I'm sorry, are you saying the media, whose job it is to report and not serve as experts, are useless ignorants, or Celera, which lied to the public, are useless idiots?
If the first, time to let that dead dog lie. It's a tired trope.
Not a tired trope because that dog isn't dead. Until the media either 1. has no influence or 2. stops being dishonest then it needs to constantly be called out and berated.
What if it is apparent that there are other groups pushing the narrative that the media is untrustworthy so that they themselves can own the narrative?
Any given group of humans will have a mixture of deceptive and trustworthy participants. Singling one group out for constant castigation, held against an impossible standard, makes it easier for dishonest members of other groups to avoid the spotlight.
It doesn’t matter, because “the media” doesn’t work as a concept. It’s a bunch of amateurs trained on nothing more than hiding the fact that they are not an expert.
How much of the reporting from the media revealed that Theranos was a fraud? Anything that wasn’t was fucking useless because it’s just a megaphone for corporate PR, despite what they think.
The entire concept of a weekly news is risible, let alone daily news. A fully investigated story actually worthy of the term journalism requires probably 2 employee years worth of actual work.
Look at how many articles the NYTimes publishes daily, multiply it by 700, and then compare that number with the actual number of journalists they have. It’s a complete farce.
Aren't we all a bunch of amateurs hiding our lack of true expertise? Each passing decade I feel that all the more. I think you've described the human condition.
"The media" isn't a uniform entity, but when people refer to it in this context they typically mean the large consolidated media corporations that own major print and television outlets. And those entities have essentially eroded their own credibility to the point that trusting anything they say is foolish. If they say the sky is blue, go out and check.
They could do better, but until they do, it makes sense to castigate them when they err, because avoiding that reputational harm is their incentive to do better. Or, if they fail to do better, the thing that should ultimately kill them so they can be replaced with something that can do better.
The larger news outlets are some of the few remaining places that actually hold their news rooms to some kind of factual standard and facsimile of objective reality. If NYT or the Economist or the BBC tells me the sky is blue, I'm pretty sure it is. If they report on some scientific topic the reporter is not an expert on, I understand that there's probably some signal lost. If they publish something on a contested political topic, I understand there might be some slant in the direction of their overall political leaning. I also understand that they have an interest in the direction of their corporate ownership and host country. But there are plenty of other outlets trying (and succeeding) at capturing audiences who have all those same conflicts of interest, and more, but do not hold themselves to a factual standard.
While media companies have indeed "eroded their own credibility", in that there's a steady stream of falseness alongside truth, I would add with equal measure that "their credibility has been undermined by others". The loudest voices that castigate the media, in America at least, tend to be the ones that profit the most from being the sole arbiter of truth for their own audiences.
The business model of having an autonomous news room that holds itself to factual standards and is largely sequestered from advertising is shrinking and shrinking. I mourn its death, for I see no replacement coming along.
> The business model of having an autonomous news room that holds itself to factual standards and is largely sequestered from advertising is shrinking and shrinking.
In large corporations it's effectively already dead, because many of the "trusted" names have already abandoned it, and you can't even tell which ones they are without being inside the newsroom to know if stories there get spiked on behalf of advertisers.
Where you can still get this is the likes of Substack, where you're paying a subscription to someone who doesn't have advertisers.
> The loudest voices that castigate the media, in America at least, tend to be the ones that profit the most from being the sole arbiter of truth for their own audiences.
That's to be expected when it benefits them. But their criticisms would sure have a lot less weight if they weren't accurate.
I don't wholly disagree with you, and in fact think you have a very good and thoughtful perspective (FWIW), but I do have some thoughts.
I think there's too much focus on advertising and corporate interests as the thing that undermines journalism. There's such a thing as to little focus, but right now there's too much focus.
For example, I have seen people lionize particular doctors, or researchers, or climate scientists, or what-have-you, who hold contrarian opinions on particular subjects. Clearly those people, in the minds of those who lionize them, have fewer conflicts of interest than advertising-driven journalists or powerful government officials.
The problem is that there are powerful motivations for people to lie or deceive that are equal in power to advertising money. Power through influence. Power through self-righteousness.
For example: I've looked into various vaccine conspiracy theories that have been touted online, and some of them come from highly credentialed people, sometimes with excellent historical track records in medical fields, who none-the-less are playing fast and loose with the data, or drawing conclusions that cannot be backed by research. The people who tout those theories look to those originators, those highly credentialed people, and say, "Look, there's Dr. So and So, they aren't part of Big Pharma, so they must be on to something". Then I look into Dr. So and So's blog, and look at the research they're citing, realize they're misinterpreting, or exaggerating, or what-have-you. In short, they are deceiving the public. They aren't financially motivated to do so. So why do they do it? Well, there's plenty of reasons. A desire to be right. A desire to be relevant and respected. A desire to have an audience. I think these things are easily as powerful, and often more powerful, than advertising money held over a journalist at a large media company.
And I see benefits to journalists working in groups with editorial control. I've seen great authors go astray in terms of quality when they start self publishing, or somehow become influential enough that they can shrug off their editors. I believe any journalist would be subject to the same forces of ego, influence, etc. If a journalist is making their money through Substack subscriptions, that may be even more of an existential threat than one faced by a journalist at the NYT, who can more readily absorb the financial hit of a story that goes nowhere. The subscribers, after all, now have expectations of what they will get from that journalist. Juicy stories -- at any cost?
I'd rather these ideas spread to others, potentially younger readers, than never have to read a trope again. I'm not sure it will ever change if we just accept it and never discuss it again.
In a sibling comment I give about 6 articles published over 3 decades by a single outlet- the Old Grey Lady (NY Times)- and it the competition was widely covered at the time.
