Most Americans think money comes before mission at U.S. news organizations

https://knightfoundation.org/press/releases/most-americans-think-money-comes-before-mission-at-u-s-news-organizations-according-to-a-new-gallup-knight-study/

by hhs • 4 years ago

179 221 4 years ago

knightfoundation.org

throwawaysleep3• 4 years ago

As a general rule, people aren’t willing to pay for the things considered public goods.

Then they whine that said news chases views.

Like Republican communities that underpay teachers and wonder why their kids have no futures because someone with a brain built a robot to do their repetitive trivial job.

PixyMisa3• 4 years ago

Also like Democratic communities that overpay teachers and wonder why their kids have no futures because someone with a brain built a robot to do their repetitive trivial job.

umeshunni2• 4 years ago

More like Democratic communities that ban building housing and then wonder why housing is expensive.

Yhippa2• 4 years ago

I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. Trad newspapers like NYT/WSJ seem to just cater to their bases. Cable companies are more entertainment and are beholden to their advertisers.

I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.

RajT88• 4 years ago

PBS is the best thing I get from the antenna on my roof.

aliqot• 4 years ago

I get from the antenna on my roof.

These are just extra words :) I like PBS a lot

SV_BubbleTime2• 4 years ago

The AP is made up of CNN, USA Today, NBC, Washington Post, etc writers be them local or national branch. Reuters is slightly better but this isn’t a problem that can be solved with just throwing more money at someone.

It’s a lack of integrity.

throwawaysleep3• 4 years ago

Integrity is what people complain about when they aren’t willing to pay up for aligned incentives.

You need aligned incentives.

tootie8• 4 years ago

Disclosure: I work in public media. It's a pretty broad ecosystem of NPR and PBS affiliates and independent news sources like Pro Publica, The Guardian or niche sources like The Markup or Grist. If you follow a few big ones and few local ones, you'll get almost everything you'd need. That being said, I think it's impossible to live without the top tier papers of records like Axios, NY Times and WaPo. They definitely push profitability, but they also unmatched resources to dig up hard news and get it to a huge audience. I even love CNN (cnn.com, not the TV network) just because their coverage is so broad and exhaustive even if so much of it is fluff. There's stuff that sucks about all of them, but we'd be much worse off if they didn't exist.

PixyMisa3• 4 years ago

Every source you mention is left-wing. They all report the same stories in the same way. And worse, they all ignore or cover up the same stories in the same way.

just-ok3• 4 years ago

WaPo is owned by one of the richest ~corporations~ people (thank you for the correction) in the history of the world (~Amazon~ Bezos); it is in absolutely no way “top tier.” Imo, everything it publishes should be viewed as if it was filtered through by Bezos himself.

CoastalCoder2• 4 years ago

A bit of a tangent, but since we're discussing NPR...

I remember a while back (maybe 10 years?) NPR spent some airtime trying to address head-on their alleged liberal bias. I respect that, I think their effort was sincere.

What left me frustrated, though, was they never addressed what I saw as their main vector of bias: they seemed to broadcast many more interviews with people unhappy about conservative policies, than people happy with conservative policies.

E.g., illegal immigration was a hot topic at the time. NPR provided a lot of sympathetic interviews with illegal immigrants, both adults and children. I don't think I heard even one NPR interview with individuals in other groups, e.g. construction companies that get out-bid by competitors who pay illegal immigrants under the table, or would-be immigrants who are awaiting their turn to legally enter the U.S.

Again, I don't doubt the integrity of Bob Edwards and other NPR staff who tackled that project. But I think it shows how hard it can be for liberals to accurately understand conservative perspectives.

landemva• 4 years ago

I think it's impossible to live without the top tier papers of records

That is a US-centric viewpoint. I'm in the US now and I don't find any need for those. Maybe because I'm too busy outside doing fun stuff most days and living. I don't know of a good reason to give those publications more than a glance once per year.

the_lonely_road• 4 years ago

Isn’t the AP the organization that insists Black be capitalized while insisting that White not be capitalized? They are just as biased and steeped in the culture war as anyone else. For the record I don’t care if both are capitalized or both are not but taking the divisive approach of choosing one and disallowing the other causes me to lose all trust in them.

res0nat0r• 4 years ago

This is likely why: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

pie_flavor• 4 years ago

According to AllSides, AP Politics is definitely sided[0], but it doesn't affect the AP outside of the politics section[1]. A lot better than nothing, especially since anyone more centrist would not publish anywhere near the volume of stories.

[0] https://archive.ph/aqpJM,

[1] https://archive.ph/1rhNj

Archive since they've merged the ratings for clarification, but haven't actually changed their minds.

Yhippa2• 4 years ago

This is very far down the list of things for me to be outraged about.

tzs• 4 years ago

Capitalizing "Black" but not "white" seems arguably reasonable for the same reason we have a "Black History Month" but no "White History Month".

We don't have a "White History Month" because white history is the default in the US. In a sense every month is a white history month here. Note that we do have months for some subsets of white, e.g., Irish-American Heritage Month (March).

Same for why we have LGBT Pride month but no straight pride month. Straight is the default.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

I've seen outlets start to capitalize "Brown" which confused me.

lettergram• 4 years ago

I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong. PBS generally has been some of the best news / reporting I’ve seen.

That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming.

If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries)

While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing.

I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88

or Steve bannons interview on frontline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0

thakoppno• 4 years ago

I really enjoy PBS and generally agree with you but we’re at a place so far removed from objectivity in news gathering when the best still stand by this rationale.

We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions

Terence Samuels, NPR's Managing Editor for News on the NY Post Hunter Biden story

https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101...

hairofadog2• 4 years ago

I sorta wish I could buy a subscription to one publication that was the news sections of both NYT and WSJ but neither of their opinion sections.

interotrong123• 4 years ago

That is almost what Apple News is.

Pigalowda• 4 years ago

Yea me too. I got combustive when I read what i thought were outrageous op-eds in those two and just canceled them. One from left and one from right wing opinions.

Even when I read unbiased information/data driven articles there’s still a bias - someone chose this information for me to digest. Did they choose it to influence how i feel? Maybe just because they think the most people will click on it so it’s published? Anyways, I’m not entitled to “truth” so I guess I have to keep reading/doom scrolling.

systemvoltage3• 4 years ago

PBS/NPR has skewed left in last 5 years. It used to be amazing and not partisan.

AuryGlenz• 4 years ago

PBS doesn't seem too bad from my limited exposure but NPR has more than "skewed."

Spivak• 4 years ago

Haha skewed, NPR has been a staple liberal stereotype since my grandpa listened to them. If you’ve noticed anything it’s that the gap between liberals and conservatives widened massively starting in the late 2000s when the Republican party started slipping so they manufactured a wedge issue out of gay marriage and when that died down trans healthcare with some opportunistic blm thrown in. And look, it worked. It paid off huge for them but at the cost of literally bifurcating the country and hollowing out moderates and independents. So now it’s much much easier to see the side they’ve always been on since the contrast has been turned up to 11.

As much as I personally think the Republican party is absolutely fucking evil for the specific issues they capitalized on — because good god lower taxes, eliminating government agencies, and less powerful unions doesn’t pour gasoline on festering racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia creating a tire fire of hate and violence that will outlive me — I’m not mad at the game in abstract, Democrats play it too.

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

A bit tangential but HUGE shout-out to PBS for their science shows on YouTube. I follow PBS Eons and PBS Space Time, both are fantastic and highly educational.

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

news from organizations like the AP

AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere.

PBS are a left public good.

Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.

gpm• 4 years ago

I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters.

reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.

throwaway67342• 4 years ago

Iirc Reuters sells a subscription

CivBase• 4 years ago

Well of course they do. The "mission" doesn't pay squat in the current environment. Fabricated outrage and tribal politics is far more lucrative and all the integrity in the world wont save you from operation expenses. People mostly just use news articles as justification for their existing political biases and the news organizations are happy to accommodate.

Natsu3• 4 years ago

This is hardly surprising. More people are able to see things for themselves and coming to sharply divergent opinions than those of media outlets. So for example you'll watch actual trial coverage-all of it, not just any one day-and get to see clips like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hw0QSbDQNo

And then you'll read stories like this which are only about one single part of the trial:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/10/20/darrel...

The funny thing is that I don't think there's a single statement in the second article that's actually factually inaccurate with what USA Today said. They're just repeating what was said in court in that one part of the trial and just not mentioning that some of those statements are completely and utterly bogus for myriad reasons that anyone who watched the trial could tell you.

But damn if it doesn't give you a different impression of how things are going in court than actually watching the thing itself with context.

gsatic• 4 years ago

Sometimes, when things don't make sense it's cause no one in the room has any idea what to do.

They don't have the time, skills, resources or experience to produce a good outcome. And so whatever they do produces either no outcomes or creates more issues.

There are only two know strategies for such scenarios

1. Find a simpler problem - refocus everyone on something simple, within their abilities to solve so that atleast outcomes are produced how ever simple they maybe.

2. Exit the room and disconnect from the people trapped in there (cuz they want to pull as many ppl into the trap hoping it will solve the prob)

TexanFeller2• 4 years ago

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was a great example of this. The media painted him as a white supremacist and all that, and one of Biden’s campaign ads implied he was those sort of things. I was buying into the mainstream news narrative at first, but then I watched most of the actual trial. In the evidence and testimony presented I didn’t see even a hint of racial bias, and my conclusion is he probably shouldn’t have even been charged since the video footage clearly shows what he did was lawful. I will never trust most news sources again.

mehphp• 4 years ago

I was also duped on this one. I still think he shouldn't have been there, but after watching the trial and finding out the facts, he didn't appear to do anything unlawful.

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

Great example. You really have to be careful in what you choose to believe.

If you don't watch the news, you are uninformed. If you do watch the news, you are misinformed.

(Paraphrasing Denzel Washington)

etempleton• 4 years ago

Traditional media paints in broad brush strokes. They simplify or streamline their stories for two reasons that are not nefarious, but lead to a lot of problems:

1. Time - Television news, which is how most of America consumes news needs to fit a story into a 30 seconds to 1 minute spot. Even if they devote more time to it, it is a series of short spots. It is almost an art form to try and package it and they are doing it on a break neck deadline. Even written content will often have a strict word count.

2. They are producing content for the lowest common denominator. Since you used USA Today, they, for example, write to an 8th grade reading comprehension level. This often involves simplifying the narrative.

And then you add on top any biases or partisan news, which sells. There is a profit motive to have a lot of angry upset readers. This is where it gets dangerous.

I don’t know what the solution is. More and more people are turning to even simpler news sources like a Facebook post. I think reading comprehension is a major issue. We have so much access to information but a large portion of the population seems unwilling or unable to effectively parse it.

NoToP• 4 years ago

Something I've noticed is that it pays to have a lot of upset conservative viewers. For a liberal audiance, it pays to make them laugh. Compare, for instance, John Oliver vs Tucker Carlson. There's a whole genre of left leaning news comedy act, and a whole genre of right leaning angry old man yells news and opinions.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

It is hard not to feel that way. I guess most of the staff at those organizations would say that the mission comes first, but they have to stay in business to do the mission.

robswc• 4 years ago

I mean, is that truly not the case?

bombcar2• 4 years ago

Sometimes what isn’t reported can be as interesting as how what is reported is.

bhk• 4 years ago

It's mission before money, but not the mission you think.

encryptluks2• 4 years ago

This. The main goal of news organizations may involve profit motivators, but ultimately they want to be able to influence the population.

jrmg• 4 years ago

To what end do news organizations want to influence the population?

oceanplexian• 4 years ago

They’ve all become hyper polarized in the last ~10 years. Go find some footage of BBC or CNN or MSNBC from pre-2010. You might be a bit shocked how, well, boring it all is.

I apologize for my American-centric view of politics, but something fundamentally changed about the world around the time Trump, Bernie, etc were making waves in 2015-2016 in US politics. It’s almost like we entered a parallel reality. Shortly after the media has gone extremist, not only in the US but globally.

ceejayoz7• 4 years ago

It's hardly just the media that's seen a change of tone; go look at a Presidential debate from 20-30 years ago. Look at how Bush and Reagan debated the issue of illegal immigration in 1980; it's a short clip, but it feels totally foreign these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixi9_cciy8w

reducesuffering• 4 years ago

That clip should be quite the wake-up call for those who are ignorant of how far the Republican party has veered right today. Those two candidates, Bush and Reagan, would be Democrats today.

Reagan [wrt Mexico]: "rather than talking about putting up a fence... and open the border both ways by understanding their problems"

bink• 4 years ago

Media consolidation in the 90s took decades to degrade our public discourse. I fear for what things will look like in another 10 years.

thewebcount2• 4 years ago

I disagree. I saw a huge change when Clinton passed the baton to George W. Bush. For the last 2 years of Clinton’s presidency, the press (all of it, CNN, NBC, Fox, etc.) were reporting daily on the various scandals in the White House. They seemed to be asking hard-hitting questions all around and being very skeptical of the answers. Literally the first weeks of Bush’s presidency, it was like all of that went out the window and they just started accepting whatever his cabinet told them. It was like stepping into Bizarro land. Even the supposedly liberal outlets felt like they just gave up. It was so strange.

IAmGraydon• 4 years ago

I agree and I can’t figure it out. It’s not only the media either - it’s everyone. Extreme polarization is everywhere, and all of it seems to boil down to a struggle for power. Rich vs poor, citizens vs police, republican vs democrat, autocratic vs democratic - all being seen in extreme forms. It’s like the world has fallen under a spell or a mass psychosis.

I would love to hear theories of what the root cause is. Is it due to massive state sponsored manipulation campaigns via social media?

Worth reading: https://consilienceproject.org/social-media-enables-undue-in...

jesuscript2• 4 years ago

You ever heard a comedian work the crowd where he tells a gender specific joke? Goes something along the lines of “blah blah blah - fellas am I right? Clap if you know what I mean fellas”.

And then all the men in the crowd cheer and clap, and all the women boo. And vice versa if the joke had been for the women.

The two sides enjoy the clamoring.

I’m sure you heard this song:

[ANNIE] Anything you can do I can do better I can do anything better than you

[FRANK] No, you can't

[ANNIE] Yes, I can

[FRANK] No, you can't

[ANNIE] Yes, I can

[FRANK] No, you can't

Is that from a Broadway musical or the News/Internet?

Or a comedy show? Hah, maybe that’s what’s going on.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

The mindset in the report seems well-represented here in the comments.

fsociety999• 4 years ago

I don’t think there is much doubt that traditional media companies put profits over reporting and facts. It is difficult to critique war when defense contractors buy up much of your ad space. Likewise, it is difficult to critique big pharma when pharmaceutical companies buy up many of your ads, etc.

The problem with the proposal to make the news publicly funded is that that just replaces one set of incentives with another. If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government. This same kind of thing has started to creep into other parts of society like the public education system where standardized test scores are often considered more important than a well-rounded education.

Personally, this is why I like the business model of places like Substack where you can find specific journalists you trust to actually hold people in power accountable and can support them directly. Finding truly unbiased information these days is not easy.

Speaking of Substack, I highly recommend this three part series about conflicts of interest and media companies:

- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/big-media-big-conflicts...

- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/the-monopoly-on-your-mi...

cocacola13• 4 years ago

Then it's a question of holding those specific journalists on Substack accountable.

refurb3• 4 years ago

You hold them accountable by not paying them if you don't like their reporting.

tootie8• 4 years ago

When have defense contractors ever bought ad space in national news? That seems like wasted ad dollars targeting a lot of people who aren't in the market to buy arms.

ceejayoz7• 4 years ago

Honestly, I've gotten promoted ads on Twitter for Lockheed-Martin and Boeing's military hardware. No idea why, they must be targeting fairly broadly.

They definitely advertise in all sorts of media, especially stuff heavily read in Washington. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/us/nation-challenged-sale...

James Fetig, a Lockheed spokesman, said that Lockheed resumed running print ads for its own Joint Strike Fighter model in The Washington Post and trade publications on Monday, and only after it saw that Boeing was pressing ahead with radio and print ads.

thrown_22• 4 years ago

http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/canberra-airport-advertising/

Not sure about airport in the US but this is what you used to see when getting into the Australian capital from the airport.

m348e912• 4 years ago

Cynical me thinks the ad spending is not specially for viewers, but rather to gain favor and influence on coverage, especially when it comes to justification for conflict.

SanjayMehta• 4 years ago

I see ads from Boeing regularly on my twitter feed.

phonescreen_man• 4 years ago

They are not advertising to sell you weapons. They advertise to get their brand name inside your head associated with positive things.

warbler73• 4 years ago

GE owned NBC from 1986 to 2013.

notjulianjaynes• 4 years ago

I've noticed the podcast Intelligence Matters, all the ads are literally for like the newest Lockheed Martin fighter jet. Surely some of the audience are decision makers about buying those jets, but it can't be the majority of listeners. Granted the host is former deputy director of the CIA, but the content is news of national interest..

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intelligence-matters-a-cbs-news...

Godel_unicode3• 4 years ago

All the time. Especially sports and NPR, weirdly.

kshahkshah• 4 years ago

I don’t see how substack solves audience capture

unity10013• 4 years ago

If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much

Parliaments decide how and how much funding media outlets receive. Not governments. And the people elect the members of parliaments. You make it so that every outlet that reaches over a certain threshold of viewers gets funding proportionate to the share of viewers it has. Just like public election funding and how parties receive funding based on their vote shares.

bruce511• 4 years ago

I didn't down-vote you, but your argument has holes.

Yes, people elect the govt, but they don't get to oversee every decision. So most people simply vote along part lines, because when you have a choice of 2, party affiliation is the only criteria that matters. And those people are only on the ballot in the first place because they are overwhelmingly party loyal.

So then fundamentally media funding would be based on viewer numbers, not quality. I'm not sure that incentivising a pure head-count would lead to better quality. Facebook has fantastic viewer numbers, but is tgst the standard of journalism we aspire to?

A better argument _against_ govt funding is that the media is there to hold power to account, which would seem to be impossible for the media to do if power was paying the bills.

SamoyedFurFluff• 4 years ago

I worry if I subscribe only to news reporters I think are accurate, Im literally funding my own biases.

marricks• 4 years ago

Well, no matter what you read, you have to think about what the incentives are. Everything has a bias, especially people who claim to be unbiased. So if you really wanted to be "unbiased" you could at least spread that out.

foverzar3• 4 years ago

My method is to monitor as many diverse sources as possible.

Left, Right, American, European, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, Ukrainian -- all with their own perspectives, agendas and their own "white lies".

Cross-reference, distill and enjoy the complexity of an objective reality and all the perspectives on it.

eduction3• 4 years ago

Defense contractors don’t buy ad space in regular media outlets. In Aviation Week and maybe Foreign Policy and some trade journals, sure. When was the last time you saw an ad for an F-35 on nytimes.com? Why would they advertise defense systems there?

Anyway I actually agree that traditional media fails to put the truth first. But the reasons are way more complicated than your post indicates. Raytheon is not buying ads in the Condé Nast magazines, the WSJ, CNN etc.

There are a number of reasons these media orgs fail the truth. Certainly money is part of it. But I think the biggest single reason is how they source their stories. It is rooted in history and inertia and laziness and a certain awe of power. They are very comfortable talking to institutions and way less comfortable dealing with individual actors. Workers, dissidents, whistleblowers, the disgruntled, call them what you will. Finding a real human experience is so much harder than being spoon fed by people paid to make you swallow easy truths.

I mean, it’s 1000x easier now than it was 25 years ago. But learning how to listen to and vet that information is still hard, and digging on it is hard, and it’s all incredibly risky. No one ever got fired for printing an Apple statement. No one ever got dragged on Twitter because their corporate PR source got exposed and arrested.

Retric• 4 years ago

I have seen lots of pro F-35 and defense contractor advertising on busses etc not just trade journals.

I can’t find references to the US advertising campaigns, but here’s some that ran in Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/f-35-ads-on-oc-transpo...

throwaway67342• 4 years ago

It also costs a lot of money. So many people love to complain about the news but refuse to pay a dollar a day for it

endominus• 4 years ago

How about amending the statement to "It is difficult to critique a war when your access to extremely lucrative war coverage is determined by your relationship with the Department of Defense"?

origin_path4• 4 years ago

Yes, that's a big part of it. That is in turn due to the differing approaches to the press in public and private sectors, which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Lack of trust in media is split strongly along partisan lines, at least in the USA. This is IMHO a result of the heavily reliance of the media on public sector / government / university / NGO employees as a source of quotes. Journalists like to present themselves as neutral voices but want their stories to sound informed, so almost every story must come with a quote from someone. Public sector orgs rarely punish people for speaking to journalists and often actively encourage it, as long as they promote the organization's goals and ideologies. Even when theoretically forbidden e.g. intelligence, military, what you see is a massive culture of leaks and off-the-record briefings that's tolerated and encouraged from the top. Universities meanwhile are pretty much quote factories for the press, with the result that in the media "expertise" is now synonymous with academia - journalists love the fact that academics are perceived as independent from their host institutions, can turn up on the phone or in a studio at the drop of a hat and there's an unlimited number of them to pick from.

By contrast in the private sector it's standard for communication with journalists of any form to be forbidden and penalized with the sack, regardless of the message being given. Employees are not perceived as independent of their institution, even when talking off the record or as an individual. It may not even be easy to find the right person to talk to.

This leads to a self-reinforcing problem in which journalists get repeatedly exposed to the ways of thinking found in the largest public sector organizations that have a well funded press operation, without getting any balance from other areas of society, making them sympathetic to those ways, which in turn discourages other kinds of people from talking to them because they correctly perceive the journalists as biased. The journalists shift ever further towards the views of the people who talk to them until they basically become arms of the state. As time passes this feedback loop has become so extreme that the media aren't content to merely repeat whatever public sector workers tell them, but actively persecute anyone who tells them anything in disagreement. The bias becomes ever more visible and trust collapses.

There doesn't seem to be any easy way to break this feedback loop. You can't tackle it from the supply or demand side. Trying to restrict who can talk to the press is probably hard or impossible, especially in the USA with the First Amendment. Trying to increase the supply of people outside the public sector willing to talk to journalists, also hard. The most obvious way forward is to support and encourage a different style of journalism that doesn't try to present a fake view-from-above, in which bias is injected via quotes from hand-picked pseudo-experts, but rather a more analytical and data oriented form of news in which the only allowed quotes are things people said to other people, in public. This is the style of journalism found on Substack.

yucky• 4 years ago

Defense contractors don’t buy ad space in regular media outlets. In Aviation Week and maybe Foreign Policy and some trade journals, sure. When was the last time you saw an ad for an F-35 on nytimes.com? Why would they advertise defense systems there?

When you're one of the only companies in the world that makes something like the F-35, you don't need to advertise the F-35, you need to advertise the need for the F-35. NYTimes is great for that..

solatic• 4 years ago

If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government.

That's why you need both. You need private journalism to serve as a check on government, and public journalism to serve as a check on private interests. Forbid political advertising in private papers, and forbid private journalists from working for government after leaving private media; forbid corporate advertising in public papers, and forbid public journalists from working for corporate interests after leaving public media.

Timwi• 4 years ago

it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government.

The (publicly funded) BBC is plenty critical of the British government. The same is true of ARD in Germany.

djbebs• 4 years ago

Oh please, the BBC is a mouthpiece of the British state

origin_path4• 4 years ago

The BBC isn't critical of the government, it's critical of the Tories. That's not quite the same thing.

kalleboo• 4 years ago

If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government

Often public broadcasters are set up where their funding doesn't come from taxes but from a license fee that they collect themselves.

What I've seen in these countries is that public broadcasters still have a bias (due to journalists generally coming from the same background/education/maybe even geography) but it's not strictly aligned with whoever is currently in the government.

pyuser583• 4 years ago

Lots of papers are in death spirals regardless. The long-term strategy for many is becoming non-profits.

arkis22• 4 years ago

I find apnews.com an excellent and mostly emotionless free news source

Ptchd• 4 years ago

same. just wish they had an RSS feed...

dzink• 4 years ago

Nationalizing the most watched news sources leads to horrible political consequences. Politicians quickly figure out that whomever gets more airtime wins and elections so the news becomes a visual diary of the activities of whoever is in power + whomever owns non-government media. In Eastern Europe the mafia bought most media in small countries, and now they cannot be dislodged.

MBCook4• 4 years ago

That’s the argument to kill live C-SPAN coverage.

We know politicians play to the cameras constantly. It’s obvious. Politicians have made their entire careers by becoming famous for their speeches on the floor.

Do they really make a lot of those ridiculous charts and pictures for other politicians?

I remember hearing from reporters and maybe even ex-representatives that things changed once the cameras came in. Things got worse. You couldn’t look weak by talking to/compromising with the other side. Bombast worked. It made polarization worse. It wasn’t a big club anymore, it was “us” and “them”.

It won’t fix the rest of the media, but maybe C-SPAN is a failed experiment. The observer effect took over and changed the outcome.

WalterBright5• 4 years ago

In Seattle it's even worse. There's a law that says that no discussion among city councilmembers can take place in private. So, all discussion is in the council chamber, with cameras recording it.

You can guess where that leads. Nothing but grandstanding to the cameras. No horse-trading. No compromise.

It's awful.

thr0wawayf00• 4 years ago

It's so crazy to me how many people are OK with ad-supported news while complaining about the objectivity of news generally. IMO (having worked for news organizations), this one of the biggest problems with the industry.

I worked for a non-profit news org in 2016 and we spent a lot of time and energy covering the presidential race. One of the biggest ethical challenges we constantly faced as an organization was the reality that a certain candidate for president drew astronomical traffic to our site when his name was in a headline compared to everyone else, which meant more revenue for us. It wasn't even close.

We hated this because we wanted to apply coverage to candidates equally, but the discrepancies in traffic were impossible to ignore. And so every time we ran another story about this candidate, we had to ask ourselves if it was appropriate or not since he was not local to our state or region.

The news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived and it's not easy to leave money on the table with any sort of regularity. And when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that". It's a no-win situation.

Here's the bottom line: ad-based news models rely heavily on traffic metrics to generate ad revenue, which is derived from serving ads. I believe this is the single most poisonous aspect of making news today because those who make news can quite easily see what kind of news sells and what doesn't. As long as news organizations are focused on driving traffic to their site to generate ad revenue, this will be a problem. But people don't want to pay for news, so where does that leave our system? We're not willing as a society to give up the convenience that this deeply corrupt system gives us.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

It's so crazy to me how many people

So shaming consumers will solve the problem? Is that what people who've worked for news orgs think?

The things I pay for and point my friends toward don't treat people that way.

news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived

Well I go to Substack and Rumble, among others. The news industry is dying because it can't handle competition. R.I.P., "The News." Now let's imagine a world a little more informative than three television networks telling us all the same stories the same ways . . .

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 4 years ago

I don't think it's the fact that money comes in from ads per se--it's the simple fact that news corps are businesses too and that they need money to survive, so they need to serve the interests of whomever the money is coming from.

If people wanted news to be as objective as news could be, then they better be prepared to apportion their taxes to news orgs (should news orgs be privately or publicly owned is a longer discussion but the latter is implied), to read news that are as boring and as declarative as an encyclopedia article, or to avoid news altogether and to be physically present in the places where news happen to see events for themselves, but people are not willing to do any of those nor are those always feasible. So up to what extent is the expectation of objectiveness from journalism realistic?

I mean, I never thought for the life of me that news are supposed to be 100% objective, precisely because events are being reported from the understanding of someone else. This is why you consume information from more than one source. What if the people consuming news are part of the problem?

thewebcount2• 4 years ago

But people don't want to pay for news

I don’t know that that is actually true. I know that for me, I’m not interested in paying for:

- The daily homicide report

- 3 minutes of news per half hour, mixed in with 19 minutes of “stories” that are paid placement for products, movies, recording artists, etc., followed by 8 minutes of advertisements, mostly for medications I don’t need for some reason

- Weak interviews and reporting that ignores very obvious lies from the people being reported on with absolutely no mention of that fact

- Both-siding a story where one side has clear facts and the other side is quite possibly literally crazy, or at the very least being obviously heavily manipulated by special interests and that’s not mentioned at all

- Reporting on what someone tweeted, especially with no indication that what was tweeted is known to be bogus or unconfirmed

I do happily give to PBS and NPR because they have reasonable coverage of most news, but over the last 5 years, even they have been sucked into the sensationalism and reporting on tweets that regular news outlets have fallen victim to. They’re still miles better, but it’s a low bar to begin with.

MBCook4• 4 years ago

This is a huge part of why I stopped watching “the news”.

“Representative X said A. When asked about it, representative Y said they were wrong so B. Now sports.”

Huh? Who was right? Was it a matter of fact you can judge? If so why don’t you? Even on opinions there is usually good contextual facts you can add.

But when you just repeat crazy or dangerous or factually incorrect you normalize it. And by never calling anyone out on things you signal it’s all equally correct.

“The president said F. We said no, G. He said but F, H, and I are all true, I said them. Sunny tomorrow…”

Soundbites without analysts are horrible. Repeatedly letting people get away with lying about objective facts and continuing to give them airtime to say it is useless.

Reporting “science” that comes from press releases on non-reviewed pre-release papers in journals no one has heard of that contradicts what you said was real last week destroys trust in science.

And telling me feel good stories about kids who started lemonade stands to pay for their own chemo completely misses the point.

And I don’t care about Kanye. It doesn’t matter other than the fact that at this point people appear to be taking advantage of his mental illness. But no one is covering that that I’ve seen.

HWR_143• 4 years ago

but the discrepancies in traffic were impossible to ignore

Why? I have no doubt it was more profitable to cover that one candidate, but the point of a non-profit news org is that you shouldn't have to follow mass market dictates like that.

when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that"

I feel like that's your own fault. You're a news organization, you could have gotten the word out. IIRC in 2016 there were lots of articles about the meta of covering X, and by 2020 X explicitly not being covered the same way was an official stance of news organizations.

ck2• 4 years ago

Journalists don't even write their own article titles, which then become click-bait by "editors".

That basically sums up the state of "reporting".

Payout is view-driven which means anything goes to survive.

Media today is the equivalent of going to work sick "whatever it takes to not become homeless, frack everyone else".

InTheArena• 4 years ago

I've never thought it was about money. But I am sure that modern media is about power and the ability to influence people to one's point of view. This is why you see Bezos, Musk, Soros, Iger and Murdoch investing. This is why you see people willing to go into the media despite the ability to be significantly better compensated in other fields.

The demand that the media be generally truthful has disappeared since the abolition of the fairness doctrine. This is a reflection of the growing cultural battle not between left and right but rather between authoritarianism and Liberalism (big L liberalism). If you control what speech is amplified, you don't need to control what speech is uttered in the first place. China, in particular, has learned this lesson well.

Meanwhile, the lessons that western culture has learned from WWI and WWII about the dangers of no separation of government and media is resulting in Millennials and gen-z being willing further to expand the role of the government in media.

foverzar3• 4 years ago

the fairness doctrine

Wow, that is so cool. TIL.

I only wish my country would copy things like this, instead of things like "Foreign Agents Registration Act" :\

squokko3• 4 years ago

They're for-profit organizations, for mission to come before money would be highly aberrant.

Aperocky• 4 years ago

for profit organization's mission is primarily make money.

WalterBright5• 4 years ago

Fortunately, they can only make money by pleasing their customers.

incompatible• 4 years ago

We live in a system which is basically designed to encourage chasing profit over all other considerations, with a complex web of regulations which supposedly attempt to restrain some of the worst consequences, or at least the consequences that the voting public may make a fuss over.

People are fickle though, voting for politicians who promote small government, low taxes, and economic inequality, then complaining about things like price-gouging during disasters (which is basically economics 101 in a free market, supply and demand curves), or monopolists setting their prices to maximize their profits (also found in economics 101), or wanting safe food and buildings or better newspapers.

grecy• 4 years ago

Which is also true for heathcare, education, prisons and many, many more aspects of US society.

Making money IS the mission.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

I’ll happily call bullshit. It’s not money - money in news organizations is drying up and everyone knows it. It’s the CYA mentality that comes before the product these days. With so little money to go around, no one wants to be the one to have screwed up in their organization for management to blame their money woes on.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

It’s funny. I actually worry about the opposite.

adolph• 4 years ago

It’s weird that Americans don’t realize that money is the mission. Why do they not think holistically about these things?

shortformblog2• 4 years ago

When I got into journalism a little less than two decades ago it was common to see “firewalls” between different departments at major publications like newspapers and magazines, which protected the coverage.

That is, the advertiser had no influence on the editorial coverage, and opinion doesn’t bleed into the content.

I think in the digital age, the complicating factor is that the decision-makers have winnowed down this work so much that the firewalls just don’t hold up as well as they used to. Owners with an agenda may not care about church-state arguments. In the case of small publications, the writer or the editor is also the ad-seller. And in publications that lean more ideological, opinion-oriented content can prove deeply influential on the editorial coverage. (See what’s happened to cable TV over the last quarter-century.)

All of which is to say that the reason this point of view is prevalent is because we haven’t done enough to invest in these institutions to ensure that firewall exists in the first place. To do it right, you need:

- An owner that actually cares about having a firewall

- Strong ethical rules for the journalists

- Advertising standards that help ad-buyers understand where the wall is

For newspapers, a key element of show a limit of ad influence is the front page. If there’s a deeply integrated ad of some kind, that reflects a negative influence on the coverage. But in the online world, we have native ads and tracking, and both of these can be deeply integrated into the experience.

I think what we’re seeing is that there aren’t strong enough firewalls—and if I were to blame anyone, I would blame the ad department. They allowed their standards to lower to the point where publications simply gave advertisers too much. We need to get back to more magazine-style advertising in publications where a single sponsor buys a premium spot and it pays for a good chunk of the coverage.

mjevans2• 4 years ago

How about, ban ads on news networks. At least anywhere near the news. The money's the root of the evil here.

jeofken2• 4 years ago

If you pay 0 you get 0. If it’s free, you are the product.

shortformblog2• 4 years ago

I would argue that actually has its limits. Fox News can barely keep any ads from major companies on air these days, but it's insulated because of carriage fees.

The problem is that digital is cutting the revenue up into too many pieces and customers have been resistant to paying in many cases. The solution is not to discourage financial support for products, as businesses need to business, but to separate these influences internally. Journalists reporting about global conflicts or crime or political corruption shouldn't have to think about how the lights are kept on to do their jobs.

MBCook4• 4 years ago

This wasn’t supposed to be a problem because to get airwaves from the FCC broadcasters had to agree to broadcast a certain amount of public interest programming, which they do with news.

The problem is basically everyone seems to be trying to see how far they can push the line on “good enough” without ending up getting fined.

And the FCC knows how dangerous it is to try to rein that in.

And media consolidation means you can produce crappy news and not fail because you only compete with yourself or one other corporation that also happens to try to send as little possible on news.

All incentives to do a good job (as a corporation) are gone. And as long as the slide wasn’t too fast they wouldn’t get called on it.

So here we are.

Edit: and oh yeah, not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down. I’m sure the public interest rule was designed to protect your ratings above all else.

gruez5• 4 years ago

Edit: and oh yeah, not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down. I’m sure the public interest rule was designed to protect your ratings above all else.

"TV networks not wanting to air a prime time presidential address because of ratings" is one way of framing it. The other is "TV networks giving what their viewers want and not shoving a presidential address down their throats". In the era of cable TV and c-span.org, people who want politics can get it. The person tuning in at prime time to watch NCIS or whatever doesn't care for the president's speech, and I'm not sure what good can come from trying to force people to watch it.

paulryanrogers2• 4 years ago

It's in the public interest to hear from the president during significant events. With on demand streaming and syndication folks with get their NCIS fix one way or another.

nostromo• 4 years ago

not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down

The networks didn’t air it because it was deemed to be an election year political speech.

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

What address and what network(s) are you referring to?

gruez5• 4 years ago

he was probably referring to this article that made the rounds a few weeks ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/09/02/biden-speech...

johnp314• 4 years ago

What is the 'mission' of a news organization? There are facts, e.g. a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was discovered with lots of unfavorable emails, an unruly group of people broke into the US Capitol on Jan 6 and wreaked all sorts of havoc, George Floyd died while in police custody, Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, etc, etc. But quickly after reporting these 'facts' nuance enters the discussion, why, what does it mean, what is the impact, who cause it, etc, etc. Why should we expect reporters to not view and report the nuance through their own personal filters? A reporter also lives in the country and/or community in which he/she is reporting and has their own biases and beliefs and, yes, political leanings. Why should they then report a nuance that might reflect poorly on the things they personally believe to be correct or their personal world view?

It's silly to compare money to mission of a news organization (or any other entity for that matter). It's like asking what influences a human being more, food to air? You need both. For a news organization to have impact it needs money. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't even NPR solicit money on a regular basis - don't they have to cater to the supplier of that money to some extent to continue their service? I hear their fund raising and they often read comments from contributors which all more or less say "you give me what I want". So their money comes from those with whom their style and nuance of reporting resonates and it's reasonable to assume that NPR reporting then continues in that direction.

dinvlad• 4 years ago

Most of what we call “news” these days are not really news, but reporting on an endless stream of negative events, because negativity and sensationalism attracts more viewership (and thus, money).

Real news should be mostly local, about all of the good and bad things around us that actually matter in our lives. Otherwise, there’s really no sense in following the “news”, it’s just a meaningless waste of our lives.

FrontierPsych• 4 years ago

Most Americans think that? Try most Americans know that.

Everything is biased, too.

Like people on the right think Fox is unbiased and fair, and on the left, they think NPR is unbiased and fair.

Not only does money come before mission, so does policital agenda. Both sides.

jesuscript2• 4 years ago

It’s difficult to accept the amorality of something you are interacting with, particularly if you are reacting to it. It forces accountability onto oneself which one often tries to avoid.

Think of it like a drug. It’s totally amoral, but it will take you to the end if you let it. Blaming the drug shifts accountability. Once you realize the drug is amoral and it is you who must stop, that’s when you take accountability.

The institution of the Media is amoral. If we sit here and say they do things for money is the same as saying such and such drug is addictive, or even more ridiculous, such and such drug has nicotine in it. Okay? It’s amoral.

Facing something amoral within yourself or outside of yourself is often unbelievable. You will always try to describe it or comprehend it, but the answer is simple and frightening.

The media actually hasn’t shifted from its virtues. We want them to be divorced from what they report and who they report it to. The amoral quality is of the essence to do it right. They should not care about right or wrong, just do, report. That same underlying trait is manifesting in another way, is all.

WalterBright5• 4 years ago

Most news organizations say their mission is to inform people, but their actual mission is to tell people what to think, regardless of what the facts are. Their political agenda shines through their "reporting" on just about everything but the weather report.

Strike that, even the weather report has become politicized.

It makes me wonder, has it always been this way, or do I just notice it more as I grow older?

As for government funding of news media, we all know where that leads - all you'll read in it is the government's political agenda. Do you really want to get your news from the White House press secretary?

foverzar3• 4 years ago

"Mission", huh?

Do people in America (or anywhere else) actually believe that news organizations actually follow some kind of "mission"? Why? How does being a news organization suddenly puts you apart from any other organization/corporation with all the corruption factors?

I don't really get this mythos of journalists being white knights in shining armor or wise sages with a holy "mission".

From where I stand, it seems like an over-glorification of people who are essentially just experts on writing texts, and not much else. And just as all the other people and organizations, they will have their own agenda, their own biases and their own ways of corruption.

Personally, I don't really see much point of modern journalism, other than maybe political signaling. Narrative writing style became a weird norm and it just feels like you are being treated like cattle. I want facts, references, comparisons, critical analysis. Instead I get a story-time and have to do all the analysis myself - most of the times the story ends up being a misrepresentative or omitting crucial facts. And you just sit there wondering, whether it was a deliberate "control the narrative" kind of manipulation, or maybe it's just the author being an idiot, or maybe today it's this post-truth thing of not addressing the parts of truth that may be beneficial to adversaries.

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

Credulity, noun:

a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true.

"moneylenders prey upon their credulity and inexperience"

bobiny• 4 years ago

Serious question: what is the benefit for a journalist to work for a news org vs working solo?

conviencefee999• 4 years ago

Stable pay. No one pays journalists or writers besides a select few.

hairofadog2• 4 years ago

Same as any other line of work: they only have to focus on writing, not on all the other aspects of running a sole proprietorship (health insurance, taxes, etc.)

There’s also a built-in, base audience.

In some cases, there’s prestige that comes with working for certain publications.

ElfinTrousers• 4 years ago

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Most Americans think money comes before mission at U.S. news organizations

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