Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America
inquirer.com
Will Bunch expresses what I've been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don't support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
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Reporting on tweets IS factual reporting.
It's just out of context. It needs to be properly analyzed and editorialized (to show how utterly inconsequential it is, or stop the story from running entirely because of its lack of newsworthiness -- both of which are judgement calls beyond that mere facts).
You're conflating two totally different things. Inconsequential, low-value reporting is a natural consequence of the way society has devalued journalism over our lifetime. Both literally and figuratively. News outlets simply cannot afford the kind of beat and investigative journalism they used to be able to do, but they still have to put out articles to keep eyeballs on them or else they will only lose more funding. It has nothing more to do with media bias than any other kind of reporting (that is to say, all reporting contains biases).
One way it devalues it is by simply drying up funding, making intensive investigative journalism basically impossible for any professional.
Another way is by spreading this vast narrative of the biased media that cannot be trusted on anything (which feeds into the funding drought).
The cure is journalistic transparency and individual media literacy, not for journalists to pretend they're beep boop robots that have no normal human opinions on anything.
I guess you just accept that no journalist can be bothered to ‘investigate’ who blew up those pipelines because ‘funding has dried up’ making it ‘impossible’ for them to ask questions?
This seems like something any real journalist would love to sink their teeth into, and discover the truth of. Why haven’t any of them? Because they don’t have funding?
Bleh, I don’t buy it. Not one bit. That’s an excuse.
And tweets aren’t facts, they are statements. If a journalist wants to ‘report’ on a statement made on Twitter they still need to at least go an interview the person who made the tweet, then interview people around that person, and interview people who refute whatever statement is made in the tweet.
Like, you know …. Follow up.
But what it sounds like you’re saying is ‘no one has enough funding to do anything more than sit at home and remotely scroll Twitter looking for stuff to write their opinions about’.
I’m sorry, but I demand much more than that from the media.
You can't draw blood from a stone, dude. Why aren't YOU out there investigating it? I think you need to get on a plane right now. Take a few months off work and get on it using your own savings to do it. I'm now demanding that much more from you.
I’m not a journalist
And how does one end up part of your slave caste of journalists, where you're allowed to demand they sacrifice themselves and work without pay? Just curious since like you, I don't want to accidentally end up one.
Or will you go ahead and hire one yourself to do that investigation? Just a few tens of thousands of dollars will probably support a few months of the work you demand.
What are you talking about?
Don't be disingenuous. You're out here DEMANDING that journalists should still be out there on investigation beats even if there's no way to earn a living doing it, but aren't willing to do anything yourself other than complain about how lazy and biased they are.
Are you suggesting that no one would read an actual, real, investigative journalism piece?
That’s what it sounds like you’re saying
Prepared by whom?
If no one can get paid a living wage to do it, it won't get done. You're the one saying that a lack of funding for journalists is no excuse and that you DEMAND they go out there and do the work even if there's no funding.
If you're so sure there is a good business model in what you want, go fucking do it.
Any story like ‘who blew up the pipelines’ would be the biggest story in the country.
Anyone who writes that story will get fucking paid
That’s how this stuff works.
It would... if you could get that result. But three different national governments devoted vast resources to it and couldn't find anything conclusive, though we are fairly sure they were deliberate detonations using shaped charges and Russian vessels including a salvage shipped equipped with a submersible well capable of planting such charges were detected unexpectedly in the area beforehand. Russian involvement is still the most credible theory with Ukrainian sappers trailing somewhere in the far distance behind it.
Dozens of organizations, including media ones, HAVE tried to "solve" this one and been unable to do so. Hundreds of people have worked on it. Published about it.
Given that you believe no investigation has happened, it's safe to assume you haven't contributed to any of that effort, including through pageviews. Which pretty much proves your thesis wrong.
So again, the amount of REAL MONEY AND EFFORT it would take to get a definitive answer to this question is more than even the Dutch, Swedish, and German governments have been able to manage. But you are still not satisfied that journalists aren't currently 100% devoting their limited time and resources to it.
I have stopped searching for answers, the best that most of the non-conspiratorial articles can give us is ‘trust us, bro’
I’m a little bit past that level of trust for the media at this point. I’m going to need more than ‘trust us, bro’
I have actual expectations of the media that they just aren’t able to live up to.
No, they definitely cannot live up to your standards because your standards are not possible to live up to. Which brings us all the way back to the start of the conversation -- bias-free journalism does not and cannot exist. Because the journalists are real people with physical bodies and actual needs and desires. You can be transparent about bias and agendas and allow readers to form conclusions based on the persuasiveness of your work. But for a reader who insists on an unpassable purity test, there's no hope.
Unfortunately, a lot of people (like you) have been raised with such profoundly bad media literacy that you believe there's such a thing as perfect objective truth and so when you see things that fail to reach that standard, no matter how thorough, researched, and convincing it is, it can be dismissed with a handwave.
But remember, when you say there's been no investigation into those nordstream bombs, you are lying. It's a lie. There's been tons. And not enough information was found to form a definite conclusion. It's an unsatisfying result, but not proof of journalistic laziness.