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?
Fucked without them... fucked with them.
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?
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?
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.
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.
there's always been a certain amount of half-truths ("spin") and flat-out fabricated lies in different media.
Bernie Sanders takes a similar view, incidentally.
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 BBC is to assemble a team to fact check and debunk deliberately misleading and false stories masquerading as real news.
Amid growing concern among politicians and news organisations about the impact of false information online, news chief James Harding told staff on Thursday that the BBC would be “weighing in on the battle over lies, distortions and exaggerations”.
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.