I am a journalist and you both are utterly misinterpreting what journalists do and why, which is unsurprising considering you know NOTHING about the actual job of being a journalist.
The fact that you specifically want to access and read the original source — which, as you just demonstrated, is public and somewhat easy to get - is certainly commendable. Yet, the vast majority of people need the news, which is indeed a summarization of very complex documents.
Like in any other profession, journalists are better or worse at doing exactly that. You can question that this article does a good or bad job at it, but always assuming malfeasance is a dangerous populist view that doesn’t help anyone, it only reinforces your own flavor of high-level dunning-krueger effect.
The reason why a journalist can be bad at doing this summarization in pieces like this is because they are human. Objectivity in reporting has been always a tremendous misconception of pure-breed American journalism. Journalists have preferences, biases, networks and more, like everyone else. They are not judges, and don’t have the law to stand by, but rather an ethical unwritten (or written, in case of a large publication that employs them) code of conduct.
Surprise: they often disregard it.
That said, the business of news is indeed a business (and that’s a major issue, in my opinion) with all that comes with it.
Nonetheless, journalists are not “out to get you and manipulate your mind”. That is a dangerous interpretation by people who know nothing about journalism and feel reinforced by the musings of rich actually manipulative idiot savants like Elon Musk.
I think addressing people's expression of skepticism of the average motives of journalists by simply making the unqualified claim that the people expressing skepticism "know nothing" made the opposite point than you intended.
This is an article posted to Hacker News where a defendant was incarcerated by a judge for media manipulation, and journalists who were involved made statements to the judge in support of the defendant. Since the defendant was incarcerated, that makes the journalists involved closer to malfeasant than not, but the entirety of your claim is that there is never malfeasance involved in journalism and the skepticism of the people you're reprimanding is simply "populism." Frankly, that comes off as a bit malfeasant, in the reflexively defensive sense.
Would you like to claim I "know nothing" about the profession of journalism as well? How would you know that I know nothing about the profession of journalism?
> I think addressing people's expression of skepticism of the average motives of journalists by simply making the unqualified claim that the people expressing skepticism "know nothing" made the opposite point than you intended.
I don't see that as the case at all.
> How would you know that I know nothing about the profession of journalism?
A person's words are excellent evidence of what they do and don't know.
The main issue I have woth journalism in the digital, and social media age, is the sometimes utter misrepresentation of primary source material. One recent example was the article about UPS driver salaries, which based the headline on the UPS CEOs statememts. The reasons why stuff like this comes of as manipulative or agenda-pushing is:
- it ignores that the salary agreememt was signed by UPS as well, hence it was acceptable from a business point of view
- people tend to only read the headlines, and this headline created the impression of over paid UPS drivers and played of peoples jealousy
- the journalist did not reference the publicly available salary agreement, nor did the salary maths themselve or compare the results to industry salaries
Throw in that journalists simply cannot have the necessary domain knowledge to properly understand all the subjects they cover, the pressure to generate content, clicks and hence revenue, well, that means publishing content, and headlines, that have the potential to generate outrage / engagement is a very common thing. And that is, at the very least, borderline manipulative, even without any biases or agendas said newspapers or journalists have to begin with.
And that is even ignoring all the outright lying journalists (there were two prominent examples in Germany recently, one made up whole stories and interviews while the other pretended to be jewish to write a jewish opinion collumn). Or the pitfall of constantly two-siding issues. Or the fact that lying with numbers is just extremely easy. Or the clearly manipulative approach of publications like the the New York Post, The Sun or Bild.
You are probably correct that few journalists seek to mislead, but you skim over the real problem by saying it's "certainly commendable" to want to read primary sources...and then just drop the subject. Why is it so damn hard to read the publicly available source material behind an article, if it's so commendable to do so?
You argued for five paragraphs that it's not nefarious, but never gave your own answer; yes, some journalists are bad at summarising, but that doesn't tell us why none of them provide sources, or are expected to.
I'd guess the answer is some combination of deadlines and editors and market demand and it just not being critical to summarising the news, but it's a bit milquetoast to complain about other explanations without giving one yourself.
I think a much more parsimonious explanation is that news websites make money from their audience. It doesn't help to send your audience to other sources - you'll lose money.
Your explanation doesn't really make a lot of sense. If some people just need things summarized for them by a journalist - those people could read the article. People who want to read the source themselves could follow the link. Linking to original sources from an article neatly solves the problems for both types of audience.
Of course, it brings back the problem I mentioned first - that linking to original sources would be sending some portion of your audience and paycheck away.
I also think your explanation would be likelier to ring true if your colleagues weren't tirelessly running down the reputation of your profession. My personal experience reading the news is not at all that journalists are usually trying to fairly or accurately summarize information - very much the contrary.
I suspect the comment was trying to say that journalism is opinions about facts. And the facts are less important than the opinions. And this is fine.
Good journalism is traditionally about holding power to account. Not seeing so much of that at the moment, except out in the mostly-unread fringes.
As for SBF - someone else was downvoted for suggesting this is really about the parents.
In my uninformed opinion, from the outside this looks like it may well about a very wealthy very narcissistic family which has persuaded itself it's above the law.
SBF appears to have absolutely no concept of moral behaviour or legal consequences - remarkable in itself. But there are wider questions about how his parents may have contributed to his beliefs and actions.
However this plays out legally, there's going to be a lot of interest in the psychology.
> I think a much more parsimonious explanation is that news websites make money from their audience. It doesn't help to send your audience to other sources - you'll lose money.
This cannot be the explanation, because journalists working for publicly funded organizations that don't get their money from eyeballs on ads suck at linking to their sources too. It's not a regrettable consequence of news industry business models, it's a culture problem in journalism.
I unfortunately have to agree with your last paragraph. Plenty of my colleagues are absolutely doing an abysmal job, and many others follow a deeply self-righteous agenda.
They are the vocal minority, and not the majority, and that’s really hard to bring across.
My original annoyance with the tone of the comments I replied to is the deeply populistic undertone and the idea that a giant MainStreamMedia connection is trying to influence minds and steer public discourse.
Could be that’s it also a personal trigger.
I am NOT happy with where the journalistic profession is at right now, but I also don’t think we should just throw away the baby with the bathwater.
When it comes to sources, I believe it’s just an editorial choice by the publishing companies that’s more of a custom coming from the days of paper journalism than anything else. Journalists on average have absolutely no control over the links they can put in a piece.
So the issue was just addresses to the wrong people.
The reason why that is, is that the OP clearly doesn’t know much of how the journalistic profession works from the inside as it is today. That was my claim.
I am sick and tired of people that express their “here’s how you should do journalism” as if they had any idea how a newsroom actually works. They do not know the profession, they do not understand the complexities behind the publication of an article, and yet they feel that based on that “frontend” they should express their unifying theory of journalism.
Yes, providing sources should be part of the standard plain and simple. The complaints r 100% valid. Ifs the year 2023 and why can't we just have the source? It's not the readers'fault that they want them
> you both are utterly misinterpreting what journalists do
yet, journalists almost never link their source material.
> * The reason why a journalist can be bad at doing this summarization in pieces like this is because they are human.*
The source is most likely to be digitized and in front of you. How on earth does one manage to not link it, yet has the time to write multiple paragraphs based on it?
>>*vast majority of people need the news, which is indeed a summarization of very complex documents.*
THe problem is that the summations are typically done with the journalists assuming that people are far dumber than they actually are - and thus, youre not summarizing "complex issues in a meaningfully understandable way" as much as creating a watered down, lacking of key details, click-bait form of communicating the topic at hand, and insidiously NOT doing journalism - as you fail to ask actual critical hard questions, and NEVER hold any person in authority accountable for their lies, or worse promises to do something they fail to do.
You're a plastic facade of journalism for the majority of topics - and youre beholden to billionaire media bosses, such as murdoch and big corporate interests (when NEWS is "brought to you by pfizer" (CNN) you're instantly untrustable...
Then, there are crazy examples of how you all just simply read a fn script "its extremely dangerous for our democracy"
Lots of provocative blather that ignores something obvious - you can write your distilled opinion and add a source.
For someone who, by reflection of your argument, knows so much about journalism, it is laughable that citing sources is somehow not a core tenet of your work.
That jab is at editors, not journalists. Journalists (as individuals) can make mistakes, but if you see three or four different papers or media channels propagating the same type of "news", you can bet the error is intentional.
What goalposts? Have you seen the media treatment given to SBF? Saying "News channels are more interested in shaping public opinion than objective reporting and transparency about their sources" shouldn't even be a controversial statement.
Yet, this is not an "either/or" situation. You can generalize and cite a source. However, for some reason you choose to ignore this simple fact. Instead, you're essentially saying "kids these days don't understand what journalism is; summarizing sells, but we do it poorly because we're human, so get over it". Absolutely useless.
Actually, people here on hn can summarize better 4 times out of 5, and that's the reason I've mostly stopped following links and read comments instead - there are too many lies in journalism, even if unintentional (and I believe it mostly isn’t).
Unfortunately, the HN crowd has an incredibly naive view of what journalism is. I think it's mainly a product of ignorance, typically conflating op-eds with the journalism, and false-equivalencies that lump the Washington Post into the same bucket as Fox News, and People's Daily.
I'm always surprised the degree to which this kind of anti-journalism rhetoric ignores the role of journalism holding powerful governments and corporations accountable.
Whatever good journalists do in holding governments and corporations accountable does not absolve them of their responsibility to link to their sources.
The fact that you specifically want to access and read the original source — which, as you just demonstrated, is public and somewhat easy to get - is certainly commendable. Yet, the vast majority of people need the news, which is indeed a summarization of very complex documents.
Like in any other profession, journalists are better or worse at doing exactly that. You can question that this article does a good or bad job at it, but always assuming malfeasance is a dangerous populist view that doesn’t help anyone, it only reinforces your own flavor of high-level dunning-krueger effect.
The reason why a journalist can be bad at doing this summarization in pieces like this is because they are human. Objectivity in reporting has been always a tremendous misconception of pure-breed American journalism. Journalists have preferences, biases, networks and more, like everyone else. They are not judges, and don’t have the law to stand by, but rather an ethical unwritten (or written, in case of a large publication that employs them) code of conduct. Surprise: they often disregard it.
That said, the business of news is indeed a business (and that’s a major issue, in my opinion) with all that comes with it. Nonetheless, journalists are not “out to get you and manipulate your mind”. That is a dangerous interpretation by people who know nothing about journalism and feel reinforced by the musings of rich actually manipulative idiot savants like Elon Musk.