Here is the part I’m curious about - it’s Wednesday February 15th 1983 - does the NYTimes have any idea what articles were actually read in that day’s paper? I’m assuming no.
That they now know with an absolute certainty must have changed journalism.
I think this article correctly describes the causes of the *long-run* decline in trust in the media.
But I think it also conflates that long-run trend with the discourse about how the NYT, CNN etc. suddenly changed their reporting standards after 2016 and then doubled down on that in 2020.
When Bari Weiss talks about how the media is untrustworthy, it’s the latter rather than the former. And you even see some journalists making explicit calls for lower standards (e.g., the moral clarity debate).
So I don’t think it’s crazy to claim that *in the short run*, the media has become less trustworthy in some sense. (In fact, the last bit about 538 illustrates how this might happen.)
"After all, the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light — so why are so many stories false and misleading, and why do so many true, important facts go under covered?"
I'm hardly the first to make this point (and I can't find a link for it now), but while this is *what I grew up thinking* was the purpose of journalism, it's not what journalism historically has been. Pretty much all of journalism from the colonial era forward was about providing a mouthpiece for certain interests (primarily wealthy ones).
What changed is that at some point, newspapers became huge advertising revenue generators, so their purpose switched from promoting the interests of their owners to appealing to as broad a swath of society as possible, thus garnering greater appeal and more money. Throw in television to the mix in the 1950s/60s and you have basically three stations with all of the eyeballs focused on them. It didn't make sense for them to rock the boat, so again, they appealed to as much of the mainstream as possible for the same reasons.
The last 40 years have led to more options, thus greater incentives to differentiate themselves. Newspapers are no longer cash cows (leading to a lot of consolidation/failures as people got out of the game). So now you have people like Murdoch or Bezos who own large media operations and are perfectly happy to take a loss if necessary to promote their beliefs. Once you start seeing media through its historical lens, the current system makes a lot more sense.
I don’t think this reckons very well with the obvious fact that large, trusted outlets really did increase their suppression and slanting of generally true stories more aggressively starting 2020. Like, are we still pretending that John Fetterman just has hearing issues or are we ok to be honest now that we have 51 senate seats?
Making renditions arguments around “what is the media really” just intentionally obscures the fact that a lot of people would like there to be media outlets that aren’t overtly partisan. like, if we’re at a place where your point is that Rush & Tucker are the same as the NYT so who cares… that is bad! I want “the media” to be a class of publications that does NOT include Tucker and Rush and Maddow!
> But I also read Bloomberg News, which really gives you a sense of how different journalism can be when it’s bundled with economic data as an actual information service.
I also strongly endorse Bloomberg News and it’s my primary source of daily news. Yes, they are biased towards business and economics, but they still cover all major news events. If anything, I appreciate their concise coverage of non-finance stuff that results from their incentives in catering to a business audience. Particularly, Bloomberg’s “Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day”, is a great daily newsletter for staying abreast of national and global events.
Also, their bundled streaming service, Bloomberg TV, is a gem. They cover all the major events, with a heavy focus on finance/econ, while still being fairly entertaining. Each morning I have to make a hard decision between Slow Boring and Bloomberg Surveillance since they both start at 6 AM ET. You can find a lot of this content for free on their YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@markets
Holy shit yo. I have much more sympathy for the Bari Weiss take when, since 2015 at least, the most strident propagandists in the major outlets are the one's on these mis/disinformation/fact checking beats.
I read the Washington Post every morning and over time I find that the information I receive is accurate and truthful. However, while reading an article suggesting some below-the-radar movies to go watch there was a line about how the live-action Little Mermaid caused a racist backlash, with a link. Curious, I followed the link.
That story cited exactly one source as evidence of this backlash, a hashtag on Twitter. It then started discussing representation of nonwhite families in children's stories, with links. Following those links I encountered a study that says that, since the 1940's representation of white families in children's literature has fallen from 100% to 45%. That seems like a good thing, except the study cast it as a bad thing, conflating 'plurality' with 'majority' and asserting that 45% figure as evidence that children's literature was inappropriately dominated by stories about white families. The original article then went on to discuss a bunch of interesting research going back to the 40's on how representation of racial group in children's literature impacts people's perceptions of all sorts of things both as children and later in life.
My takeaway was that researchers started looking at this topic in the 40's and surfaced a pernicious problem that has subsequently led to a measurable improvement and has raised awareness. I learned a lot of interesting facts that were true and was happy to see that children's literature had become so much more diverse than when I was a kid. (My kids were born abroad, so I don't have experience with modern children's literature in the US, but I'm a parent so these things interest me.) But the whole narrative arc of the story was super pessimistic and, in my opinion, absurdly hyperbolic (and/or Twitter-centric) in elevating a hashtag to the level of Racist Backlash, while also not being untrue.
That is one of many examples of what I think sows mistrust with "the media", at least among people old enough to have grown up with three TV networks and a local newspaper; ironically, because it produced a single, coherent narrative that manufactured consent. It's nigh impossible these days to find news that isn't infused with a specific and often tribal worldview, which is probably a result of the competitive incentive structure and lack of gatekeeping Matt wrote about (which reduces to engagement metrics). It's something I have to get used to because it isn't going away, but I can very much see how it can feed into the "you can't trust the media"—or the "you can't trust *their* media"—narrative.
I would like to throw in a little about stuff before Matt's time (outing myself as old in the process)--as another person in the comments pointed out, the big change was from the time when news went from a Serious Public Interest thing to primarily entertainment, a development that was accelerated by technology (from radio and TV to internet). One reason JFK's affairs were not the subject of news stories was that serious journalists did not cover "gossip"--that was for movie-star rags and such.
If there was a pinpoint time when political coverage broke the taboo on gossip, it would be in 1987 when a reporter asked Senator Gary Hart (presidential candidate) if he was having an affair and Hart dared them to follow him if they thought there was a story, evidently assuming they'd be ashamed of themselves, which they were not, which led to the whole Donna Rice/"Monkey Business" story and torpedoed Hart's candidacy as well as his reputation. It must seem crazy to people today that anyone would think they could get away with behaving like that, but that was the "the way it was" in those days. I do have to wonder how much better we are for knowing this stuff, though--of course we want to know because it's entertaining, but does it improve the quality of people we elect?
I really enjoyed Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent when I read it in college. I also enjoyed learning how to make a gravity bong out of my sink and a half a milk carton that summer. Memories!
There's certainly something to be said about "zombie" publications that used to command respect but have been purchased for their intellectual property and now churn out dogshit work hidden behind a formerly trusted brand. Newsweek is the most egregious of these, but I think it also applies to most of America's alt-weeklies as well. Locally the Washington City Paper used to have excellent local politics coverage - which WaPo has never done well or cared about - in addition to investigatory longform and arts coverage. Now it's a two year pit stop for wealthy children playing journalist to pop by, complain about how unprogressive locals are, and then jump to bigger and better (paying) lefty journalism or advocacy jobs. A really pathetic end for a once great paper.
The most jarring change in media over the last few years has been NPR, which by all accounts has been fully captured by activist 20 somethings. Yesterday they ran an article that was straight up junk science called "What's your attachment type?" - with buzzfeed-esque personality quiz included! - that was indistinguishable from some woo girl shit I would expect to see from Gwyneth a Paltrow aligned blog trying to sell me mood crystals. Our local NPR reporter now just straight up rewteets lefty politicians opinions uncritically. Absolutely pathetic to see what NPR has become. The Trump years broke everyone's brains, and we're all worse off for it.
The thought of losing 538 makes me really sad. They're really the best in the game. And better than their most direct competition, too (RealClearPolitics)!
This is a fine assessment of structural changes and pressures in the media, but I think the individual angle plays a big role in declining trust. We see reporters more closely and clearly than we did in the past, and people don’t like what they see. I have reflexive (but rebuttable) contempt for reporters under 40. They are disproportionately rich kids with an insular worldview, transparent political bias, zero research skills, no bullshit detector, and primary interest in building their personal brands and status. Give me a cynical old timer from a state school any day, but they’ve all but disappeared.
I think the media in general in excellent and there are definitely axes on which it has gotten better.
But when I complain about the media, as one is wont to do, my complaints are not really answered by any of this. For instance, it was pretty clear pretty soon after COVID vaccines became available that they didn't provide sterilizing immunity and that the medium- to long-term positive effects nearly all accrued to the vaccinated individual. That is, 'avoiding the unvaccinated' was not a good COVID prevention strategy. And yes, there were NPR and New York Times articles that said this. But this was not the overwhelming impression that one got from reading the kind of media that the people around me (liberals in liberal places) read. Similarly, while the evidence for mask mandates was frankly not great, this was also not the impression one got.
And in large part as a result of this, institutions I belong to and people around me made really poor decisions and in some cases are still making really poor decisions. Like, "not seeing grandma"-type decisions*, or "vaccine mandates for five-year-old" decisions. It felt like the media was making people and institutions just way dumber in ways that affected their everyday lives.
That's the big example, but there are others I'd put in this same general bucket of "making people less-informed about what's going on directly around them to their detriment".
And for that matter, a conservatives-media analogue to this, sort of, is the number of people who really truly thought that their state/local election people were committing massive, widespread election fraud. That's probably not affecting your day to day choices, but it's still a "lying about what your neighbors are doing/making you less-informed about things in your backyard" situation.
Is there an earlier analogue to this? Potentially! I'm certainly open to it.
*not that there were not situations where you shouldn't see people, but that the vaccination status of other people was not substantially affecting your risk
I listened to Bad Takes before reading this and noticed (or thought I noticed) an interesting point in common: that it’s easier now than it used to be for people to simply take the path of least resistance: click on the story that confirms your opinion/hopes, watch another video rather than catching up with a friend or suffering a few minutes of boredom alone in your thoughts, eat another donut (which is much better than the donut you could have eaten 10 years ago). Matt has made this point in other posts as well, and especially seems focused on it when he talks about his son.
Life today, while amazing on many measurable dimensions, seems to be organized to make it harder and harder to make thoughtful decisions about what to consume and what to do with your time. We have access to so much “content” and so much stuff. In the Slow Boring world this is generally celebrated, which is not wrong. I appreciate that Matt doesn’t hold himself out as a guru, but given his background in philosophy I would enjoy some more explicit discussions of the tradeoffs.
In this brave new world of media, something that I wish would be a norm (yet I know is probably just a dream) is if every publication had a strong, prominent mission statement on what news they find is important, and what their values are that drive the decisions on why they find said news that they cover important.
I feel like a lot of distrust of "the media" comes from people disagreeing with the legacy mass media on these questions. For example, I think that certainly stoked a lot of right wing discontent that resulted in the rise of Fox News, and Fox News in turn stoked a left wing backlash accusing them of not being on the level with the whole "fair and balanced" slogan.
Knowing where publications stand, be it partisan, ideological, or not, I think would lower the temperature of some of this discontent.
Here is the part I’m curious about - it’s Wednesday February 15th 1983 - does the NYTimes have any idea what articles were actually read in that day’s paper? I’m assuming no.
That they now know with an absolute certainty must have changed journalism.
I think this article correctly describes the causes of the *long-run* decline in trust in the media.
But I think it also conflates that long-run trend with the discourse about how the NYT, CNN etc. suddenly changed their reporting standards after 2016 and then doubled down on that in 2020.
When Bari Weiss talks about how the media is untrustworthy, it’s the latter rather than the former. And you even see some journalists making explicit calls for lower standards (e.g., the moral clarity debate).
So I don’t think it’s crazy to claim that *in the short run*, the media has become less trustworthy in some sense. (In fact, the last bit about 538 illustrates how this might happen.)
"After all, the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light — so why are so many stories false and misleading, and why do so many true, important facts go under covered?"
I'm hardly the first to make this point (and I can't find a link for it now), but while this is *what I grew up thinking* was the purpose of journalism, it's not what journalism historically has been. Pretty much all of journalism from the colonial era forward was about providing a mouthpiece for certain interests (primarily wealthy ones).
What changed is that at some point, newspapers became huge advertising revenue generators, so their purpose switched from promoting the interests of their owners to appealing to as broad a swath of society as possible, thus garnering greater appeal and more money. Throw in television to the mix in the 1950s/60s and you have basically three stations with all of the eyeballs focused on them. It didn't make sense for them to rock the boat, so again, they appealed to as much of the mainstream as possible for the same reasons.
The last 40 years have led to more options, thus greater incentives to differentiate themselves. Newspapers are no longer cash cows (leading to a lot of consolidation/failures as people got out of the game). So now you have people like Murdoch or Bezos who own large media operations and are perfectly happy to take a loss if necessary to promote their beliefs. Once you start seeing media through its historical lens, the current system makes a lot more sense.
I don’t think this reckons very well with the obvious fact that large, trusted outlets really did increase their suppression and slanting of generally true stories more aggressively starting 2020. Like, are we still pretending that John Fetterman just has hearing issues or are we ok to be honest now that we have 51 senate seats?
Making renditions arguments around “what is the media really” just intentionally obscures the fact that a lot of people would like there to be media outlets that aren’t overtly partisan. like, if we’re at a place where your point is that Rush & Tucker are the same as the NYT so who cares… that is bad! I want “the media” to be a class of publications that does NOT include Tucker and Rush and Maddow!
> But I also read Bloomberg News, which really gives you a sense of how different journalism can be when it’s bundled with economic data as an actual information service.
I also strongly endorse Bloomberg News and it’s my primary source of daily news. Yes, they are biased towards business and economics, but they still cover all major news events. If anything, I appreciate their concise coverage of non-finance stuff that results from their incentives in catering to a business audience. Particularly, Bloomberg’s “Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day”, is a great daily newsletter for staying abreast of national and global events.
Also, their bundled streaming service, Bloomberg TV, is a gem. They cover all the major events, with a heavy focus on finance/econ, while still being fairly entertaining. Each morning I have to make a hard decision between Slow Boring and Bloomberg Surveillance since they both start at 6 AM ET. You can find a lot of this content for free on their YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@markets
This is maybe a minor tangent, but the rise of "misinformation" journalism is a nightmare of Orwellian propaganda.
For example: https://reason.com/2023/02/14/global-disinformation-index-state-department-list-risk-reason/
Holy shit yo. I have much more sympathy for the Bari Weiss take when, since 2015 at least, the most strident propagandists in the major outlets are the one's on these mis/disinformation/fact checking beats.
The variable that's changing over time is partisanship within media.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
I read the Washington Post every morning and over time I find that the information I receive is accurate and truthful. However, while reading an article suggesting some below-the-radar movies to go watch there was a line about how the live-action Little Mermaid caused a racist backlash, with a link. Curious, I followed the link.
That story cited exactly one source as evidence of this backlash, a hashtag on Twitter. It then started discussing representation of nonwhite families in children's stories, with links. Following those links I encountered a study that says that, since the 1940's representation of white families in children's literature has fallen from 100% to 45%. That seems like a good thing, except the study cast it as a bad thing, conflating 'plurality' with 'majority' and asserting that 45% figure as evidence that children's literature was inappropriately dominated by stories about white families. The original article then went on to discuss a bunch of interesting research going back to the 40's on how representation of racial group in children's literature impacts people's perceptions of all sorts of things both as children and later in life.
My takeaway was that researchers started looking at this topic in the 40's and surfaced a pernicious problem that has subsequently led to a measurable improvement and has raised awareness. I learned a lot of interesting facts that were true and was happy to see that children's literature had become so much more diverse than when I was a kid. (My kids were born abroad, so I don't have experience with modern children's literature in the US, but I'm a parent so these things interest me.) But the whole narrative arc of the story was super pessimistic and, in my opinion, absurdly hyperbolic (and/or Twitter-centric) in elevating a hashtag to the level of Racist Backlash, while also not being untrue.
That is one of many examples of what I think sows mistrust with "the media", at least among people old enough to have grown up with three TV networks and a local newspaper; ironically, because it produced a single, coherent narrative that manufactured consent. It's nigh impossible these days to find news that isn't infused with a specific and often tribal worldview, which is probably a result of the competitive incentive structure and lack of gatekeeping Matt wrote about (which reduces to engagement metrics). It's something I have to get used to because it isn't going away, but I can very much see how it can feed into the "you can't trust the media"—or the "you can't trust *their* media"—narrative.
I would like to throw in a little about stuff before Matt's time (outing myself as old in the process)--as another person in the comments pointed out, the big change was from the time when news went from a Serious Public Interest thing to primarily entertainment, a development that was accelerated by technology (from radio and TV to internet). One reason JFK's affairs were not the subject of news stories was that serious journalists did not cover "gossip"--that was for movie-star rags and such.
If there was a pinpoint time when political coverage broke the taboo on gossip, it would be in 1987 when a reporter asked Senator Gary Hart (presidential candidate) if he was having an affair and Hart dared them to follow him if they thought there was a story, evidently assuming they'd be ashamed of themselves, which they were not, which led to the whole Donna Rice/"Monkey Business" story and torpedoed Hart's candidacy as well as his reputation. It must seem crazy to people today that anyone would think they could get away with behaving like that, but that was the "the way it was" in those days. I do have to wonder how much better we are for knowing this stuff, though--of course we want to know because it's entertaining, but does it improve the quality of people we elect?
I really enjoyed Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent when I read it in college. I also enjoyed learning how to make a gravity bong out of my sink and a half a milk carton that summer. Memories!
There's certainly something to be said about "zombie" publications that used to command respect but have been purchased for their intellectual property and now churn out dogshit work hidden behind a formerly trusted brand. Newsweek is the most egregious of these, but I think it also applies to most of America's alt-weeklies as well. Locally the Washington City Paper used to have excellent local politics coverage - which WaPo has never done well or cared about - in addition to investigatory longform and arts coverage. Now it's a two year pit stop for wealthy children playing journalist to pop by, complain about how unprogressive locals are, and then jump to bigger and better (paying) lefty journalism or advocacy jobs. A really pathetic end for a once great paper.
The most jarring change in media over the last few years has been NPR, which by all accounts has been fully captured by activist 20 somethings. Yesterday they ran an article that was straight up junk science called "What's your attachment type?" - with buzzfeed-esque personality quiz included! - that was indistinguishable from some woo girl shit I would expect to see from Gwyneth a Paltrow aligned blog trying to sell me mood crystals. Our local NPR reporter now just straight up rewteets lefty politicians opinions uncritically. Absolutely pathetic to see what NPR has become. The Trump years broke everyone's brains, and we're all worse off for it.
The thought of losing 538 makes me really sad. They're really the best in the game. And better than their most direct competition, too (RealClearPolitics)!
This is a fine assessment of structural changes and pressures in the media, but I think the individual angle plays a big role in declining trust. We see reporters more closely and clearly than we did in the past, and people don’t like what they see. I have reflexive (but rebuttable) contempt for reporters under 40. They are disproportionately rich kids with an insular worldview, transparent political bias, zero research skills, no bullshit detector, and primary interest in building their personal brands and status. Give me a cynical old timer from a state school any day, but they’ve all but disappeared.
I think the media in general in excellent and there are definitely axes on which it has gotten better.
But when I complain about the media, as one is wont to do, my complaints are not really answered by any of this. For instance, it was pretty clear pretty soon after COVID vaccines became available that they didn't provide sterilizing immunity and that the medium- to long-term positive effects nearly all accrued to the vaccinated individual. That is, 'avoiding the unvaccinated' was not a good COVID prevention strategy. And yes, there were NPR and New York Times articles that said this. But this was not the overwhelming impression that one got from reading the kind of media that the people around me (liberals in liberal places) read. Similarly, while the evidence for mask mandates was frankly not great, this was also not the impression one got.
And in large part as a result of this, institutions I belong to and people around me made really poor decisions and in some cases are still making really poor decisions. Like, "not seeing grandma"-type decisions*, or "vaccine mandates for five-year-old" decisions. It felt like the media was making people and institutions just way dumber in ways that affected their everyday lives.
That's the big example, but there are others I'd put in this same general bucket of "making people less-informed about what's going on directly around them to their detriment".
And for that matter, a conservatives-media analogue to this, sort of, is the number of people who really truly thought that their state/local election people were committing massive, widespread election fraud. That's probably not affecting your day to day choices, but it's still a "lying about what your neighbors are doing/making you less-informed about things in your backyard" situation.
Is there an earlier analogue to this? Potentially! I'm certainly open to it.
*not that there were not situations where you shouldn't see people, but that the vaccination status of other people was not substantially affecting your risk
I listened to Bad Takes before reading this and noticed (or thought I noticed) an interesting point in common: that it’s easier now than it used to be for people to simply take the path of least resistance: click on the story that confirms your opinion/hopes, watch another video rather than catching up with a friend or suffering a few minutes of boredom alone in your thoughts, eat another donut (which is much better than the donut you could have eaten 10 years ago). Matt has made this point in other posts as well, and especially seems focused on it when he talks about his son.
Life today, while amazing on many measurable dimensions, seems to be organized to make it harder and harder to make thoughtful decisions about what to consume and what to do with your time. We have access to so much “content” and so much stuff. In the Slow Boring world this is generally celebrated, which is not wrong. I appreciate that Matt doesn’t hold himself out as a guru, but given his background in philosophy I would enjoy some more explicit discussions of the tradeoffs.
In this brave new world of media, something that I wish would be a norm (yet I know is probably just a dream) is if every publication had a strong, prominent mission statement on what news they find is important, and what their values are that drive the decisions on why they find said news that they cover important.
I feel like a lot of distrust of "the media" comes from people disagreeing with the legacy mass media on these questions. For example, I think that certainly stoked a lot of right wing discontent that resulted in the rise of Fox News, and Fox News in turn stoked a left wing backlash accusing them of not being on the level with the whole "fair and balanced" slogan.
Knowing where publications stand, be it partisan, ideological, or not, I think would lower the temperature of some of this discontent.