""Post Truth" politics"

vimothy

yurp
You've described the article; what do you actually disagree with - simply that people would be more likely to trust the media if it was in fact more trustworthy?
 

Leo

Well-known member
"very good" was a bit of an overstatement, i get his point that MSM aren't perfect but it came off as too much of a straw man argument. as is often the case with armchair academic exercises, he cherrypicks a few examples where a mainstream media outlet screwed up and extrapolates it into "all mainstream media are fools and liars", which is absurd. what about the vast (vast) majority of times when MSM like the washington post or ny times get it right, or are the first to uncover legitimate wrongdoing?

they aren't perfect, and i guess one will always be critical and disappointed if one's criteria is media perfection. say what you will about publications like the post and times, but we'd be fucked without them.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
From now on I intend to learn about goings-on in Foreign Parts only by listening in rapt, gawping attention to the tales told by road-worn travellers in the local inn when their tongues have been loosened by a few flagons of ale.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
Fucked without them... fucked with them.

i'm not saying they should be a person's only source of information, or that everything they write should automatically be held as true. i am saying they are the ones that usually do the hard work of uncovering scandal and wrongdoing that then gets pontificated upon by others on the sidelines. there's an expression here: "monday morning quarterback"...

they aren't perfect, but i give then credit where credit is due.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
as is often the case with armchair academic exercises, he cherrypicks a few examples where a mainstream media outlet screwed up and extrapolates it into "all mainstream media are fools and liars", which is absurd. what about the vast (vast) majority of times when MSM like the washington post or ny times get it right, or are the first to uncover legitimate wrongdoing?

Plus he's demanding full disclosure of sources (if I remember correctly, can't be bothered to re-read it), well, in some cases you'd better not go that far - "Deep Throat" and the Watergate scandal is a prime example.
 

droid

Well-known member
This situation is a direct result of the success of the propaganda model. You can only distort, frame and lie in the service of power for so long before you lose credibility and alienate the general populace. The financial crash, austerity and the reporting around it was the final straw.
 

vimothy

yurp
It's all in my reply, read it.

You say that the article is "not very good at all", but your only disagreement, as far as I can see, is that readers won't come back to the "classic media", even if it does become more trustworthy. Is this true? Maybe. What if it is?

What the article shows (through numerous examples) is that the complaints about "fake news" are often hypocritical -- transparently so -- attempts at rubbishing the output of those on the other side of the partisan divide. The moral panic that is currently gripping the great and the good in the media should not simply be accepted at face-value, but also understood as part of a project to delegitimize political opponents and reassert dominance over the narrative, control of which has evidently slipped (if the election of Donald Trump is anything to go by).

Watching its funding model implode is by itself probably enough to drive the press to a certain amount of dubious behaviour, but the threat to its world-view is also an important driver of the trend. Society is supposed to be gradually converging on liberal democratic capitalism -- it's not a process that is meant to work in reverse.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
You say that the article is "not very good at all", but your only disagreement, as far as I can see, is that readers won't come back to the "classic media", even if it does become more trustworthy. Is this true? Maybe. What if it is?

Watching its funding model implode is by itself probably enough to drive the press to a certain amount of dubious behaviour, but the threat to its world-view is also an important driver of the trend. Society is supposed to be gradually converging on liberal democratic capitalism -- it's not a process that is meant to work in reverse.

I don't consider the article "very good at all" exactly bc the author bags on "classic media" (rightly so, and there I agree), but doesn't say a word why it fell for sensationalism, is dropping good journalists/journalism etc. and how this could be reversed. Just demanding "get more trustworthy again (and audiences will come back)" isn't enough by far. And IMO the funding model imploding IS the crucial point here. And even if this trend could be reversed, and investigative journalism could be revived - I have serious doubts that people would have the patience in these day and age when they get more and more conditioned to the alert-ism of social media.
 
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vimothy

yurp
It seems pointless to complain that the article isn't something else entirely. As a careful exposé of the gap between the media's self-image and reality with respect "fake news", I think it's extremely useful.
 

Leo

Well-known member
except "the reality" is that this whole fake news element represents a very small aspect of what most reputable MSM provide. yes, they've screwed up and stupidly tried to cover their tracks on occasion, but a much greater proportion of their coverage is legitimately fair, some even critically vital. the evidence doesn't support the notion that everything's gone to shit. some of it has gone to shit, it needs to change and journalists need to be held accountable, but the notion of media perfection can lead to throwing the baby out with the bathwater*.


* pleased to have shamelessly used TWO crass cliches in one morning!
 

firefinga

Well-known member
This situation is a direct result of the success of the propaganda model. You can only distort, frame and lie in the service of power for so long before you lose credibility and alienate the general populace. The financial crash, austerity and the reporting around it was the final straw.

"Old" Media doesn't really "lie" tho - lying means intentionally say unfactual things - sure thing, if you read the financial times you'd hardly see a critical word bout the elite/establishment (meaning the actual elite, those who run the economy). Problem today rather is, that a lot of people now call special angles of media coverage "lies" just bc that particular angle doesn't go down well with their views (or rather, prejudices). Big problem in the German speaking countries, (mostly) right wing (populists) calling mainstream media "lügenpresse" = "lying press" for giving a more positive view of the refugee crisis.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
"We rated 82 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 12.3%. Another 169 posts (25.4%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage.
Left-wing pages did not earn as many “mostly false” or “mixture of true and false” ratings, but they did share false and misleading content. We identified 22 mostly false posts out of a total of 471 from these pages, which means that just under 5% of left-wing posts were untrue. We rated close to 14% of these posts (68) a mixture of true and false."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.nblMkZMgX#.nvmAkrA2O
 

Leo

Well-known member
there's always been a certain amount of half-truths ("spin") and flat-out fabricated lies in different media. the two big differences now: anyone can now start their own blog/website to spew wherever they want (and amplify it virally with social media sharing), and the fact that lots of people now simply don't care if something is true or not. in other words, it's not necessarily that they think the ny times is "lying", it's that they don't care about the facts written about in the ny times.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
there's always been a certain amount of half-truths ("spin") and flat-out fabricated lies in different media.

Further, a lot of people have extended this in their heads to "The 'MSM' lies about everything all the time", so that any news (or 'news') source saying something drastically different from what is being reported by CNN, BBC, NYT, The Guardian or whatever is automatically given credence. (In the case of the Guardian, this is complicated by the fact of it being clearly an example of 'MSM' while at the same time frequently publishing editorials that align pretty well with much of the 'anti-MSM' media.)
 

vimothy

yurp
Bernie Sanders takes a similar view, incidentally.

Chomsky on the relationship between capitalism and racism (from Understanding Power):

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because its anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of any predetermined quality -- sex, family, nationality -- they are impediments to the free flow of goods, labour and capital, the great deterritorializing agents of globalisation.
 

vimothy

yurp

vimothy

yurp
Meanwhile:

Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community.

Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...6f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.0335858eb06c
 
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