
Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong? - mlla
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-does-the-american-media-get-big-stories-wrong/276454/
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crimsonzagar
Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy.
The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older,
you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people
exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is
optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the
networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the
truth." - Steve Jobs

Guess, we have to do away with "when you're young" part now. Internet keeps us
young.

~~~
duedl0r
"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard.
The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X.

How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their
profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own
choice. In fact, they can't.

IT'S THE TRUTH.

(btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid
thing...oh boy)

~~~
Ntrails
They didn't create a group of people who wanted unbalanced press coverage of
events in line with their own viewpoints.

In British print media there is a whole range of right wing, middle and left
wing newspapers. They all have a readership, and they all serve that
readerships requirements. None of them created their readers thirst for
leftist spin, or right wing shock - it exists and so they sell to it.

Often times the left and right wing extremes are owned by the same parent
company. They don't care what we want, as long as we buy it from them.

~~~
duedl0r
Yes, you're right, but I think what you're describing is the current
situation. It doesn't say anything about how we got there in the first place.

For me this process is compareable to education of children. If you let your
child drink coke instead of water, it will do so. But since we're good
parents, we don't allow that, do we?

Btw, this whole argumentation isn't restricted to media. E.g. clothing
companies: they want to make us believe, we want our stuff from Bangladesh,
where the mortality is significantly higher in a cloth company than anywhere
else?

So you're saying there are groups of people here who want this?

I just refuse to believe that.

In the end I'm not the one who makes a fortune of all this, so I'm not willing
to take the responsibility.

------
graycat
(1) The 'news' is bait for the ad hook. (2) Good bait needs to get attention.
(3) The ancient Greeks discovered that a sure-fire way to get and hold the
attention of an audience was to use the techniques we now call 'formula
fiction'. (4) The news is staffed heavily by humanities majors well acquainted
with formula fiction. (5) The news, in order to get attention, is really
mostly just light entertainment based on the techniques of formula fiction.
(6) The old idea that a free press was to help create an "informed citizenry"
as needed for a good democracy rarely competes with the approach of light
entertainment. (7) There is more information available, but long "the medium
is the message" held true -- that is, when have just a few major news outlets,
those outlets go for the mass audience and omit special interests, the long
tail, details, etc. and just stick with their light entertainment. (8) With
the Internet, there are millions of 'outlets' so that we can be on the way to
much more information beyond just light entertainment.

For the OP, for the light entertainment based on the techniques of formula
fiction, getting details, facts, etc. correct was not very important. This is
not new: There is an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that has Andy laughing at
the poor accuracy of the news. The audiences for that movie in the 1930s were
quite prepared to laugh at newspapers. For anyone with the discipline of a
good STEM background, news is outrageously bad and irresponsible junk.

------
eksith
"American Media" is only a label for the most prominent examples, I.E. the
"Mainstream" we all keep hearing about. Elsewhere, many of these stories were
picked up early, however these days, The Media has an "over-the-shoulder"
syndrome in which they keep looking at what others are doing and try to beat
them at the ratings.

There's also a prevailing trend to crowdsource journalism E.G. CNN's iReport.
And we can see the results of the unfiltered variety with that Reddit
misidentified bomber debacle. Lesser controversies easily slip through without
much backlash.

This is nothing new, of course. The soapboxes are now digital and the speaking
trumpets are in geosynchronous orbit.

------
brown9-2
_Surveying stories as diverse as the Soviet spies that infiltrated the U.S.
government during the Cold War, the bankruptcy of Enron, the anthrax attacks
of 2001, the run-up to the Iraq War, and the Vioxx scandal, he points out that
major news organizations have repeatedly missed or inexplicably ignored
newsworthy facts and events of the utmost significance._

It will always be possible to pick certain stories or facts that "the media"
have missed - because the world of "facts" is so large and no organization
could always be either right about everything or omniscient. The world we live
in is large and many things happen in it, and most of them are not easily (or
even possibly) discoverable.

This sort of critique seems like it would ignore the fact that there are some
stories that "the media" would have gotten "right", whatever that means.

You will always be able to find things that were missed.

------
kaoD
It's not "American Media". It's "Media". The issue is worlwide.

~~~
chalst
I think the US faces some distinctive problems - in particular, the rest of
the world has not seen the same kind of collapse of quality local reporting
that lies behind the Bell, CA example he gives.

~~~
kaoD
_(citation needed)_

Reporting is awful everywhere and at any scale.

Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion. They're
not mass informative media, they're mass propaganda tools.

That's why they lack quality: their goal is fulfilled even if their quality as
informative media is very low.

~~~
chalst
> (citation needed)

I can recommend, despite the paywall, Michael Massing's 2009 piece, 'A New
Horizon for News' on what happened to the US news business:
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/a-new-h...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/a-new-
horizon-for-the-news)

As for the situation outside the US, I have close knowledge only of the UK
(where there has been a decline in print news, but not comparable), and
Germany (which is generally very healthy, not to say I can't complain about it
at length). What I hear about print news reporting in France, Italy, and Japan
is more positive than negative.

> Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion.

I think this is oversimplifying and rather cynical. Much TV news is like this,
but much print reporting and some for-web reporting (Bloomberg, Reuters) is
informational in intent. I don't particularly enjoy reading the New York
Times, say, their attempt to render stories in accessible terms tends to rub
me up the wrong way, but I admire the scope and ambition of their straight
news reporting. And they bring a lot of news to light.

What's the alternative? What would the world be like if we only got the kind
of news from Fox News and weblogs, and nothing from news teams like those of
the NYT.

~~~
VLM
"What's the alternative? What would the world be like if we only got the kind
of news from Fox News and weblogs, and nothing from news teams like those of
the NYT."

It would probably look a lot like news.google.com. I extensively customize my
sources and I get a lot of Reuters, BBC, stuff like that. When I see
infotainment articles, I filter it out at the source.

------
squozzer
Here's my hypothesis -- The US Media gets things wrong because the news really
isn't relevant. So errors of either commission or omission don't really matter
-- sure, the occasional journalist resigns (e.g. Dan Rather after W's National
Guard story) or someone goes to jail. Certainly the story is relevant to them,
but not to the rest of us.

In most cases, when the story breaks, it's already over. And when a lesson can
be drawn from it, it's usually the wrong one (e.g. "they hate us for our
freedoms") but that's decided by the propagandists.

You might rightfully ask, "what about stories whose outcomes remain undecided,
e.g. Syria? I doubt the outcome, or at least how the US will act, is
undecided. But we're not likely to learn about such decisions until after
they've been implemented, unless someone really needs to stick their finger in
the wind before acting.

------
lazyjones
I don't know how relevant this is to the american media, but here in small
european countries, media corruption is rampant: government agencies (in
particular ministries) bribe newspapers and magazines with expensive ads in
order to avoid the (rightfully) bad press and possibly investigative
journalism.

~~~
mercurial
I live in a small European country (Denmark) and I'm not aware of this
behaviour. Do you have more specifics?

~~~
johnchristopher
I would guess (based on wild and unsubstantiated assertions on my part) that
parent is referring to eastward European countries such as the Balkans.

~~~
gadders
Or The Guardian in the UK, which almost exclusively carries local government
and civil service jobs.

Obviously even this won't work with a Conservative (led) government.

~~~
mercurial
Are you simultaneously arguing the Guardian is bribed by the government and
that the UK is a "small country"?

~~~
gadders
Only the former. If it wasn't for government ads and Autotrader (owned by the
parent group) it would have folded long ago.

------
rumcajz
American conservatives adopting chomskian media analysis? What's going on
here?

------
Vivtek
_the American people, who want the media to rally around officials in times of
crisis_

Bah. Speak for yourself, Atlantic Magazine. (Especially during manufactured
crises...)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Of course he doesn't mean _every single American_ \- he's making a
generalization. But kindly note that in the weeks after 9/11, fully three
quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that
harbored terrorists - even, explicitly, if thousands of innocent civilians of
those countries would be killed.

~~~
DougWebb
_...fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against
countries that harbored terrorists..._

The problem is that Iraq wasn't one of those countries, but the media mostly
supported President Cheney's^h^h^h^h Bush's desire to invade anyway.

The American media is also hugely biased when it comes to reporting casualties
too... every American soldier's death was and continues to be noted, but the
huge number of soldiers with severe injuries is rarely counted, and the
enormous number of local civilians and soldiers killed and injured are hardly
mentioned at all. Aside from military families who know what's really going
on, American warfare is presented to Americans as if it was just another one
of our action movies. That's why we seem so ignorant about our impact on the
world.

~~~
Vivtek
"Seem"?

------
waxjar
That headline makes me cringe. Media is the plural of medium, they do things,
they don't does things.

~~~
icesoldier
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun>

~~~
waxjar
"Media" isn't a collective noun, in the same way that "apples" isn't a
collective noun. It's the plural form of "medium".

------
kmasters
I dont think the media "gets it wrong", although they do endemically, I think
that media is reflective of ourselves.

If we dont see a threat, we dont react. If we dont see a threat the media wont
react to it either.

This can operate in reverse, if we see a threat but the govt tells us its not
a threat, the media will try to soothe our anxiety.

Maybe what the media fears is being drowned out by the mill of a thousand
voices, none of which have any credibility, and so they follow the "dont throw
pearls to swine" rule of not getting in the way and wasting their breath.

In the world of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Ventura, Rand Paul, who wants
to hear facts?

The "media" as we call it, is adjusting to the ability of our collective
digestive tract to consume what they have to say.

And their adjustment is to say screw it. Its just (expletive ommitted)

