zlacker

>>minima+(OP)
All I wanted to do was read the memo and I couldn't find the link. I'm not sure if I missed it or what but this is a common problem I run into on "news" sites. They quote (often out of context) parts of something but give no links to the actual source.

>>chowar+M6
That's very much by design, in order to paint a certain picture, generate outrage, and ultimately clicks. Recall when the James Damore story was breaking? Many outlets like Motherboard (owned by Vice, authors of this story) circulated quotes and even modified documents that didn't show the full list of research references quoted by Damore, in an attempt to paint a certain picture.

Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.

>>throwa+k7
> Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.

Creating fact focused journalism is a laudible goal but I'd be curious of what specific time in history you think that this was generally the case?

>>Dubiou+I8
Not OP, but it was my impression that quality journalism was generally the case in the 1980s (in the US at least). What I was reading then certainly seemed to be. Separation of church and state was taken very seriously.

These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.

>>downer+Gb
There never was such a thing as neutral, factual reporting.

Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications.

The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism.

The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand.

Foreign Policy is another good example coming to mind.

News is produced by humans and humans have biases and always will have.

What's new is massive lying on an industrial scale and the fact that facts seem very relative nowadays, depending on the news medium.

>>Captai+b91
See, I agree with everything up to that last sentence. Because from what I can tell most people who say that just have a different idea of which media outlets that are the problem.

I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-doe...

>>Dubiou+EQ1
> They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)

The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.