Jay Rosen

This is true, but I believe current American journalism has additional problems beyond the generic ones. For those interested, I strongly recommend Jay Rosen's blog: http://pressthink.org/ For example, his latest piece discusses areas where political coverage should not be neutral: http://pressthink.org/2016/10/campaign-press-not-neutral-toward/ Saying, e.g., that they should be for deliberation and voter participation, while being against opacity and demagoguery. And I strongly recommend his critiques of the View from Nowhere. E.g.: http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answ…

Here's a thorough critique from 2014, well before the current election or even the 2016 election, about an article in the NYT. It doesn't mention T---p. It's illustrative of the problem: https://pressthink.org/2014/08/when-quoting-both-sides-and-leaving-it-… This style of journalism continued to prevail through all kinds of pronunciations from certain people that were all-out lies, prevarications, misinformation and various and sundry other assaults on the truth. The professor who wrote the article, Jay Rosen, is quite insightful with regards to the press and some of their current failings.

There's plenty to criticize about both the modern media landscape and modern "wokeness", but this piece seems more cultural grievance than productive critique. Personally, when it comes to political journalism, one of my favorite pieces is Jay Rosen's "Why Political Coverage is Broken"[1]. I think it covers specific problems with media coverage in more detail, and provides a better path to restoring trust in news than "be more objective". [1] https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/

"Intentional moderate" = High Broderism, or at least the popular understanding of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Broder http://pressthink.org/2010/06/clowns-to-the-left-of-me-jokers-to-the-r… The above has this quote, which sums it up nicely: > Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

Journalistic neutrality, or "the middle" as you refer to it, as it is practiced in American media has some serious flaws. Sadly, it still has cachet with a sizable portion of what has been sneeringly referred to as the "mainstream media" for the last few decades. I highly recommend reading Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU, talk about the "View from Nowhere." There was one link posted above, and I'll post another. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answ…

I think your first impulse was the right one ... ;-) In general, HN threads fail on pure politics topics. (Sorry, friends, for the scold, but it's true.) We don't have enough people who have expertise on politics and media. Add this to a fact-free piece like OP, and you get blech. The current administration and its cheerleaders have figured out how to turn trolling into a weapon, leaving the NYT befuddled as its model of well-intentioned fact-based debate (on the oped page), and "above-it-all" stenographic reporting (on the news pages), has broken down publicly. For earlier failures, see the boxes marked "Hillary's e-mails", and "Iraq, Invasion of" -- but it has gotten worse recently. The NYT still does great info-graphics, non-politics reporting, and deep investigative scoops. Under Baquet (who I don't like as editor - I've been a regular reader since the mid-90s), it did successfully transition to a pay model for subscriptions -- and it has a lot of subscribers. This is more than most papers can say! But, as noted, there are real problems with NYT reporting. They have not adapted in some key areas. This will require fundamental change that Baquet seems unable to do. Jay Rosen of NYU is my go-to source for analysis here (blog and twitter). See in particular: https://pressthink.org/2020/06/battleship-newspaper/

Pay more taxes and strengthen public schools. Push public school education as John Dewey intended, for the betterment of civic society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_teacher_educ… """ According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes in children for use in their contemporary life because it is “impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now” (Dewey, MPC, 2010, p. 25). However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs that education serves an immediate purpose (Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010), he is not ignorant of the impact imparting these qualities of intelligence, skill and character on young children in their present life will have on the future society. While addressing the state of educative and economic affairs during a 1935 radio broadcast, Dewey linked the ensuing economic depression to a “lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill and character” (Dewey, TAP, 2010, p. 242) of the nation’s workforce. As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present society and teachers have a responsibility to create them in their students, who, we can assume, will grow into the adults who will ultimately go on to participate in whatever industrial or economical civilization awaits them. According to Dewey, the profession of the classroom teacher is to produce the intelligence, skill and character within each student so that the democratic…

How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN? Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?) Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.) I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring. --- Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such. Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either. At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is. The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true.…

The Intercept was bankrolled by a billionaire who committed $250 million to his journalism efforts while it got off the ground... https://pressthink.org/2013/10/why-pierre-omidyar-decided-to-join-forc…

You step away from neutral as soon as you introduce "version of quality". There will always be an introduction of bias and judgement calls that need to be made to get useful results, especially because bad actors on the web are part of the geography that aren't going away. Just like the press trying to force a neutral "view from nowhere" leads to confused and problematic journalism that can be exploited by bad actors. https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-ans…

http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answ… There are other, better, rebuttals but this is from someone who can't really be impeached on ideological grounds. Also, the idea that Mother Jones is "left-wing-nut territory" is ....bad. Unless your yardstick is "distance from more or less explicit white nationalism of breitbart" then Mother Jones is solidly center-left. Finally the graph you posted is pretty bad. The Economist is an ideological chop shop with no bylines that started life as a forum for propoganda agitating against the Corn Laws. The idea that their minimally distant from an axis of "minimal bias" is not exactly born out by the facts.

Jay Rosen's idea of "explainer" [1], implemented for instance by Vox's cardstacks, might help here. [1] http://pressthink.org/2014/01/keep-me-informed-parsing-the-logic-of-ez…

The "View from Nowhere." http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answ…

Interestingly while Bloomberg suspended this reporter; prepares to lay off 50 people [1]; and possibly shutter its investigations division [2], [3], there is "good" news too: 'NewCo', the Pierre Omidyar-Glenn Greenwald news venture just brought on board NYU's Jay Rosen. >> Out of the press box and onto the field - http://pressthink.org/2013/11/newco/ As Bill Bishop (one of the best 'China experts' on Twitter) recently said: "Perhaps the new omidyar news venture can hire some of the excellent Bloomberg journalists in the projects and investigations team" https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401645221022142464 ============== [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB100014240527023035312045792… [2] https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401618179878686721 [3] https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401618756192858112

A link on that story (in "Other Matters) leads to a video where "James Risen, national security reporter for the New York Times" seems to be doing a pretty good job too. http://pressthink.org/2013/08/the-toobin-principle/

Jay Rosen on Greenwald's style of reporting: >The professional stance that proscribes all political commitments and discourages journalists from having a clear view or taking a firm position on matters in dispute (you can call it objectivity, if you like, or viewlessness, which I like better) is one way of doing good work. A very different professional stance, where the conclusions that you come to by staring at the facts and thinking through the issues serve to identify your journalism… this is another way of doing good work. >They are both valid. They are both standard. (And “traditional.”) They are both major league. Greenwald operates in the second fashion, but the language we have for this style — calling him a blogger or an advocate, hoping that these shorthands convey what’s different about him — is not very illuminating. “Blurring the line between opinion pieces and straight reporting…” is not very illuminating. "Politics: none", the first kind of journalism, is a form of persuasion that tries to signal credibility by refraining from taking a view so far as is possible. "Politics: some" is a form of persuasion where you are transparent about your commitments and your judgments of the facts. These both have their advantages, neither is more inherently "journalistic" than the other. http://pressthink.org/2013/06/politics-some-politics-none-two-ways-to-…