all those extra things that are considered essential nowadays. Trying to do three times as much work in the same space of time has two effects. One is that they spend less time checking the accuracy of their stories to make sure they're true and the other is that they are having to rely less and less on their their own investigative journalism and more and more on other sources of information. Now the normal pipelines of information, the local newspapers and independent journalists, have been cut and replaced by new kinds of service providers that aren't up to task which the remaining journalists have to rely on more and more. 2) The Sources The big source journalists use is now the wire agencies like the Press Association. These are the people that the Queen or an MP or the police service or government departments speak to if they want to make a national or an international statement who also have their own reporters around digging up information. Every news organisation of any sizes subscribes to them. All the national papers, all the major regions, all the freesheets like the Metro, all of the BBC national and regional outlets, all the commercial news and radio stations, they all subscribe to it and they all rely on it. A study into the major Fleet Street publications, the respected ones like The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, as well as the Daily Mail because it's a monstrously well-selling mid-market title found that about a third of their articles were direct rewrites of Wire material where at best they'd just slightly changed the layout. Another fifth were largely reproduced from the Wire and another fifth on top of that contained elements of wire stories but had a fair amount of original material added on top. That's about 70% of major UK stories either wholly or partly rewritten from wire copy. It's completely replaced the national network of local journalists as the major pipeline of stories into the big papers. A typical journalistic rule is that you need two sources for every story. For a lot of media organisations, including the Beeb, a Press Association story pulled off of the wire doesn't need a second story to go on the waves, it's considered good to go as is. The problem is that wire organisations just aren't up to the job, either in terms of coverage or accuracy. To compensate for the thousands of local reporters that have disappeared from regional newspapers throughout the country, the PA have assigned an extra fifty reporters to cover regional and local news across the Irish republic, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and all the major cities outside of London. This means, for instance, that Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria are covered by five reporters, including trainees. Merseyside, Cheshire and North Wales have two. Cardiff has four for all of South Wales and the Wales Assembly. No matter how hard these journalists work, these dozens of journalists can only dig up the tiniest fraction of news that the several thousand journalists they're replacing used to. It's not anywhere near enough. On weekends and evenings they have one reporter to cover the entire North West. That's over seven million people being covered by one person. That's the network that the major newspapers are using in part or whole for 70% of the stories they publish. They don't have the resources to comprehensively check for accuracy which means we get stories that are simply wrong and they don't have the manpower to go and actually find out all the important stories that are happening out there. Those same problems being faced by the newspapers who are now forced to rely upon the Press Association and other wire services are being faced by the wire services themselves, but moreso. A really good example of this is back in 2006 when two people, one of them a BNP activist who had stood as a councilor, were found with the biggest chemical explosives haul in UK history. The only place to report on this when it happened was the Lancashire Telegraph, with the information copied a few days later in the Burnley and Pendle Citizen. When people complained, the BBC's response was that the BBC didn't avoid the story, they just didn't know about it. They had no local reporter and the police chose not to push it: they hadn't gone to the PA and feed them a story which would find it's way onto the wire. How could the BBC know about it if someone didn't go out of their way to tell the Press Association them about it and the BBC didn't have their own reporters down there? One BBC reporter did try to follow it up with the Lancashire Telegraph journalist who filed the story, but she declined to get involved because the BBC couldn't afford to pay her for her work. It's worth mentioning here that although I'm focusing on the newspapers because traditionally they form the network of journalists that funnel news upwards to all the bigger organizations whether they're radio, national newspapers, tv or anything else, the rest of the media has been effected in the same way. The BBC are state owned but have been forced to compete in the marketplace, which predictable results. 7000 jobs cut in the 8 years after Wapping. A 25% cut in 1997. Another 13% cut in 2005 followed by more cuts in 2007 to the present day. At the same time as this is happening, they're released guidelines to journalists that stated they must maintain accuracy and adequately source all stories while at the same time stating that within five minutes of a breaking news being known they have to have a four paragraph version of the story online - which simply isn't enough time to find sources for anything. The commercial stations have gotten worse too, especially ITV which used to have a strong regional presence when it was made of 11 companies but collapsed into a monopoly in 2004 and lost much of it's regional coverage along the way. But the other bring problem of where they are sourcing their information from apart from this massive over reliance on wire agency reports is that the other influxes of data all come from biased sources. More than half of newspaper articles have clear indicators of using PR material, which is an industry that has exploded in terms of growth since the 70's. I think it's fairly obvious why we don't want PR material to become news, but a good example of this is Paul Hucker and britishinsurance.com where in 2006 a story was put out about how he insured himself against mental distress if England got knocked out of the World Cup. It was a nice little story, which easily found it's way into the Times, Guardian, BBC, ITV, Sky, Daily Mail and a lot of international organizations as well. The problem was it was fake and could be found to be fake with a few minutes on google. Paul did the same thing in 2002. He also appeared in 2005 as a generic member of the public who was so happy that british insurance would insure his house. He's also a marketing director who specializes in promoting web-based companies like britishinsurance.com and had been involved in business ventures with the Managing Director of the company before. They'd also written stories about insuring yourself against becoming ugly, being kidnapped by aliens and three women who took out an immaculate conception policy. It shouldn't have been published, and it doesn't take long to confirm this is a non-story, but it was a neat easy story of the kind the newspapers need to fill space so it became news and pushed the Britishinsurance brand. More repellent PR practices can be seen by big business, where oil companies will use PR to cast doubt on global warming. 3) Institutional Power and inertia On the other hand, and what's not so obvious is that the reliance on PR agencies just as easily stops news from becoming known if the people involved don't want it to be known. Journalists are used to getting stories from PR officers if something happens. With police forces for example they publish the info on the big stories and the positive stories, not not ones they'd prefer kept quite. As long as a reporter has enough stories to fill his column inches, it's no longer a concern that there could be several major stories he's not covering. A freelance journalist used Freedom of Information requests to find out what information one police force (Northumbria) hadn't released information on in a single weekend. It turned out over 5,000 crimes hasn't been mentioned, almost all minor but including major crimes like a man who went missing from hospital and was found dead at sea, a 74 year old man badly beaten by a group of youths and a young girl who died when she fell from a tower block. If the journalists who historically would have looked for those type of stories don't exist anymore and the people involved don't push it, there's no way for it to become news. The constant stream of information that DOES come through keeps the journalists busy enough that they can't check in on those stories that aren't pushed. There are various other ways that truthful new reporting is damaged in perhaps more minor ways, but which all contribute to the overall problems with your news coverage: If you want a story to sell it has to fit the popular wisdom of the day. The torture and abuse of American prisoners in the Middle east was found out about a year before if became a national news story, but wasn't run with because it didn't fit the narrative of Americans being the rescuing heroes of the Middle East. Something controversial will get you in trouble and alienate readers and major bodies like the government that you rely upon to feed you stories. The issues with Abu Ghraib were known behind the scenes for a month or two for instance, but it was only once Bush spoke out that journalists started talking about it. Different newspapers also have different audiences which they have to cater for in different ways. The Sun isn't going to include a peace of philosophy from Zizek. The Guardian will slant away from supporting the Conservatives and UKIP. Journalists at the Daily Mail have said how they've gone to visit victims of murder, only to be called back to the office halfway there because the victims are black as one damning example. When you cater to a paticular audience, what does it matter One thing which seems like it could be a positive ideology but has some big downsides is the need to be 'fair and balanced' while providing all sides of the story. In cases of opinion where there is no hard fact or truth, this can be good but in cases of factual news problems just dilutes the coverage because this is typically done when the news is especially damning against a powerful group and needs to be neutered so the news organsiation doesn't come under fire. Israel, for instance, has massive professional and voluntary lobbying groups. HonestReporting, which is one major pro-Israel lobbying group, has a 140,000 strong member base that it can call on to drench news organisations with complaints if they see stories which refer to Israel's policies negatively and claims to have caused hundreds of apologies, retractions and revisions from news outlets. They even had enough clout to get in meetings at CNN headquarters and get them to adopt pro-Israel policies like consistently Palestinian militants as terrorists. The thing is, Palestine has no comparable lobbying organisation. In an article critical of Israel there is good reason to neutralise the real news by providing an alternative stance as it protects the paper from criticism. When you are running an article critical of Palestine, there isn't the need to present a pro-Palestinian voice in the same way because there are no Pro-Palestinian organisations out there that lobby news organisations at that level. When fair and balanced is used ideologically to ensure all voices are heard, it's fair enough. When it's used to cover a newspapers back when real news can get them in trouble, it is a problem. Why has this happened and what to do about it It is this combination of less staff, less resources, less comprehensive sources and having to turn a profit of eye catching stories that has turned many journalists (and most likely the organisations they work for) towards illegal activity. These journalists didn't grow up dreaming of hacking C-list celebrities phones, but in the current circumstances who is going to give a reporter several days to track down the truth in whether a story is made up. What's clear from all of this is that a the capitalist approach has disincentivised responsible and thorough journalism. The owners got rid of journalists because it was more profitable to deliver a cheaper but lower quality product. The owners cut operating budgets so they stopped paying for stories from all the disparate sources spread across the UK rooting up information and largely rely on wire reports which are every cost effective per column inch and PR reports which are free. The editors at the owners behest make sure that stories which fit the right narrative get printed or that they get printed but framed in the correct way. We can pick out particular people like Murdoch for taking on the unions, but if Murdoch was out the picture then the same set of conditions would have been pushing other newspaper owners to do the same thing. He might have been especially ruthless and quick to act, but the dialectic between labour and capital in this instance wouldn't have been substantially altered without him. In my opinion a socialist news industry is required to deal with a lot of these problems. Workplace democracy, the removal of capital and profit from the equation and a focus on social benefit eliminates much of the drive to not bother checking stories and churning our regurgitated information quickly from the wire and PR agencies. I must be clear that I don't mean a centralised state-owned media. Media plurality issues have been a massive concern with the current framework so completely collapsing everything into a monopoly would be a nightmare. Instead what is needed is investment in the means of producing newspapers like printing presses and offices which can be held in a trust/overseen by an independent body.We'd still have the the Times and the Daily Mail and the Mirror, but the journalists would be working for themselves. There would also be room for much more competition now that you don't need large amounts of capital to set up a rival newspaper but rather good journalism.' We wouldn't eliminate these practices entirely because there are various other factors we can't instantly solve, like the fame from breaking a big story which can drive someone in the same way profit can or the feeling of a moral duty like David Leigh of the Guardian who has admitted to hacking the phone of a corrupt arms dealer who made hundreds of millions, although in his case he was vindicated as a the police decided it was not in the public interest to pursue a case against him. A strong and independent body to deal with press problems rather than the current system of self-regulation which newspapers can even opt out of if they find it too restrictive would ensure that those problems that do occur are dealt with seriously, but I believe a socialist system would be eminently preferable the the system we have at the moment which does still work and does produce some great stories, but is in many ways a complete shambles and a shadow of both what it was previously and what it could be if run in the proper socio-economic context. I'd also say that a lot of this comes from Flat Earth News, a great book by an award winning journalist that is backed up by research conducted specifically for it.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:18
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do we bring journalism back to a point where it's valued enough to actually pay reporters? I think we need to start thinking about media literacy in education. Obviously literature is valuable in school, but I think that we need to teach children to analyze all the media they consume - music, television, film, everything - by the same standards of critical thought with which they approach literature. But will a stronger foundation of media literacy mean the coming generation will value news? people don't approach literature with critical thought though?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:22
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FactsAreUseless posted:I'm not saying there was some sort of golden age in which reporters weren't biased - modern journalism emerged from William Randolph Hearst wanting to have lots of money and power. I'm talking about the idea of organized journalism, as in paid reporters with at least the goal of informing objectively. Not that that's always achieved, but is it even something people will value? The question isn't whether reporters are paid to inform objectively. Very few news sources, even the most reactionary ones will tell an outright lie and the ones that do will probably not last long. The real crisis of journalism is what people are being informed of objectively.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:32
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The Kingfish posted:The question isn't whether reporters are paid to inform objectively. Very few news sources, even the most reactionary ones will tell an outright lie and the ones that do will probably not last long. The real crisis of journalism is what people are being informed of objectively. Yep: they'll honestly report that "important person/party X said Y", yes, without determining whether Y is true, credible, or at least plausible...
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Aug 19, 2016 22:42
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team overhead smash posted:Why has this happened and what to do about it
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Aug 19, 2016 22:43
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The Kingfish posted:The question isn't whether reporters are paid to inform objectively. Very few news sources, even the most reactionary ones will tell an outright lie and the ones that do will probably not last long. The real crisis of journalism is what people are being informed of objectively.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:44
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fake edit: sorry if this is all scatter brained, I could talk for hours about how hosed newspapers in particular are Greater media literacy would help but it can only go so far. As Fojar said above, there is an obsession with wanting to seem unbiased even on a local news level because so many papers are desperate for ad dollars from local businesses. If you piss off the companies with the money, you run the risk of losing revenue in an already tight market. I still feel like so many issues come back to all things money, rather than the emergence of echo chamber websites. There was a debate years ago here in the US about some sort of bailout or nationalization of newspapers to help them survive and preserve reporting on a local level but questions were raised over the ethics of the government giving millions to members of the press. I feel like the heads of many of these newspapers missed a huge opportunity to monetize their information at the start of things when the internet’s influence kicked in during the 90s. I’m not a business expert so if someone could shed light on things feel free to because I’d love to hear it, but from what I’ve seen a lot of publishers and people at the reins should have had paywalls and other things up from the moment the internet truly began to take hold. Young people have become so accustomed to getting information for free and it’s going to have to take a rather seismic readjustment on how people value information and what they’re willing to pay for it. It doesn't help that the newspapers I’ve worked with have all had great ideas on how to connect people with one another – if this were still 2002, anyway. My last boss had this amazing idea of having a big map you can sync up and go inside individual businesses virtually and view their menus or inventories and shop and stuff. When I asked him about what would set it apart from the work Google has already done with StreetView and Google Earth and how exactly we would attract people to it as opposed to just using Google, I was told something along the lines of how people would love it because it’s local  . He also didn’t believe me when I told him most people aren’t turning to classifieds, as there are these little things called Craigslist, Ebay, and the Amazon Marketplace, but all of that fell on deaf ears too.I thought this was more of an isolated case of an out of touch guy leading a newspaper, but I’ve talked with so many other people that have had similar issues. So many ideas and thoughts that are completely behind the curve, it actually becomes comical at times. I’ve been told about how so many higher-ups laughed at the idea of the internet cutting into revenues like how we’re seeing, but now you have all of these old idiots just flailing about “we don’t understand the internet how do we make $$$$ someone pls help!!!!!!!!!!!!!  ”
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Aug 19, 2016 22:47
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Awesome Welles posted:I feel like the heads of many of these newspapers missed a huge opportunity to monetize their information at the start of things when the internet’s influence kicked in during the 90s. I’m not a business expert so if someone could shed light on things feel free to because I’d love to hear it, but from what I’ve seen a lot of publishers and people at the reins should have had paywalls and other things up from the moment the internet truly began to take hold. Young people have become so accustomed to getting information for free and it’s going to have to take a rather seismic readjustment on how people value information and what they’re willing to pay for it.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:51
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I also wonder if the future of journalism, at least whatever survives into the future, is more cooperative. We already see this with things like the practice of aggregation, which is essentially just a form of plagiarism that everyone agrees to let happen as long as stuff is attributed and linked to. There might be a time when reporters no longer work for local organizations, and many more things like the Associated Press that share news regionally and nationally emerge. If that happens, is the end of classically-competitive scooping and exclusives good or bad for reporting as a whole?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:55
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FactsAreUseless posted:I also wonder if the future of journalism, at least whatever survives into the future, is more cooperative. We already see this with things like the practice of aggregation, which is essentially just a form of plagiarism that everyone agrees to let happen as long as stuff is attributed and linked to. There might be a time when reporters no longer work for local organizations, and many more things like the Associated Press that share news regionally and nationally emerge. Even the AP's in a bit of a weird spot; when I visited their Chicago offices a few years ago, it was nothing you would have expected from the super-slick facade on the outside: leaking drop-tile ceilings with computers last updated in 2002, the staff being crunched into about a dozen full-time employees with many, many pursuing secondary lines of work (one of my adjunct professors!) to compensate for the free fall in pay. It also merits a mention that the current head of the AP is the first non-journalist to head the organization in its 150+ year history. On the one hand, he has experience in the field, having been in charge of McClatchy, but at the time, it was one hell of a signal that the business models that kept print and wire places afloat were in need of a change. edit: I almost forgot to mention that the data-driven guy over there was very into R for modelling trends and statistics.
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Aug 19, 2016 23:18
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FactsAreUseless posted:Where does the revenue come from? I work in public radio, and while we're non-profit there's always pressure to focus on bringing in donations at all costs, because that's the bulk of our revenue. But even NPR has had to move to more and more corporate sponsorship, and most members stations remain open because of large donations from a small number of wealthy listeners. How does non-profit or socialist media fund itself? To a fair extent it wouldn't fund itself. A free press is an important requirement of a modern democratic society which should be subsidised. At this point we're fairly practised at having institutions that are state funded but independent of government control.
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Aug 19, 2016 23:19
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Weeping Wound posted:Even the AP's in a bit of a weird spot; when I visited their Chicago offices a few years ago, it was nothing you would have expected from the super-slick facade on the outside: leaking drop-tile ceilings with computers last updated in 2002, the staff being crunched into about a dozen full-time employees with many, many pursuing secondary lines of work (one of my adjunct professors!) to compensate for the free fall in pay.
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Aug 19, 2016 23:23
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team overhead smash posted:To a fair extent it wouldn't fund itself. A free press is an important requirement of a modern democratic society which should be subsidised. At this point we're fairly practised at having institutions that are state funded but independent of government control.
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Aug 19, 2016 23:24
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do you stop the power of the purse from becoming de-facto censorship? NPR only receives a tiny fraction of their money from the federal government, but that still gets threatened every time they report something a congressman doesn't like. I'd imagine you'd have to convince the voting public that they're more valuable than the congressman voting against the funding, at least if the press is playing "nice". I also think that a subsidized system may not be necessary if the federated/unionized press achieves the same in a similar system where news publishers buy stories from a sort of mega-AP (or two). A lot rides on that independent governing body, though, and how deep their control is going to go.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:45
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do you stop the power of the purse from becoming de-facto censorship? NPR only receives a tiny fraction of their money from the federal government, but that still gets threatened every time they report something a congressman doesn't like. Does this grandstanding actually have an effect? From the looks of it, like 2% of NPR's budget is direct funding from government. An elected official mouthing off and there actually being an effect on the content of the quality and output of the journalism are two separate things. That said funding is going to have to come from somewhere and that is always going to create some form of conflict of interests. The issue is what framework handles it best. With Capitalism that conflict is significant because there is direct control of the organisation by those funding it and they have a significant interest in putting other concerns (like profit) over the quality of the journalism. With a socialist type framework with government funding it's possible to create significant barriers between the source of the funding and those controlling it, such as having it overseen by an independent body. It also places a greater burden on them to ensure quality because there is no moral imperative on a business owner to ensure their product is always high quality and the involvement of business owners in the running of their own business is seen as normal and of no concern, while if newspapers are treated as a public service than it is expected that they should be reputable and trustworthy and overt involvement of the type you claim is something that can be seen and criticised as you are doing here. It's not perfect but under a socialist set-up a resurgence of quality journalism is possible while it seems impossible under a capitalist framework it seems impossible due to the complete lack of motivation to pursue such a goal.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:58
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If we had a GMI, for real, would it solve this problem?
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Aug 20, 2016 05:01
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do we bring journalism back to a point where it's valued enough to actually pay reporters? I think we need to start thinking about media literacy in education. Obviously literature is valuable in school, but I think that we need to teach children to analyze all the media they consume - music, television, film, everything - by the same standards of critical thought with which they approach literature. But will a stronger foundation of media literacy mean the coming generation will value news? The utter death of the ad funded model of Web content would be a good start. Click bait is a cancer, and pay walls make people quit giving a poo poo about their local news in the first place because they can't effectively access it. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 07:34
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It's not dead yet. Cable news is pretty much worthless, at least in America. But there is still plenty of good reporting by NPR and a few newspapers and magazines. Indepently reporting on an event is easier than ever thanks to the internet (e.g. a blogger who has the unfortunate luck of living in a war zone or disaster area). But that's not really a professional career.
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Aug 20, 2016 07:35
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nelson posted:It's not dead yet. Cable news is pretty much worthless, at least in America. But there is still plenty of good reporting by NPR and a few newspapers and magazines. Indepently reporting on an event is easier than ever thanks to the internet (e.g. a blogger who has the unfortunate luck of living in a war zone or disaster area). But that's not really a professional career. I find that the quality of NPR reporting tends to be overstated. It often tends to just uncritically report whatever it hears from the white house, and I think its reputation benefits greatly from the fact that all of the other news/tv competition is even worse.
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Aug 20, 2016 08:56
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From my rather unique perspective on journalism I've seen a growth in what you might call journalism NGOs, such as the OCCRP, Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), and my own site, Bellingcat. These are run as non-profits, relying on external funding, and that's really a response to profit led journalism, which results in many of the problems already described in this thread. Mother Jones summarised this problem nearly in a recent piece about its prison investigation:quote:Conservatively, our prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared in it brought in $5,000, give or take. The big challenge is finding organisations who will fund investigative journalism. I've personally faced two major hurdles. First, getting the first lot of funding that means other potential funders will give me money because they no longer feel like they're the first ones to take the leap in funding an organisation with no funding. Second, finding organisations that actually fund journalism. It's still a pretty new concept in the NGO funding community, because the perception is journalism is a for profit enterprise, but that attitude is starting to shift. The one big positive from this is I've found these journalism NGOs are very willingly to work with other news organisations, both other non-profits and commercial organisations, and this had lead to some great journalism, with the Panama Papers being a prime example. Another example is the recent 2015 Tom Renner Award by Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (IRE). awarded for an OCCRP led project where they partnered with RFERL, Meydan TV, Sveriges Television, TT News Agency, the Investigative Reporting Center of Italy (IRPI) and my site Bellingcat to investigate corruption in the Azerbaijani government. I was also involved with the production of two DuPont award winning pieces be VICE News and CBS 60 Minutes, and that sort of stuff makes funders happy, so this new system seems to work so far.
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Aug 20, 2016 09:40
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FactsAreUseless posted:Given the following:
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Aug 20, 2016 10:44
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You are far too concerned about print media OP. Twitter has made the reporting side of journalism largely irrelevant, the part that paid the bills. The exposing and investigating side is very much alive it just looks very different. The rigorous cult of fact,has moved up the intellectual food chain into academia. You no longer need a middle man to find out what is happening in the world of science or polling. Print media, and associated print journalism were not immune to point 5, 'The era of on-demand information makes it possible to choose never to be exposed to ideas or facts you dislike'. If you didn't like 'facts' you simply didn't read that particular column in the paper and skipped to the funnies. You just need to watch Citizen Kane and the cynical contempt Wells seems to portray for Hearst to appreciate that the role of the media and the inherent distrust of it hasn't really changed, at least in terms of perception. The difference with new media is that the act of skipping is measurable. Real journalism, the reporting and dissecting of events, absolutely still exists it just looks very different. David Simon has talked about the death of print in length, his previous profession. Arguably he created The Wire as an experiment in a new form of journalism. To tell the very real story of inner city life through art, where interviews made it into the script in verbatim. Oftentimes, the characters were based on the very actors that were playing them. A more recognisable form of journalism that looks very different in the internet age are podcasts. Take a favourite of mine, the obnoxiously titled 'Security Mom' podcast. In it, Juilette Kayem goes in to detail interviewing movers and shakers in current events. Her guests are those involved in homeland security, disaster management and counter terrorism. Here is an episode on 'why is Guantanamo Bay still open?' http://news.wgbh.org/post/why-gtmo-remains-open Give it a listen, I highly recommend it. Note the quality of the format, the smooth yet helpful editing and the complete absence of quote cherry picking. If not journalism, in the true sense, what would you call this kind of thing? Whatever your opinions on the subject matter, you cannot deny the quality of the interviews and the value of the perspective they present. Of course, there are people like Mr Moses up there too and sites like Belllingcat too. They need to be more concerned with commercial viability though. gently caress knows what the answer is there though, donations seem like a thin band-aid at best. jiggerypokery fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 11:47
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You also see sites like the Mail Online that have huge readerships and will report any unverified nonsense they can get away with just for the clicks, and if they get called out there's a tiny chance they'll publish a correction no-one reads anyway. I've noticed it a lot with their conflict reporting, likely because they don't have to worry about ISIS suing them from reporting bullshit. Then you get sites that report the stories as fact based on the Mail Online (or others) reporting, and before you know total bullshit is being reported as fact in a hundred languages. Another good example of this is the Daily Express reporting "shocking revelations" in a BBC documentary that a Ukrainian jet shot down MH17, when in fact the documentary examines and debunks those claims. Despite the story being bullshit it was reported across the world, in particular Russia, the BBC was claiming Ukraine shot down MH17. Groups like First Draft do what they can to promote verification, fact checking, and basic journalistic integrity, but some news site, even those linked to print, are willing to publish utter bollocks just for the clicks. jiggerypokery posted:Of course, there are people like Mr Moses up there too and sites like Belllingcat too. They need to be more concerned with commercial viability though. gently caress knows what the answer is there though, donations seem like a thin band-aid at best. In my experience it's not commercially viable, that's why Bellingcat is now a non-profit NGO on the hunt for funding, which fortunately isn't going too badly. The question then becomes who you are willing to take money from. Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 11:52
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Brown Moses posted:In my experience it's not commercially viable, that's why Bellingcat is now a non-profit NGO on the hunt for funding, which fortunately isn't going too badly.
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Aug 20, 2016 17:09
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