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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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.
That’s such weak bullshit.
It’s not that hard to report the facts. Do you think science can? Math? Why can journalists not do it?
The mere selection of which stories to pursue or not pursue leads to bias. The personal conditions that affect whether a story even teases in front of a journalist in the first place to inspire investigation is part of their sphere of personal bias. There is not a single point in the investigative process that does not involve implicit bias. This isn't contentious or up for debate even if you personally don't like it. It's correctly part of the formal training of journalists to be able to identify and mitigate their own bias and how that bias affects their reporting.
Everyone has an agenda. Every. single. person. Journalists are people, therefore they have agendas. Anyone who looks you in the eye and tells you they have no beliefs, convictions, or feelings is lying to you. So if a journalist looks you in the eyes and says their work is entirely and flawlessly without any sniff of bias, they are the one you should trust the least.
Yes, that includes the sciences. Very much. Biased and bad science happen routinely. There's a process in place for being transparent in research, explicitly stating your biases, and testing/reviewing works. Sources of bias is a section in the template of pretty much EVERY published research paper. Because that's what you have to do. Just as with journalism. Because to report on the facts requires you identify and be transparent about potential sources of bias because there are ALWAYS potential sources of bias.
Leave this conversation and work on your media literacy. Go type the phrase "media bias is unavoidable" into Google and do some goddamn reading. People much smarter than you and I have written shelves full of books on the subject.