Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, provided by Seth Borenstein from scriptsandscriptors.wordpress.com.
By Eric Anderson
The reason fake news exists is not complicated. The majority of journalists don’t follow a professional ethical code. It’s not that they don’t have an ethical code. It’s that they – or more likely their paymasters — don’t want to be held accountable for breaking it.
Four basic elements comprise the Society of Professional Journalism’s (SPJ) voluntary code of ethics: (1) seek truth and report it; (2) minimize harm; (3) act independently, and; (4) be accountable. But because there aren’t any penalties for not following the code, journalists are perfectly free to: (1) report lies; (2) maximize harm inflicted upon their paymasters enemies, for; (3) a corporate paycheck upon which they are absolutely dependent, and; (4) be left completely unaccountable for the damage done to society. What? You didn’t swoon?
Of course you didn’t. Because, the public already knows this to be the norm practiced by the large majority of “professional” journalists today — as demonstrated by the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media, and Democracy. The survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans (84 percent) believe it is harder to be well informed and to determine which news is accurate. The same percentage also increasingly perceives journalists to be biased and they struggle to identify objective news sources. And again, hold on to the table: The survey concludes that “[a]mid the changing informational landscape, media trust in the U.S. has been eroding, making it harder for the news media to fulfill their democratic responsibilities of informing the public and holding government leaders accountable.”
Given such a trenchant indictment, and amid the obviously changing informational landscape, one might think the SPJ would be inclined toward some out-of-the-box thinking in an effort to address this catastrophic lack of public trust. Wrong! Just witness the puerile arguments regarding the reasons the SPJ doesn’t enforce their Code of Ethics:
• The SPJ thinks that encouraging fellow journalists and the public to hold news reports and commentary up to ethical scrutiny is the most effective antidote to questionable reporting — not quasi-judicial proceedings;
• And that establishing a quasi-judicial system, such as those found among other professions, would inevitably lead to actions by governments, thereby restricting protected speech;
• And that protected speech is vulnerable and placed in jeopardy whenever it’s allowed to be confused with, or limited by, the professional responsibility to act ethically;
• And that professional enforcement of ethics for news reporting would require more detailed provisions and case law that are far beyond their resources to provide, even if desirable, because no set of rules, however detailed, could possibly apply to all the nuances and ambiguities of legitimate expression;
These are nothing more than excuses as to why the SPJ advocates no action be taken to reform journalism in the modern age. Which begs the question: What action has the SPJ taken?
Well, it seems the SPJ has “entered into a partnership with Bloomberg to teach ethics to professionals.” Fox? Meet henhouse.
And, given that the hens are allowing the fox to rule the roost, it would be remiss to not ask another question: Can we really, in good faith, allow journalists to call themselves professionals?
I’m pretty sure the noted sociologist Eliot Freidson would not. Freidson posited five elements that define a professional:
(1) Adherence to an ideology that asserts a greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of work
(2) Performs specialized work grounded in a body of theoretically-based, discretionary knowledge and skill that is accordingly given special status
(3) Possesses exclusive jurisdiction in a particular division of labor created and controlled by occupational negotiation
(4) Occupies a sheltered position that is based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation
(5) Has completed a formal training program that produces qualifying credentials, which are controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education
With good reason, all five factors apply to what are traditionally called the “white collar professions.” Because when doctors lie, people die — witness the opioid epidemic. When lawyers lie, people die. Don’t believe me? Do a quick web search of “dishonest prosecutor death penalty.” When engineers lie, people die –witness Boeing. In short, when professionals that broker in public trust tell lies, people needlessly die — witness Judith Miller. And witness, too, the utter lack of accountability that followed her comeback.
Fortunately, the factors outlined above also contain the cure to the changing informational landscape’s problem with fake news. Journalists can create sheltered positions that are based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation, combined with a formal training program that produces qualifying credentials that are controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education. Which, in turn, would result in truly professional journalists that assert greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain, and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of their work.
And hear the SPJ protest: Requiring the establishment of a quasi-judicial system, such as those found among other professions, would inevitably lead to actions by governments, thereby restricting protected speech! It might. But it doesn’t have to.
Coming full circle, we arrive back at the point where the SPJ has utterly failed to think outside the box.
Licensure does not need to be required in order to be effective. It can be voluntary, because the U.S. Constitution also enshrines another fundamental right – the right to enter into and be bound by contract. Just think, for a moment, the profound trust that would be instilled among the public for the journalists who were willing to put their necks on the line – for the truth.
Thus, the answer to the fake news problem can be solved as easily as it was created. A few brave and principled journalists just need to form a new organization that allows them to submit to licensing requirements, wherein their peers can sanction and revoke licensure like every other “professional” organization in the US that brokers in public trust. And for that, one can only hope their efforts will be applauded and secured throughout the remaining history of what once was, and still can be, a noble profession.
Until that time, journalism deserves every ounce of shame thrown upon its practice.
450.org
I don’t like the term Fake News. It’s Trump’s term and Trump gets no truck. Nada. In fact, Trump’s Twitter account is Fake News 24/7.
Propaganda is the appropriate term. Russia does Fake News in America and Trump does too. The American mainstream media does propaganda. Propaganda is much more sophisticated. It paints a pretty picture of legitimacy. It’s partially factual or maybe even mostly factual but mixed with untruths and half truths in order to manage perceptions and encourage the audience to draw the wrong conclusions or preconceived conclusions about the subject matter.
Trump calls any news that doesn’t glorify him Fake News. That’s the definition of Fake News because, remember, Fake News is Trump’s term. He invented it. Of course, FOX News is not Fake News unless and until it turns on Trump. Then and only then does it become Fake News. For example, Trump had to visit Walter Reed after Chris Wallace took one of Trump’s GOP sycophants, Scum Scalise, to task on his FOX News show this past weekend. Chris Wallace, per Trump’s definition of his term, was engaging in Fake News.
Eric, since you authored this, perhaps you can tell us what is Fake News related to the reporting of the Trump impeachment proceedings. I can tell you what is propaganda related to it, but it isn’t Fake News as far as I’m concerned. Trump engaged in a clear impeachable offense. In fact, he’s engaged in so many impeachable offenses, they’re too numerous to count and recount. Trump’s Pressers are the real Fake News. Russian trolls setting up fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter and submitting completely false stories as legitimate is real Fake News all the while pretending to be conservative uber patriots.
450.org
Bullshit, and this is disingenuous when juxtaposed with your commentary per a previous blog post. An honest journalist will be shunned and ostracized. They will be muted and isolated. They will be ignored, marginalized and dismissed. They will be told that an “Open Thread” exists for their forthright honesty. An “Open Thread” that no one reads where they can post to themselves and the mountain like a tree falling in the forest. Honest journalism starts with you and you already failed the test. Let’s see if you can redeem yourself by honestly and genuinely and intelligently informing us what exactly and precisely is fake about the news related to Trump’s most recent impeachable offenses.
Hugh
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
Always good for a laugh to watch newscasters with their seven figure incomes doing their everyman schtick.
Media consolidation should be reversed and social media platforms should be broken up. Nor is media ownership by billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, and Bloomberg a good thing.
Also bring back the fairness doctrine.
Ten Bears
The crotch-shots in the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and bimbo bottle blonde bobble-heading crotch-shots of the multi-millionaire mainstream media Kool-Aid, sprawled drunk and drooling Pavlovianly across a ‘couch’ the backseat out of a nineteen sixty-nine Chevy Suburban, blindly following a charismatic ‘leader’ to suicide. Dragging the rest of us with them.
Paraphrasing Will: first thing let’s do, eliminate the ‘journalists’.
Kudos on front paging …
Ché Pasa
‘Fake news?’ ¿Que es? An item, article, or opinion you don’t like or agree with? Something somebody said on social media that gets spread far and wide before being debunked? Something people believe that they shouldn’t? False information deliberately put out by ‘influencers?’ Or erroneous information that is later corrected?
Even the concept of ‘news’ these days is something of a mystery, meaning one thing inside the business and something quite else outside. Key idea, though: ‘business.’ News, however you define it, is a capitalist commodity to be created, packaged, traded, marketed and sold — ideally for a profit — to one another in the business and to the public in due time.
What’s wrong with the news business now has pretty much always been wrong with it, and it’s what’s wrong with capitalism. ‘News’ is only peripherally about truthfully or accurately informing the public and holding the powerful to account. News is primarily about selling something. Whether it’s a sponsor’s product, an idea or ideal, or one’s soul for lucre. That in a nutshell is what ‘freedom of the press’ ultimately means: not so much that a news publisher (note, not a reporter) can say whatever they damn well please, but that they can sell it for money. And get rich.
That means they must publish what sells and very little else. Or they fail and go out of business or get taken over by someone who will publish what sells for a profit.
Remember the heady days when the old legacy media order was in economic collapse and the largely free and independent news outlets on the internet were taking their place? How’d that work out?
And what happened to all those free and independent outlets?
I think many of us would say that the media transformation that’s taken place since those heady days has been for the worse because it’s even harder now to sort wheat from chaff and get any closer to understanding what’s really going on.
Ethics rules and licensure are all well and good, but they’re not really going to deal with the underlying problem that ‘news’ is practiced as a business, a capitalist enterprise meant to produce a substantial profit.
ponderer
Professions are very poor at policing themselves. Finding an external neutral external body is likewise very difficult. If we were full of objective rational arbiters of truth, we wouldn’t have the problems we do now. I agree that it is something that requires some thought though. I also think media companies should be the ones held accountable for their fake news even more than the journalists. Although, you could argue with their pitiful ratings, they are. Once they are run for propaganda purposes by a random billionaire or conglomerate, they no longer have the ‘accountability’ intrinsic to the publishing world for generations (ratings don’t matter). It costs nothing to spew the most biased electronic drivel (such as trying to make your article about Trump). The internet has allowed the spread of a lot of knowledge, but also a near zero cost mind control experiment and disinformation campaign(s).
KT Chong
Yesterday I was just having a discussion about “fake news”. Americans love to accuse Chinese state media of lying — i.e., making up “fake news”. In reality, as far as I have seen, Xinhua and People’s Daily do not make up — or have not yet made up — “fake news”, (not that I get my news from them.) Chinese state media simply censors and selectively not reports any unfavorable news. Which is actually not too different from what the Western establishment media like the CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, BBC, Guardian, etc. have been doing for years and years. Some examples: ABC buried and killed an Jeff Epstein expose four years ago, NBC killed a Harvey Weinstein news story, CNN and MSNBC are currently “erasing” Bernie Sanders in a media blackout, the Western media simply ignores the Yellow Vest protests in France and many other on-going protests against US-backed and Western-backed regimes. The US mainstream establishment media has always censored and controlled news about Palestinians (who are almost never on the news, and only shown negatively when they are reported) and Saudi Arabia (almost always reported positively — the Saudi royal family actually owns a lot of shares in many US news and media corporations, so that figures.)
I would say the Western media is even WORSE than Chinese state media. Just recently, the Western media just made up lies about the US-backed coup in Bolivia, the conflicts in Syria, polls that showed Bernie Sanders as the number-one frontrunner, i.e., one of CNN’s own polls showed that Bernie Sanders was number one in the poll, but in the news they blatantly lied and just swapped the ordered of Bernie and other candidates in that poll. It was shocking how blatant CNN was, and it did not just happened once “by mistake”. CNN straight-out LIED about their own polls, on TV, repeatedly and multiple times. So it was deliberate. And, of course, both CNN and MSNBC straight-out lied about the coup in Bolivia.
As far as I know, even Chinese state media does not straight-out lie like CNN and MSNBC. The worse China has done is they censor news. They just do not report anything unfavorable. China has not (yet) made up lies about stuff in the news. On the other hand, Western media has entered that “fake news” territory – and just made up stuff that is not even true.
IMO, the best and most credible news sources are independent news like the Intercept and Grayzone. Russia Today is more trustworthy than CNN and MSNBC. Xinhua and People Daily are also more credible — because they do not make up stuff; they just censor out stuff that they do not want to report. On the other hand, establishment media like CNN and MSNBC just make up stuff. That is just LYING. And they are doing it more and more. I do not watch Fox News, but I think even Fox News does not sink to that level. Sure, Fox News have talking heads spilling right-wing talking points, but we all know they are speaking their opinions and not reporting news. CNN (especially) and MSNBC, on the other hand, just straight-out make up stuff. It is shocking.
KT Chong
Correction: not that I get my news from them –> not that I get my news EXCLUSIVELY from them.
Bill H
“Society of Professional Journalism’s (SPJ) voluntary code of ethics: (1) Seek truth and report it, (2) Minimize harm, (3) Act independently, and (4) Be accountable.”
That merely proves that the media does not even know what a code of ethics is. A real code of ethics would consist of specifics such as, “do not report anything which you have not yourself observed.”
450.org
Just as I thought. Fake News is a dog whistle term. One of Trump’s many dog whistles. KT Chong, you’re about as Chinese as my dog and my dog isn’t Chinese. In fact, my do doesn’t even like Chinese food. My dog also doesn’t salivate about gas chambers and crematoriums when Dear Leader whistles Fake News.
KT Chong
Ah yes, when you can’t argue with facts, let’s just resort to racism.
KT Chong
Another cosmic coincidence — The Hill on the establishment media:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_3O1hk7otQ
450.org
KT Chong tells us China has more free and objective news than CNN and MSNBC. Too funny! He says it with a straight face.
I agree it’s all propaganda to one degree or another. It’s a matter of degree. China’s propaganda is off-the-charts. Nothing in America compares. Not yet at least but if Trump and his ilk had their druthers, it will soon enough. Meaning, American media, despite its massive flaws and while not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, is still many times more free and objective than Chinese media. It’s like various versions of Raisin Bran. Some brands have more raisins than others. China sells their version as Raisin Bran but there are no raisins to be found. America’s version has raisins but not nearly enough. Raisins are truth.
Here’s a taste of China and its approach to media. It’s a good read because children get news too, don’t you know? It’s best to capture hearts and minds while they’re developing. Trump is more Chinese and Russian than he is American. Maybe he should expatriate to a country more suitable to his tyrannical sentiment.
To Stop Fake News, Online Journalism Needs a Global Watchdog | Without regulations that push search engines and social media companies to prioritize reliable and truthful sources of information, propaganda and censored content will dominate digital platforms.
Charlie
Missing a big one here. The media can legally tell untruths that lead to deaths due to Obama’s repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act. Of course, propaganda has been here for quite some time (Iraq war Generals: “We don’t do body counts.”) however, there were some brake on what the corps and government could get away with thanks to news outlets’ inability to hire CIA types.
Since the repeal, lying by news outlets and the incredulity of those lies has skyrocketed. A big step would be getting government spies out of newsrooms and ban billionaires from owning news outlets (or just have media post a disclaimer that all reporting from these outlets are for entertainment purposes only before every broadcast or printing).
More on the 2013 NDAA:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/
anon y'mouse
sounds like a kind of category error. hold the individuals responsible for the systemic problems. create “standards” for them to live by, and penalize them when things go wrong.
is the problem the teachers who inadequately teach to the test, or the system that requires them to instill -test taking ability- in measurable quantity in a group of students at the end of the year, instead of real knowledge (which is an individual’s journey to take, and can be guided but not truly lead unless it is rote memorization).
“data” can be considered plain fact. but data is meaningless without interpretation. you act as though “news” is data. it is not. if you truly had your way, the news would be a list of numbers and categories. and even then we find trouble because “categorization” or taxonomy requires rationalization, judgement, and even argument about what constitutes a given -thing- or not.
there is no one way to view/interpret data. data is ONE (although statistical gewgaws are endless), but interpretation requires perspective, aims, points of view, backgrounding in more data AND information, and so on, almost ad infinitum.
this sounds like bringing in Newspeak McCarthyism through the back door and then claiming that improvements have been made. all news media is political. even choosing what data to report, and which to exclude. we will have endless rounds of “possums invaded Mrs. Pettifor’s garbage can requiring 3 police to respond at 2 a.m.” and nothing else. it will be reduced from warring myths and worldviews to even worse. there’s already too much pure factoid bs clogging the stream now as it is.
you are trying to turn something into a pure “science” which is not. somewhat similar to what the entire field of Economics/economists have been trying to do for the last few hundred years—and FAILING.
Stirling S Newberry
Fake news is what government create:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/19/sweden-drops-julian-assange-investigation
450.org
So, let’s have our first quiz. Is this Fake News and if so, why? Can anything akin to this be found in the Turkish press or the Chinese press? If not, why not if their media is more impartial and objective than American media as KT Chong opines?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/china-uighur-ethnic-cleansing-impunity.html
450.org
Question #2 in our quiz. Is this Fake News? If so, why? Is this being widely and honestly reported in China? If not, why not considering how fair & balanced and free to report the truth the Chinese media is?
When we discuss this topic it’s important the discussion is global in nature otherwise if we just focus on America, we’re engaging in American exceptionalism and I would say American imperialism. China is a rising super power and may have already surpassed America in influence upon the global economy. Money talks. Money is power. Economic power is political power.
If you’re Chinese, don’t let your social score slip too low otherwise you may become a target and be falsely accused of a crime and the mobile execution vans will pay you a visit and strip you of your organs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3kkAloo7ng
450.org
A prime example of Fake News was the bevy of mainstream media venues that ran with the Jussie Smollett ruse as though it was true. They had an obligation to not report until verification and they reported anyway and reported Jussie’s fabrication as truth. As we now know, it was a lie and Jussie should be in jail for making it all up. The mainstream media venues that ran with it had an agenda and they engaged in Fake News to comply with that agenda. It’s despicable. It’s pathetic. Editors should have been fired left and right, heads should have rolled, and yet no one within the media has been held to account. No lessons were learned. No best practices tweaked and applied.
Temporarily Sane
@Ché Pasa knows where it’s at. The idea that the media was basically fine and doing its job until recently is ridiculous. The western media has always served as the corporate state’s propaganda arm. Anyone who doesn’t see this simply can’t be taken seriously as a political commentator.
What hashappened recently is the media’s propaganda has become more blatant and obvious…hence all the sleepwalkers who suddenly discovered “fake news.” Another recent change is the” FOXnewsing” (or neoliberalization) of the mediasphere. Corporate media outfits and, to an extent, big state media like the BBC now treat news as a product that it delivers to consumers. This is most obvious in the United States where MSNBC is now a liberal version of FOXnews, complete with ranting lunatics spewing the most inane and insane garbage. All the things the old Daily Show used to ridicule about the FOXnews right is now just as common on the “left” (i.e. liberal) side.
The other factor driving the media to do idiotic things, like breathlessly reporting “literally Hitler” Trump’s every word and making him the most publicized person in history, and deliberately pushing audience’s emotional buttons by fuelling the us versus them identity wars, is the rise of the internet, specifically the ad click model underwriting it. Media organizations have to compete for “clicks and eyeballs” on the internet …and they can see exactly which “content” attracts the most attention (clicks) so running more of it is a sure way to keep the clicks coming. Legacy media, which was barely scraping by, quickly learned that Trump anything gets lots of clicks, and 24/7 Trump is the result. If discussions about paint drying got lots clicks there would be wall to wall paint drying stories flooding the media landscape.
Independent media and blogs cannot opt out of this brutal market logic. They have to cater to an audience of consumers in order to get people to stick around. If Ian Welsh, for example, did not cater to his donors, he would lose readers and the income his blog generates would plummet. Same thing with YouTube indy news channels. Thus, even neoliberalism’s critics have to become micro entrepreneurs and reinforce the system they want to reform/destroy/replace. Commodification corrupts and absolute commodification corrupts absolutely.
So yeah, there have been big changes in how the media operates and how information is disseminated, most of them not very good. But the news media pushing propaganda and a biased POV (“fake news”) is not at all a new phenomenon.
Temporarily Sane
@450.org sez “China and Turkey do some bad stuff so stop criticizing the media in your own country and focus on the transgressions, real and imagined, of countries where you have zero influence.”
What do you think, 450.org, of WikiLeaks and the persecution of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden by the US/UK for revealing illegal actions and war crimes of the United States and its lackeys, and exposing the hypocrisy of “the free world” and its rhetoric about “the rules based international order” “free speech” “freedom of the press” it claims to champion?
Temporarily Sane
@450.org So you are upset over the media’s coverage of the Smollet thing. I generally don’t follow idiotic lifestyle and celebrity “news” but I’ve read enough about this case to know the basics. It is a fact that the MSNBC/CNN wing of the media reflexively shields minorities from criticism and disingenuously focuses on the phantom concept of “whiteness” as the fount of America’s many problems. It is equally true that the FOXnews wing of the media disingenuously blames immigrants and minorities for all of America’s problems and reflexively shields white folk (especially the rich kind) from criticism.
Do you agree?
FOX/MSNBC are birds of feather, two peas in a pod, two sides of the same coin. Both try to get people to channel their anger and legitimate grievances onto select “others” and shadowy foreign conspirators who “hate is for our freedom” or are “undermining our democracy.” It’s a divide and rule tactic that prevents people from seeing that their real enemy is a corrupt, amoral and moribund political and economic system that has become utterly depraved and dysfunctional.
If you side with “MSBNC “ or “FOX” and think it’s the other “side” that is wrong and full of shit…congratulations you are a propaganda victim.
The real other side is the system that works to line the pockets of billionaires and hucksters of every stripe at the expense of regular people who need to work for a living. They don’t care if you swing from Trump’s nuts or Obama’s balls or how/as what you “self-identify.” You are nothing but a mark to be bilked and milked for everything you’ve got. Blaming white males/immigrants/whoever is just a way to get you all slitting each other’s throats while they abscond with the loot.
Hugh
We have to careful about the fallacy of false equivalence. FoxNews and MSNBC resemble each other, but they are not mirror images of each other. Aside from the occasional Chris Wallace interview, FoxNews pretty much doesn’t do any factual reporting. MSNBC actually does as long as it does not challenge or is in line with elitist Establishment thinking. What this means is that with heavy filtering there is still information to be gleaned from MSNBC while even with such filtering you pretty much come up dry at FoxNews.
For me, Chelsea Manning has been a prisoner of conscience, and Edward Snowden, an exile of conscience. Not just the intelligence community but the political establishment has had a hard on for Assange. They have wanted to make an example of him because he and his activities embarrass them. They want to eliminate any future Assanges but making the price Assange might pay as high as possible. As the Roger Stone trial brought out, there was coordination between Assange and operatives of the Trump campaign. The espionage charges are BS and fly in the face of First Amendment protections of freedom of the press. But Assange has real legal exposure from breaking campaign finance law, that he a foreign national gave something of value to a US political campaign in violation of 52 U.S. Code § 30121.
Herman
As bad as the mainstream media is I worry more about the impact that the Internet and specifically social media has on the news. Now anyone can be a “journalist” and while this can open up opportunities for good alternative reporting it also gives a big push to the likes of Alex Jones and even anonymous people spreading whatever “information” they want to spread.
Also, as @Temporarily Sane pointed out, the media is a business and that means that almost all journalists, including alternative journalists, follow the money. Even for a sitting president Trump gets a lot of media attention because he generates views and clicks. It also pays to push people’s buttons which is why biased media outlets often do well, they play to what their audience wants to hear.
Perhaps more importantly, though, I think @anon y’mouse is right, that ultimately the news will always include a large amount of interpretation and that it is impossible to be totally unbiased. One of the biggest problems with neoliberals is that they claim to be unbiased wonks who are just reporting the facts while everyone else is an ideologue. Neoliberals say this while being blind to their own ideology and how it influences what information to report and how to interpret that information.
I agree that journalism needs to improve but I also think that fake news is here to stay. We should try to promote critical thinking while helping people recognize their own biases. Everyone is biased to some degree and it might even be better if we recognize real ideological and philosophical differences between people instead of trying to artificially minimize these differences.
Eric Anderson
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
Admittedly, I left a lot that could have been said on the table. Told Ian last night that the subject really deserves a serious deep dive long form that fleshes out the edges I left rough. I could quibble with many of the arguments made, but honestly, I just don’t have the time.
That said, I’m quite confident I’m never going to fix the world, but do enjoy provoking thought around a subject that hasn’t seemed to lend itself to much original thinking.
Peace, love, and #Bernie2020!
450.org
Yes, I agree.
450.org
See, this here is Fake News. That’s not what I said. Not even close. I stated my point which anyone can read above and you mutilated it. You transformed it into a scarecrow you then burned down. That’s dishonest and disingenuous and it’s indicative of someone not interested in having a constructive discussion about this important topic. American exceptionalism is a very real thing and there are a myriad of ways you can engage it. The planet is getting smaller and smaller. It’s a small world afterall. As such, this issue transcends America and America is not and should not be the end all be all when it comes to topics that apply globally. In addition, my commentary related to the articles I linked to was aimed at the irony of KT Chong’s commentary. He, or she, is allegedly Chinese and he/she had the temerity to proclaim the Chinese media is more objective and fair & balanced than the American media and then he/she went on to absurdly indicate Fox News is somehow not as bad as CNN and MSNBC. You don’t help yourself or your case by purposely mischaracterizing to support your conclusion. You undermine any conclusions you espouse by using such dirty tricks and you engage in the very behavior that’s under scrutiny in this blog post.
450.org
It’s more than a business and depending on what country under scrutiny, it’s more not a business than it is a business (in China and Turkey and Russia it is 9o% propaganda and 10% business). In America it’s certainly a business but not just a business. It’s also perception management, or, in otherwords, purposeful propaganda meant to shape opinions and views about the world so the peeps will think and act as the elite want them to think and act.
Also, I will add, as Ian’s book title says, it doesn’t have to be this way. Your statement reads like as though it’s an immutable law of physics that media is a business. If the current system, the American media at least operates in, is to be reformed and or replaced, the media can no longer be viewed, or considered, a business. Instead, it should be viewed and considered as a public service or a public utility if you will.
450.org
Temporarily Sane, not only do I agree with what you said but in fact what you said IS what I said. I’m flummoxed as to why you would even ask the question. Clearly you didn’t read what I typed or if you did, you read it with a heavily biased filter and saw what you wanted to see versus what I actually typed. There are two parts of the media equation. The sender and the receiver. So far this discussion has been focused on the sender. Perhaps we should also discuss the receivers and their ability to comprehend what they are reading if they bother to read, or watch, or receive, at all.
Take a look at these receivers. Especially note the commentary starting at 1:17. What does the blonde Einstein in curlers say? Right, Fake News and that’s why she doesn’t believe any of this nonsense from the mainstream media about Trump and his Watergate doings.
These receivers are exactly what Putin wants and Trump is his tool to deliver them on a silver platter to the Kremlin for entertainment. Because they can’t comprehend and because they refuse to think critically let alone comprehend, they are servile infants for all intents and purposes. Putty in the bloody hands of tyrants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=_t75kZmrwxg
Ché Pasa
Apparently Eric doesn’t have time to define his basic term: Fake News. So we’re left with an essentially empty plate on which we can project whatever we want as a stand in for the missing item and argue about it to our heart’s content.
As for the proposal to establish and enforce ethics rules (on reporters and editors only?) and engage in licensing of credentialed field workers (but not the publishers and owners?) that may come one day if the current devolution of the media into partisan chaos continues unchecked.
The public wasn’t very well served by the previous news media formats — newsreels, newspapers, magazines, radio, and very limited television news broadcasts — most of which reflected and informed government propaganda — but at its best, there was at least an attempt at truthfulness (according to the accepted definition at the time) and a unified message. It seems rather quaint now to look back on.
Dissenting and contrarian messages and opinion were certainly available, but they didn’t dominate as they can do now.
And let’s not fool ourselves, “fake” stories, false stories, made-up stories, planted stories, partisan opinion and so on, were far more common than may be remembered. The news business may have been more staid overall than it is now, but eyeballs were still necessary, and doing whatever it took to get people to pay attention and pay their nickel or dime for a paper or magazine, including lies, false narratives, gossip, rumor and innuendo, as well as endless propaganda were widely employed then as they are now.
Would licensing and enforced ethics rules have made a difference then?
What kind of difference are you looking for?
And how about this: what would happen if the public were required to consume a certain amount of authorized, correct, non-commercial news before they could delve into the swamp of commercial “fake” news? Ah, PBS and NPR, right? Or for our Canadian friends, CBC.
Of course they’ve been corrupted like everything else, but they still stand proud above the mud-fights of the commercial news media. And no one has ever been required to watch or listen to them.
But maybe they should be.
john
Yes, Fake News is here to stay, and yes, \”promoting critical thinking\” is the ideal stabilizing strategy. Sure, we\’ll get right on it… but wait… in our Fake News constructed \”pure emotion culture\”, who is gonna listen. The IDW crowd is just talking to themselves, while the other 99% are respectively either sharpening their weapons, or penning their surrender speeches. kobayashi maru
Plan Q
@Hugh: the trial concluded that Stone had never really been in contact with Wikileaks, so how does that incriminate Assange?
Eric Anderson
CP:
Ok. I’ll bite.
Tell me what it means to be an unethical lawyer? Exactly … you can’t.
Which is why the profession establishes guidelines with wide latitude for interpretation. Rub too close to the edge and you’re likely to get called before the bar, wherein, you peers will determine if you should be sanctioned. Clearly step beyond the line and you get disbarred.
What, am I supposed to explicate the rules another “profession” deems acceptable?
Come on Che. Do better.
anon y'mouse
doing bad things as a lawyer is also doing bad things to your employer, a bunch of other lawyers. fiduciary duties and all of the rest protect the lawyers from each other and the public, and from bad washing out good.
doing “bad things” as a journalist means doing good things for your employer, and bad things for the public, even as they lap it up.
eventually you will understand as a journalist just as you would working as a “customer service representative” that there is no way to serve two masters. or will be made to understand it.
anon y'mouse
also, your fail—
law is where both sides get to put on their best argument and display it before a (theoretically) impartial judge or set of judges.
there is no “two sides” to any argument you can come up with that would be important enough in a news article to put on. try hundreds of sides.
the reader is not an impartial judge. actually, if it is news worth knowing, the reader cannot be an impartial judge.
this seems like an exercise in extreme logical positivism, whose adherents supposedly believed that statements which could not be proven true should be eliminated from the language.
Eric Anderson
Toward clearing up a common misunderstanding in this thread —
Fake news, defined:
An action, or the lack thereof, by a journalist breaching the profession’s ethical code of conduct as determined by an impartial jury of one’s peers on a case by case basis.
Or, more simply: Promulgating unethical media.
Ché Pasa
I’ve listed numerous categories of what could be considered “fake news” depending on your point of view, political faction, malice, narcissism or what have you. I doubt that any of them would be ultimately prohibited by an enforceable code, credentialing or licensure.
In fact many news media outlets have established codes, standards and more for internal discipline purposes. And they use them — too often arbitrarily, but that’s the risk you run with any such means of employee discipline and control.
The difficulty with Eric’s proposal to deal with the fake news he won’t define is that there are no universal standards for news media conduct, and any efforts to impose standards beyond those adopted by individual owners and outlets would be subject to immediate and ongoing subversion and disruption.
If you want to get down to the root of the problem and deal with the nature of the business, then maybe we’d get somewhere, but that could mean revolutionary change, and that doesn’t seem to be on the table.
The plate remains empty.
450.org
Once again I submit the term “Fake News” has no legitimacy. We can’t even agree on its meaning. The author of the following article agrees. I’m not alone.
https://theconversation.com/the-term-fake-news-is-doing-great-harm-100406
450.org
This sizes it up nicely.
https://imgur.com/a/OyhcHHM
Willy
When I was 12 I had to learn the difference between “muckraking” and “yellow journalism”. Today it seems most adults don’t even know the difference between real and fake news. You might have to undo whatever caused all that, first.
KT Chong
FAKE NEWS is when news like CNN straight-out LIE about facts. Here is one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVvyrx0lscs
Straight-out LIES. Literally FAKE NEWS.
450.org
This one’s even better. When I looked up the term “Fake News” per Merriam-Webster, it’s definition was “Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.”
https://imgur.com/a/VzdtGWw
Seriously, although that is serious, when it comes to the news, it’s caveat emptor. It’s incumbent upon the receiver of the news to parse the wheat from the chaff. It’s an important skill. It’s called critical thought — something in short supply these days if not always. If we don’t keep that skill sharpened, it dulls. Just as we shouldn’t make children’s play so safe they never develop the ability to recognize and manage danger, we shouldn’t so regulate and sanitize the news to the point where receivers lose the ability to think critically and comprehend accurately & effectively.
Propaganda and misinformation and disinformation is like porn, you know it when you see it if you have developed the ability to think critically.
The challenge is, how do we enable the majority to think critically because most do not possess this skill?
KT Chong
CNN could have just avoided mentioning that poll completely. Instead, they just changed the poll and LIED about it. That was literally FAKE NEWS.
Stirling S Newberry
> Tell me what it means to be an unethical lawyer? Exactly … you can’t.
Umm… no. There are several ways to be unethical as a lawyer, it is why we have:
cigarettes
fracking
quid pro quo
perjury
bankruptcies
All of these things have lawyers to smooth way. You might have a good case that reporters do more illegal acts that others, but you are making hash with the evidence. Try again.
ponderer
There seems to be a lot of hang-wringing over a term a middle schooler could clarify for you. It should be obvious what the author means, regardless of anyone’s personal interpretation of Fake (disingenuous, deliberately deceiving, manufactured) News (information on recent events that are supposedly of interest or relevant to the reader/watcher, generally regarded as factual). The nitpicking is an obvious distraction and logical fallacy.
Should spreading *known* falsehoods to the public be punishable? Should spreading information you don’t believe be punishable? If you say “no” then you must defend our ME adventures which have been founded by lies to the public. You also have to defend the lack of action on Climate Change as the media spins that regularly. It’s ridiculous to not insist on integrity in journalism. How people who present themselves as passionate on such subjects can argue against basic standards of professionalism is well beyond me. For the MSM there are plenty of people who have influence over a ‘story’. Editors, fact checkers, the journalists themselves, all of whom have to participate in the generation of fake new, propaganda, or whatever you want to call it. Our Republic is built on the idea of a functioning ‘4th Estate’, hense none of the problems we face could have happened without the guiding hand of the media. What do you call someone who promotes the spreading of lies and propaganda in a Democracy?
450.org
Donald Trump. Any middle schooler could have answered that correctly.
450.org
We can insist on it until the cows come home, but it’s spitting into a strong headwind unless the root of the issue is effectively addressed. Simply put, there is yet to be a truly free and independent media, whether it’s America or otherwise. So long as the media is owned, so to speak, meaning it’s a business that must serve its paymasters, it can never be free and independent and yes, advertisers are indeed paymasters and so too is a loyal demanding audience. Authors are all too aware of falling into the trap of becoming beholden to the demands of their fans and once that point is reached, they are no longer free to write at will.
That aside, what we should also insist on because it is a dimension of journalism is the appropriate use of language because language matters. Language means everything. Words should be chosen judiciously and wisely. Per that sentiment, “Fake News” is a shit word and/or term.. It’s an empty word. A vessel that imbeciles and jerk-offs can fill with whatever definition they feel fits.
Hugh
Plan Q, there is this thing called reality. Try it.
and
Note even the link name:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/11/15/roger-stone-jurors-deliver-verdict-trump-ally-trial-over-wikileaks/4187429002/
Ché Pasa
It’s interesting that in this discussion, the only targets for ethics sanctions, licensing and so forth are the news room and field workers. Not the owners. Not the publishers. Not those who actually make the policies that result in the kind of news that’s marketed to the public, “fake” or no.
For some time, I’ve had a problem with the way the protests around the world are being covered — or not covered — by practically all mainstream news media and much of the alternative media.
It’s obvious that word has gone out (from where?) that Hong Kong protests are to be covered obsessively and in full sympathy for the protesters. Every injury and/or death of a protester is to be highlighted; violence against the police is to be ignored or cast as justified retaliation for police violence.
On the other hand, as a counter example, the protests in Iraq are to be largely ignored, at most mentioned merely in passing, despite the huge numbers of protesters killed and injured (hundreds killed, more than 15,000 injured) much as the weekly Gaza protests have been largely dismissed or completely ignored.
How would a reporters code of ethics, credentialing and or licenses affect that kind of coverage disparity? The reporters usually don’t decide what is to be covered or how. I can’t say that the coverage has been “fake”, but it has been very obviously controlled and disparate. Basically propaganda on behalf of… what or whom?
Unless we’re prepared to deal with those on top, those who make the decisions about what-and-how, all the fussing over reporter ethics won’t make a whole lot of difference. For the most part, the reporters are not the problem.
Hugh
Objectivity in human affairs is a myth. The most we can hope for is a certain degree of fairness and balance, of reason and reasonableness, of social consciousness and an openness in stating where someone (the journalist, politician, scholar) is coming from.
At the same time, not all points of view are equal or morally or factually equivalent. Most of Trumpism is fake although the underlying anger and the reasons for that anger aren’t. Most of the Establishment reaction to Trump is also fake, but in a different way. And to compound matters, the two are not equivalent. On the one hand, we need a government that works, that is functional (the Establishmentarian view), but then the question is works for whom (what Trump exploits).
Eric Anderson
I’d be interested in hearing how many commenters have in the past, or are currently, members of professionally credentialed professions.
Ché Pasa
Thought provoking article on “the collapse of the information ecosystem.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/19/the-collapse-of-the-information-ecosystem-poses-profound-risks-for-humanity
450.org
Eric, I was a member of one of the credentialed professions. I returned my hard-earned credentials as a form of protest ten years prior and have never looked back and do not regret it. It was and is the principled thing to do and the system punishes, in every conceivable way, the principled.
Fyi, the profession I have rejected and repudiated is corrupt beyond the pale as are all credentialed professions. It has a code of ethics but that code is scarcely and arbitrarily enforced and as such is nothing more than a paper tiger that’s largely ignored much like the American Constitution is largely ignored by those who laud it the most.
450.org
Fyi, the comments to that article posted by CP(3O) are better than the article itself.
The noise to to signal ratio has been dialed up. It’s akin to what those poor state department folks experienced in the American Embassy in Cuba. The worms ate into their brains. Bits & bytes are worms of a sort.
bob mcmanus
Journalism? I’ll drop it here, maybe at CT n a privacy post.
Connect.
1) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/trump-television-medium-is-the-mistake/
Book review of Taibbi’s Hate Inc
Much of the fault, he thinks, arises from the homogeneity of the journalistic milieu. Fifty years ago, a good many newspapermen and -women came from working-class backgrounds. Now, most political journalists have gone to “expensive colleges,” and “literature degrees are common among our kind (I have one).” Telling stories is what these people do, and their lack of political knowledge is atoned for by their shared possession of an attitude. This imparts an unruffled confidence to their judgments and assures their lack of curiosity about stories or angles that others of their group have identified as pointless. “They are on social media day and night,” Taibbi says, and the people they talk to are each other. “They share everything, from pictures of their cats to takes on the North Korean nuclear crisis.”
Two contradictory things are going on there. Journalists are simultaneously “sharing everything” and siloing off into a self-conscious subculture and community. Like everybody else.
As a good Marxist
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/21/how-our-home-delivery-habit-reshaped-the-world about say Amazon and the “last mile” except about the UK
As a not so good Marxist, I look ar consumption and distribution as much as production. Here I see the “common,” agora public space as understood for millenia, is disappearing n space(?) but moving to time. Our public spaces are now digital, accessed from couch or cubicle.
The distinction between public and private is disappearing, fast. I don’t know what it means, if I even could, the tech social revolution is so vast and deep and profound.
Oh. The new next source of value? ATTENTION.
bob mcmanus
Sorry, there is an allusion there that I assumed…
Anyway, the quote from Marx is that
“Capitalism s the conquest of space by time.”
ponderer
I was thinking an idiot or a few names of people here who make a show about turning everything into a criticism of Trump. Most middle schoolers are aware that Donald Trump is the President of the United States which precludes him being an idiot. Seriously, however it may make some feel better to belittle Trump, one has to realize he’s one of the most powerful people in the world. He didn’t get there with Russian manipulations or blind luck and constantly insisting his low intelligence only serves to make the insist-er look as if having lost touch with reality. While we type and flail away helplessly there are a few who have actual power in the country. They aren’t idiots and most of them play the populace like a fiddle, just like Trump uses Fake News. I don’t remember where Sun Tzu mentioned assuming your enemy was an idiot and making everything about them –further feeding the impression of their importance– as a winning strategy. The Democrats seem to think that is a thing though and they seem to have convinced others to waste a lot of electronic ink while falling into irrelevance. They do it while exposing their mind boggling corruption, but if we were to call them idiots, we’d have to consider what they are doing has worked pretty well for themselves.
As I said before professional self-regulation works pitifully. Putting people behind bars for luring the country into wars, into financial frauds, is the only thing that will put a dent in the corrupt media. You can be sure they will cover that just like they cover Trump. Treating “news” like shouting fire in a crowded theater will be the only way to restore public trust or prevent millions of future casualties.
Trinity
Indeed it does. Because they are a threat to the unprincipled status quo.
Exactly. And that\’s what you are all missing, although Che comes closest. You argue definitions and terms and facts, and all the highbrow rubbish that accomplishes absolutely nothing, resolves nothing, and ultimately changes nothing.
It\’s about values, all of it. It\’s about what\’s valued and what is not. As so many of you have pointed out, nothing about the press or the business of journalism has really changed, it has taken a new form, has new \”stakeholders\” but it\’s the values of these new \”stakeholders\” that have changed. Once upon a time the local furniture store could withhold its ads or place them in a rival rag if they didn\’t like your \”slant\”. Those days are long gone, that scale of oversight is as gone as the dodo bird. The new stakeholders care about nothing but making money, lots of it, and care nothing about how they make it.
The consolidation of media into a handful of corps., the propaganda, the lack of anti-trust enforcement, the deliberate inciting of divisions and factions among the deplorables, are all contributing to this deliberate shift in values away from anyone or anything that threatens the status quo.
They *want* you to argue endlessly (and uselessly) over the proper definition of a term. What will you accomplish when you can all finally agree on what the term means? What will you solve with your righteous definition? Meanwhile, they are robbing you blind, in nickels and dimes, literally stealing your health, stealing your children\’s futures, stealing everything meaningful in your life and holding it ransom. Pay up or die! Literally.
For the sake of whatever you hold dear, stop wanting to define a ducking term. Value something other than arguing uselessly over a definition or saying that \”strong professional ethics\” are needed to \”fix\” everything (good luck with that). Wake up and realize they\’ve got you uselessly chasing your own tail, dreaming of a better world if we could only get the definition right!
What they say doesn\’t matter, fake news doesn\’t matter, what they do doesn\’t matter (you can\’t change them), there\’s not an effing thing you can do about a lot of things, but you do know what really matters. You can do something about that.
450.org
Trump is an idiot. That’s the state of America and of the world. An idiot is the most powerful person on the planet.
Trump is a narcissistic, egomaniacal, greedy, malevolent version of Chauncey Gardener from one of the best films ever produced and directed, Being There. He walks on water because he’s too dumb to know you can’t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bow1ZJTV4L4
bruce wilder
I am not so sure that ethics can so neatly severed from craft and craft methods for producing a quality product.
The professions in their 20th century incarnations were a reinvention of guilds, ethics being part of their brand management. To the extent the profession is willing to ostracize practitioners for violating ethical norms, ethical codes might even work to improve behavior. To the extent . . . One obvious problem is that the profession has a common interest in conspiring against the public at large and will normalize as “ethical” practices that advantage the professionals vis a vis the public, their clients.
The guilds died a long time ago and the dominant form of economic organization is bureaucracy. Production is not organized around craft in any meaningful sense and that is certainly true of journalism and the more carefully hidden but also more populous “professions” of public relations, advertising and marketing.
I do not think the phenomenon of Judith Miller was primarily an ethical problem. Judith Miller most probably thinks herself innocent, and just innocent, but among the wronged parties — used by darker forces, perhaps. Rachel Maddow does not think herself ethically challenged I think, even as she follows the Roger Ailes playbook.
The problems arise from product design and production methods inside a hierarchy organizing design, production and distribution.
Judith Miller was practicing a form of access journalism designed to give power to elites self-consciously manipulating the news. Her employer thrives in its niche, as an intermediary in a process in which its reporters earn privileged access by being manipulable. There is precious little room for ethics there. Rachel Maddow earns several millions a year exciting elderly partisans with nothing better to do than watch television. Again, ethics scarcely touches the news content, to the limited extent there is any.
The basic problem with propaganda is that is, at base, a consumer good. People like the opinions they have and enjoy the propaganda they consume. With a vast Media ecology organized around processing propaganda into seemingly consequence-free, nutrition-lite tasty nuggets, it is hard to see how to find or invent an audience with better taste, let alone an elite profession with any sense of obligation to deliver it.
Billikin
Just a brief comment. The problem with fake news is not that it is fake news, but that it is propaganda and rumors. Which means that journalistic ethics is not the full solution. The solution has to deal with propagandists and rumor mongerers, and those that spread propaganda and rumors. And with people who accept propaganda and rumors as the truth.
We have met the global village, and it is full of gossip.