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Journalist Says…Don’t Trust the Media
Matt Taibbi, over on his substack, posted his opening remarks at the Munk Debates he participated in recently. You can read it here.
He brings up some very good points (well, because I agree with them), but he also makes some troubling ones as well. He thinks that the fracturing of news into many outlets and channels created an environment where each media outlet seeks an audience and writes to serve that audience and ignores the rest. He pointed out that while Fox is watched by 90%+ Republicans, MSNBC is watched by 90%+ Democrats and neither seems dedicated to telling the facts and the story, but rather promoting a narrative.
At a basic level, I agree with him and think he is spot on. But where I suspect we differ is going to be how to resolve it. Can journalists be trusted to self-regulate themselves? It’s not like they have a good track record. The idea of the unbiased reporter is a relatively new concept that didn’t even exist prior to the mid-20th Century. Joseph Pulitzer is credited with using his fortune (made through selling news, much biased) to push for the creation of Journalism schools where aspiring reporters would be trained to be objective. His funding of the Pulitzer Prize was supposed to give Journalists something to aspire to win and thus guide the journalists on how to act.
But look at what wins Pulitzer Prizes now. The most recent and arguably the most egregious examples of this would be the prizes won for the reporting on Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the ’16 election. The reporting was based on fabricated information that was reported as truth, but aligned with the narrative it was rewarded. What gets rewarded gets repeated. To me, until those prizes are revoked and the Pulitzer organization reviews how they screwed up so badly, how can we expect journalists and Journalism to be trusted.
Published in Journalism
I find myself agreeing with the many commentaries that assert the Woodward/Bernstein/Nixon project was the worst thing to happen to journalism. It gave so many people that view that the purpose of “journalism” is to take down a politician or to right some perceived wrong (as you say, to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable).
I mean, to be fair, there’s a long history of yellow journalism stretching back to the moment the first caveman drew a picture of his rival being gored by an aurochs.
By the way, my trust in media (or “journalists”) has diminished further in the most recent several years as media or “journalism” personalities and organizations increasingly argue against the concepts of free speech and free press, and in favor of forced constraints on speech and press.
As a matter of principle, I find it bizarre that speech and press people think someone should be able to tell them what they can and cannot say.
As a matter of practice, I find it odd that speech and press people are so confident that they will be on the “permitted” side in a world of constrained speech.
My belief is that the audience Fox plays to is actually center-right Americans who honor the Constitution and our Jeffersonian heritage. The myriad outlets on the far-left portray both Fox and its audience as far-right and constantly include lies describing MAGA and other conservative Republicans as fascists, racists, sexists, and any other extremists that they can come up with. This is because the media have been sold and and actually bought with big money, consolidated, the far Left narrative that has been used to indoctrinate our younger generations within our public education process.
The political game Taibbi is describing is essentially the centralized planning and control Hamilton approach versus the decentralized Federalism advocated under Jefferson’s governing ideas.
Nah, Ol’ Pete is one of the “afflicted” because of his sexual preference. Remember, they don’t see “afflicted” and “comfortable” the same way we do.
I wonder if the original Hamiltonian view of central government was very legitimate for his time not having enough experience and vision to see the inevitable totalitarian destination?
We have seen enough to know now that individual liberty is at stake. I think it is truly amazing the vision the Virginians had to insist on a commitment to have a vote on adoption of the Bill of Rights before the Constitution was ratified.
Glenn Greenwald is someone that most of us wouldn’t agree on about politics, but he is one of the few on the left that is criticizing the media. My friend Christine Tatum also is fighting back from the left. She got J-pilled when Colorado legalized weed (her husband is a pediatric psychiatrist who deals with THC induced psychosis as one example, and when her friend who were leaving the service asked her where to go to get facts and not biased reporting and she realized during the 16 election and Russian Conspiracy aftermath that the media was rarely reporting news anymore and she (a journalist herself) began her push back. She isn’t nearly as popular as Glenn, but she is dedicated.
They imagine that they will because they are “trained journalists”. What they want is to gatekeep out people who haven’t been to J-school and been indoctrinated in reporting the news to promote the left’s narrative.
I’m really not sure where Taibbi got his numbers but as an old sports stats guy I can tell you they are a bit deceptive. (Tell me what you want to say and I’ll find you the stat that backs it up!)
On this past election night FNC pulled in 7.4M viewers. More important was the 1.8M inside the 25-54 demographic. That beat the combined networks – both broadcast and cable. All but 400k skewed even younger. 1.4M were ages 18-49.
Nielsen estimates that more total Democrats and Independents watched FNC’s election coverage in primetime than they did the entire day on MSNBC or CNN. More loosely translated, the FNC’s 10% of Democrats are larger in numbers than MSNBC’s 90% of Democrats.
Even these revealing numbers might be deceptive as well. One thing we think(??) about the voting patterns is that a lot of Democrat votes come from uninformed voters who probably are not watching any TV for any number of reasons. Maybe the votes resulting from ballot harvesting don’t watch any TV either. And the fraudulent votes? @ejhill
Taibbi is right. Fox News and MSNBC are mirror images of each other. I don’t know how that gets fixed, but diagnosing the problem is surely the first step.
Again, Fox News accurately reported on the Trump Russia Collusion lie exposing all aspects of the FBI/MuellerSpecial Counsel/IC/MSM/(D) malfeasance, corruption, and lies.
MSNBC was a major MSM player in spreading the lie.
How is that a mirror image?
Actually, this kind of result is why I stuck with Fox through those years when Trump was President. It’s not that hard to discern the truth when the lying is blatant.
The very first major partisan break between Hamilton and Jefferson when they were cabinet secretaries under President Washington was when Hamilton began pushing to establish a national bank. The underlying dispute by these two mirrors what we are still experiencing today, urban versus rural.
Many at the time of Washington’s Administration thought Hamilton’s ultimate objective was to do away with States. His moves in banking were geared to get the rich, elite citizens tied closely financially to the federal government so has to promote centralized government authority.
This sounds very familiar. All the media and entertainment is concentrated in urban centers and most of them play the same tune. Except now it is not just our federal government seeking to undermine the states’ authority, it is international organizations seeking to destroy America’s national sovereignty and Democrats are supportive with help from the RINOs.
Fox News and MSNBC both stoke the outrage of hyper-partisans.
Not exactly.
How many hyper-partisans do you imagine are being stoked at any given moment.
Many of us watch the content, take it in, and you know what …. never really get that hyper-partisan outraged feeling at all.
What am I doing wrong?
@suspira Recognize the difference between the truth and lies. Cannot be a mirror image.
MSNBC might be more like OAN than Fox.
Maybe. There are definitely crazier outlets than Fox (I seem to get emails from all of them, no matter how often I hit “unsubscribe”). The straight news used to be pretty, well, straight, but the commentary drifted into populist paranoia territory a while back. I gave up on them.