From the ousider point of view – they seem to be either balanced or at least competitive providing different points of view on issues. If you compare this with government monopolized media in some countries – from the outside it looks okay.
So what are the reasons mainstream media are being criticized and (I believe) distrusted in the US? Or are they not?
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Much of the media has either an implicit or explicit bias and partisans blow the significance out of the water in order to discredit their opposing side and end up making less knowledgeable people think nothing can be trusted.
Ever notice all the stories are the same?
Blatant ideological biases on both sides coupled with the 24 hour news cycle creating a financial incentive to turn non-stories into major stories and to focus more on weaving a compelling narrative than reporting on the facts.
Riled up viewers are repeat viewers which generate money, and offending your viewer’s ideological sensibilities *costs* you viewers and loses you money.
* They are explicitly biased and push a narrative not just independently either, but as a collective
* The journalists themselves are low knowledge and don’t put in almost any effort to research into the topics they write about
* They don’t post primary sources and instead will quote other news agencies or ‘anonymous sources’
* They rely on contract writers who’s business model is to sell blog quality writings to as many outlets as they can
* They push sensationalist articles loudly which might not be true, and then post retractions quietly weeks later if at all
* They feel their job is to tell you what you need to believe rather than simply present the facts
* They are detached from reality and believe life exists as it does on Twitter for which they are addicts of
Go to your local library’s microfiche catalog to look at newspapers from decades ago and tell me journalism hasn’t shit the bed.
There’s basically only like one whole news source that isn’t biased and it’s the AP, which is a collection of journalists who post their article and other news places can use that as long as they give credit. Other than that every other channel is biased. The right only has one major easily accessible channel in Fox, with some online presence and niche channels like OAN or the daily wire and most of the Wall Street journal, while basically every other name brand is left leaning, from CNN to NBC to ABC, to NPR. Buzzfeed, Vox, Vice, aren’t even left leaning, they’re just straight up “left”.
Media has an inherent bias, and even trusted news sources will control the dialogue of political discourse.
That being said, there is a movement attempting to discredit journalism in general as part of a political strategy.
Nearly any criticism of the media, especially the mainstream media, is ultimately a criticism of the profit motive. Business do stuff to make money and almost no one wants the government to enforce ethical standards, so it’s pretty much like complaining that wind exists.
Large media/news companies are owned by even larger corporations whose main goal is to make as much money as possible. When making money is your main goal, you use tactics like what other posters have pointed out to generate as many views as you can.
You can certainly seek out opposing viewpoints yourself but from the perspective of the large news companies, there is no point in doing so because their audiences would rather watch something that aligns with their political views.
There’s also the idea of the 24 hour news cycle these days where most people will just read a headline or tweet to get their news and you cannot possibly critically think about an issue with such minor details. But then again, this all goes into profit making.
They over sensationalize things that should be arbitrary to keep people watching but it leads to polarization
The business model of most of the media depends on advertising and ad revenue which impacts coverage. In the old days newspapers were supported by advertising and the classified but those have moved online.
First, “mainstream” doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s not by any means mainstream, the majority of Americans do not consume it, and majority of people that have only have it because it was bundled with their cable package.
Let’s call them the Legacy media instead. The reason trust is so low with them is because they aren’t news anymore. They’re either the resistance or the propaganda of the party in power. This has been going on for a while, but Trump really accelerated things. Basically no actual fact finding, not verifying, actively burying things if it hurts your side, no matter if they actually are news worthy. And above all, not every segment can conclude “that’s why the Democrats are to blame” or “and that’s why Trump is Satan”.
They lie. Alot. And there not even good at it.
At this point what’s typically referred to as “the mainstream media” acts as little more than a PR department for the Democratic Party.
“Journalist” was always an occupation that skewed heavily Democrat but for the most part the news media tried to at least maintain an appearance of impartiality. Donald Trump changed a lot of things and among them was that impartiality. Now, the media does everything they can to amplify pro-Democrat or anti-Republican stories and bury pro-Republican or anti-Democrat stories.
Just Google the word “recession” and look at coverage on that for the past couple of weeks.
most media in the US anymore is just propaganda simulators
It’s because most of the mainstream media has become activism masquerading as journalism.
Most of the mainstream media doesn’t even make a good attempt at being truthful or objective anymore. They have picked a “side” when it comes to social and political issues and are actively trying to advance their cause instead of share information in an honest way. News stories will be twisted to fit a certain narrative, and the stories that can’t be
made to fit the narrative will be downplayed or ignored.
* Pretty much all media outlets rely on advertising dollars for revenue. This creates incentives to present the news in distorted ways. Cable news has the 24-hour news cycle where every news events needs to be an emergency of utmost life or death urgency. Online articles write clickbait titles to drive views and ad revenue, which tend to distort the story.
* The angrier the news makes its audience, the more engagement it gets, which increases its ad revenue.
* A lack of socio-economic diversity in newsrooms. Many mainstream media journalists come from the same background of highly educated and upper-middle to upper class. Even if a journalist grew up poor, they typically attended an Ivy League college.
* Most “news” that’s pushed tends to be more editorials than news.
* Most mainstream outlets have decided to appeal to a clear ideological group for views and hire staff with these ideological views. This creates separate news streams for different ideological groups, which makes it hard for these groups to even talk to one another.
Don’t get me wrong, I think our current system is preferable to a government monopolized one, but it has issues. However, there are a lot of people who think news media completely controls what people think, and this makes it convenient to write off other people as being puppets controlled by “Russian trolls,” “the libs,” “the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch,” “the woke,” etc. If you take this view, you don’t actually have to engage with alternate political perspectives and try to understand why someone may think differently about a policy than you. You can simply write them off as being brainwashed.
People think that everything is a conspiracy or a lie these days, so they project that onto the news as well.
Because they lie, a lot. Bay of Pigs, Babies in Incubators, WMDs in Iraq; the list goes on. The US public has been lied to so much that many of us just don’t trust them. Now we have to deal with coastal elites telling us inflation isn’t a big deal and that we should just buy Teslas.
I’m pretty conservative but where I agree almost 100% with progressive liberals is that the media is corporate horseshit and very few journalists live up to the ideal standard. It’s a lot of yellow book journalism, “Remember the Maine!” type stuff that is drivel at best, or propaganda at worst.
One big problem is that a lot of the national news organizations are headquartered in New York, and this does result in some biased reporting.
Like most things in America these days, our media is actually really good, especially compared to the what many other nations have, but we don’t understand the alternatives, we just reflexively hate what we have and are in the process of destroying it. Sort of like public education.
24 hours news networks have, imo, undermined the journalistic integrity throughout all of media, which is a shame. I don’t care which network you’re watching…CNN, Fox News, MSNBC…they’re all in the Info-tainment business, so you need to take anything you see with a grain of salt.
Much of their programming is opinionated news. They spend 30 seconds telling you about the event that actually happened, and then they spend the next 10 minutes delivering a highly opinionated monologue that is masquerading as fact.
For example, let’s look at the recent school shooting in Uvalde, TX. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc all reported the facts of the story with equal levels of accuracy (at least based on the info available at the time). But beyond that, most of their actual coverage of the event revolved around gun laws, rights, who to blame, how to react, etc, etc.
All of that extra stuff is debatable and highly opinionated, so what you hear is going to entirely depend on which network you’re watching.
This has long been the case for well over 20 years though and most people have always at least a mild degree of skepticism of the media in any form. But then the Orange Menace came along and went nuclear on the media and popularized the “fake news” mantra, which has very quickly taken firm root in our society and has especially been embraced by the right wing/conservative community in the US, specifically among Trump supporters. They literally only believe something if it comes from the mouth of Trump or a Trump approved media outlet, such as OAN. Even Fox News has fallen out of favor among Cult 45.
I mean, there’s always been a bit of animosity between conservatives and the media. Freedom of the Press was an incredibly liberal and progressive concept when it was established and apparently it still is.
I watch very little televised news and try to limit myself to reading AP articles, as they offer little to no commentary outside of the known facts at the time of publishing.
Something to keep in mind is that a lot of criticism of “the media” is criticism of coverage that people are idealogically opposed to.
For example, a huge number of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, despite there being no evidence that it was, and despite all lawsuits related to that claim failing spectacularly. When media outlets make the claim that the election wasn’t stolen, those same people see them as being overly biased. Reporting that Trump called the Georgia secretary of state to try to overturn a legitimate election is seen as biased. If Nixon repeated Watergate in 2020, you can be sure that reporting on it would be seen similarly.
The criticism directed at places like ONN, which repeats dangerous conspiracy theories and doubles down on their lies, is entirely different than criticism of places like the NYT, which publish corrections when they get something wrong.
As a scientist, it bothers me to see that even basic scientific facts are often seen as “biased reporting.” The data showing that climate change is real and caused by humans is overwhelming, but making that claim has been seen as media bias for decades. The (mRNA) covid vaccines save lives, but saying that is also now considered to be biased.
I would like this comment itself to be far less biased than it is, but I can’t get around the fact that politically, there is one party tends to reject science, education, and evidence, and as a result will call those things fake news. Are facts biased? Unfortunately I think we’re coming to the point where that’s functionally the case.
Tldr: media outlets will often do better fact checking than your crazy uncle on Facebook, but that doesn’t fit the narrative that many Americans see as reality.
Its a business so they use sensationalism and pander to specific markets in order to get views/clicks/etc. This leaves the media stations themselves not only viewed as alarmist and bias, but also very susceptible to ‘donations’ or other business dealings. And the crazier people get, more news outlets will either shift or start up to meet the demand of that new market.
This isn’t one of the main reasons they’re being criticized but my problem is they’re all run by mega corporations, therefore they never even talk about a lot of relevant issues because it makes capatalists look bad. They never talk about worker’s rights or Democrats and Republicans working together to bail out mega corps
Sensationalism as opposed to accuracy.
An easy and controversial case study of this gun violence.
If you’d believe news coverage then you’d believe that mass shootings and “assault” weapons were the leading cause of gun deaths. Despite the fact that you’re more than 100 times as likely to die in a one off shooting with a handgun.
There is also some cursory evidence that the media reports on these mass shootings long if it hits certain sensitive metrics. And the closer you get “young white male with right leaning ideologies shoots innocents with an AR-15” the longer it stays in the news.
Instead of being “government monopolized” they’re “private corporation monopolized”.
Pushing narratives instead of trying to do objective reporting. Not reporting facts that don’t match the narrative they are pushing. They’ve been caught lying or simply being wrong because due diligence wasn’t done. Not publishing corrections when they are wrong.
The media in the US has lost all credibility (according to the survey data I’ve seen). They did it to themselves. They abdicated their responsibility to the truth and it is destroy them. The product they sell is trust and they now have nothing to sell.
It’s hard to say, I’ve read a little bit of media in other democracies and America seems to be the worst, maybe tired with UK. I think its for a lot of reasons.
-Media chases clicks, this means that in order to make money and stay in the game the popular outlets *have* to ignore journalistic standards and just make articles that will make people maximally angry/scared/clickbaity.
-Fox news was literally founded by right-wingers to be a propaganda piece, it also happened to stumble upon, until the internet, a very good business strategy, because propaganda sells much better than boring old news.
– We invented advertising, and PR our political class seems uniquely good at manipulating the media
-our libel laws are such that for public figures its hard to prove libel, basically, they have to prove “actual malice” which is a really hard bar to prove. I think if we just made changes in the ilbel law we could reign in our crazy-ass media. Big fines! Put fox out of business! Put MSNBC out of business if they can be proven to be lying.
People cryfor freedom of speech but
1. police will just extrajudicially fuck you up if you do things that really bother our rulers (see the fate of black panthers, or some animal rights activists, or jury nullification activists) so its like what are we protecting anyway? and 2. our courts are pretty independent so I’d trust them with this.
The media than makes our lawmaking worse which makes our media worse which makes our lawmaking worse.
Several main factors contribute to the distrust.
Implicit or Explicit Bias has practically infected all of mainstream media and it results in everything getting muddled and clouded. Even the big name trusted ones are suffering from it as it feels like the news has turned into more of a pissing match between the two going
“Your side fucking sucks!”
“No! Your side are the awful ones!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
Repeat at nauseum
Click driven headlines that feel more like clickbait than genuine news sometimes as they always try to word it or present it in a way that will get traffic and attention. Both sides of the political spectrum do this alot via online medias and it’s manage to seep it’s way into the mainstream. It feels like the truth or informing the public matter anymore, it’s all about the clicks and ratings now and nothing gets the ratings up and up like some anger. Rile people up here and there, it works.
It’s no longer about the everyman now. Honestly I don’t think it has been for a while. Whatever makes the investors and shareholders happy and keeps the money coming in. That’s all that matters now.
Edit – Oh, the 24 hour news cycles has also forced journalism to essentially make mountains out of ant hills. So many nothingburger stories can just get pumped out that don’t really deserve a lot of attention anyway. Gotta fill up that timeslot somehow. I believe The Onion’s video titled “Breaking News – Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere” summed it all up perfectly in the very first line.
“And now in a desperate attempt to fill 24 hours of programming, here’s some Bullshit that happened somewhere today.”
The amount news on TV and social media makes it easy to find some pretty poor quality journalism and that’s made worse by the incentives inherent to TV and social media which thrive on eliciting a strong emotional reaction. It can all be very sensational and biased.
That being said there are plenty of good sources. Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica and NPR to name some bigger ones (though these are far from perfect). You can also find a lot of quality journalism in local papers or independently on places like substack. Bias is pretty hard to avoid in any reporting so it’s always good to check out a few sources.
Part of what you might be hearing in terms of criticism of the media often comes from political players who’s strategy is to inundate the public with honest but misleading or at times totally false information, though I’d say this is a strategy that is not limited to the US. Steve Bannon has spoken pretty candidly on this strategy I believe.
Most of the hullabaloo is manufactured, imo
Nearly all American media is heavily biased to one side or the other, and they’re all filled with opinions and analysts who go over the same stories ad nauseum for days on end until the next gotcha arises. I don’t want any of that. Give me the facts, with FULL context and maybe some relevant history, with absolutely NO fluff or opinion.
Media in the US is for profit and therefore media companies are motivated by quarterly earnings, stock price, and share holders. This works in some industries but seems to have an especially negative impact on the product with news media.
Corporate news has gotten increasingly click-baity, divisive, and hate driven.
A really good book about the issues with modern American media is Hate Inc from Matt Taibbi. He’s a good non-partisan investigative journalist, something that is becoming more rare because investigative journalist are too expensive for the current profit model
They do a lot of awful things, but i think it stems from this: the MSM cares more about money and ratings than reporting the truth.
The main point of criticism is that many people, like me, see too much blurring of the line between *journalism* and *punditry*. Journalism is reporting the facts and circumstances surrounding notable events with a minimum of opinion and editorializing. Journalism strives to be as objective as possible. Punditry, on the other hand, is at its base a form of opinion. Ideally punditry involves expert opinions, but opinions nonetheless. A key feature of punditry is that a pundit *need not be objective, fair, or even honest.*
When pundits are part of news broadcasts, even if in indirect roles, it casts doubt on whether what I’m watching is objective reporting or subjective analysis. The danger is that punditry is increasing, while straight-news journalism is decreasing. Why? Punditry is exciting. It evokes strong emotions in people (either in support of or in opposition to the pundit), and people who are emotionally involved are more likely to keep watching your channel. Journalism can be boring. A sober presentation of the facts isn’t nearly as fun as people arguing and screaming back and forth.
So, because broadcasters now have to fill 24 hours with content, they rely more and more on subjective punditry to keep people tuned in. When the vast majority of content on a “news” channel is opinion and analysis rather than straight news, the viewing public begins to confuse opinion with fact.
My main criticism w/ mainstream media is it’s ran more like a business than a public service. Back in the days of broadcast TV the FCC granted use of the airwaves to TV stations on the promise that they would provide a public service. One of those services became the nightly news where they would inform the public of things going on. Sometime around the 80’s it became clear that the news could be more profitable entertainment. Hence the era of the 24 hour news channel (CNN).
In today’s political climate division is a big money maker. Left or right politics really push viewer counts which brings along advertisers. So you have many more far left/far right media outlets who really have very little oversight due to being on cable/online services rather than the stricter broadcast rules of the FCC (which have weakened considerably).
Lastly 90% of the mainstream media is owned by 6 companies. I don’t think I need to explain how bad this is. It’s not as bad as monopolized media, but it’s not the free media market that we claim to have.
The main criticism of the media isn’t the different points of view. I think most rational people can at the very least understand how someone might not like the idea of universal healthcare for economic reasons and be willing to listen to the counter arguments.
It’s more so both sides consistently calls the other racists and the scum of the country for thinking differently than them and it just turned into “OWNING THEM”. Seriously both sides of the media should be sued for defamation because they’ve been doing it more and more for the past 3 years.