
How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion - pseudolus
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/15/how-objectivity-in-journalism-became-a-matter-of-opinion
======
benlumen
In my opinion, once-objective mainstream journalism is now about writing
content to please target audiences and catch trending topics on social media,
as well as keep fast cycles going to appease the algorithms on news
aggregation sites and search engines.

The names of once-trusted news companies has stayed the same, but it's about
the only thing about them that has.

I believe the tipping point was smartphones, and find it very ironic that
Steve Jobs showed off iPhone's ability to load up The New York Times in its
reveal keynote in 2007.

This was the exact topic of my first substack piece on Monday if anyone is
interested. [https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-
into-...](https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-
journalism)

I did feel a little vindicated reading Bari Weiss' NYT resignation letter the
next day saying that "Twitter has become its ultimate editor".

~~~
save_ferris
> once-objective mainstream journalism is now about writing content to please
> target audiences and catch trending topics on social media, as well as keep
> fast cycles going to appease the algorithms on news aggregation sites and
> search engines.

This is spot on. The major problem here is that content is now largely
generated based on maximizing ad revenue. News publications developing content
aren’t all that different from SEM campaigns. When editors and publishers use
article clicks as a performance benchmark, as many do these days, this is
bound to happen.

~~~
Sgt_Apone
> The major problem here is that content is now largely generated based on
> maximizing ad revenue.

When has news content not been about maximizing ad revenue? That's been the
model for decades before the internet.

~~~
philipkglass
Newspapers used to have very geographically limited competition in advertising
for things like apartment rentals, for-sale listings, and job listings. They
also got a fair bit of national brand advertising, even after TV eclipsed
them. The lack of competition enabled them to do things that don't make money
-- like in-depth investigative journalism. A newspaper that contained _only_
meaty investigative journalism could not cover its costs with advertising,
even back in 1990.

This is similar to how today's high-margin advertising funded companies (e.g.
Google, Facebook) can afford to pursue out-there projects with no prospect of
making money in the short term. Investigative journalism was a vanity/halo
product that usually didn't make money, funded by people overpaying to
advertise in the newspaper.

In a case of perfect competition and low barriers to entry, newspapers have to
prioritize minimally expensive content as a supporting scaffold for
advertising. Newspapers are much closer to this "perfect competition" case now
than they were in 1990. (A _very_ few newspapers like the New York Times
achieved "escape velocity" to reach a national audience on the strength of
their reporting.) Likewise, if Google were up against a dozen other nearly-as-
good search engines, neither it nor its competitors would have the luxurious
cash surpluses for "moonshot" projects.

The golden ages of AT&T and IBM were also back when they enjoyed monopolistic
pricing power. They could afford to do Nobel Prize winning research instead
focusing slavishly on cost efficiency. They overcharged everyone, and a bit of
that surplus money was reinvested in scientific research and product quality
that was _higher_ than what an equilibrated competitive market would converge
on.

I wouldn't give AT&T a telephone monopoly again just to bring back Bell
Telephone Laboratories. But certain kinds of positive externalities seem to
emerge only from businesses enjoying fat margins and high pricing power. One
of those positive externalities, in the case of newspapers in the 20th
century, was deep reporting.

------
henvic
Was the mainstream media ever objective or impartial?

I find it appalling how people believe there is such a thing as unopinionated
journalism. There's not, especially in a world where much media outlet income
and even access to information comes from its association with state actors.

In some - if not most - parts of the world, there are even supposedly
impartial media outlets whose most income comes from advertisings for state
campaigns and politicians' agendas.

Exclusive perks and access to state authorities for journalists is also
another problem. While many people might say that it's essential for them to
have close access to presidents, governors, and lawmakers to inform the
general public, no one can argue that this doesn't have implications in
behavior.

You get reporters traveling alongside politicians in taxpayer-paid aircraft,
bypassing immigration protocols, getting celebrities associated with
authority, and their integrity is likely going to mold even if it is hard to
see.

~~~
bitcurious
> Was the mainstream media ever objective or impartial?

"Objective" or "impartial" were never descriptive - they were aspirational.
It's a philosophy that says "check your assumptions" and "let the reader draw
conclusions." It's this aspiration that appears to be leaving the industry.

I recently saw an article in the NY Times.

Headline: "Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are A Major Source of
Cases." Body (summarized): 650 cases linked to churches and religious events
since the start of the pandemic.

I believe this was published on the same day that the US crossed 3,000,000
cases, meaning that this "major source of cases" was linked to 0.022% of all
cases.

So, why I brought this up. Is there a _fully_ objective way to share this
news? Of course not - the very act of publishing an article about church
transmission is political - looking for that data was a result of bias. But
there clearly was a _more_ objective way to publish it, by changing the title
from one that's so obviously bullshit to one that just shares the facts.

Edit: it appears that NYT changed the headline 2 days after publishing. DDG
search, top result is the old headline, click through and it has a new one:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=churches+were+eager+to+reopen+site...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=churches+were+eager+to+reopen+site%3Anytimes.com&t=h_&ia=web)

~~~
II2II
> Is there a fully objective way to share this news? Of course not - the very
> act of publishing an article about church transmission is political -
> looking for that data was a result of bias.

There are several ways to be objective about it. One is to write an article
about the spread of covid in social gatherings, and include church gatherings
as part of that piece. Another is to put the data into context,
quantitatively. Yet another is to avoid the use of charged words, phrases, or
examples. That article was designed to be political, so that is how it ended
up.

I'm not saying that you could write an article that everyone agreed was
apolitical. Heck, if an evidence based article was written about the roundness
of the Earth, someone would find a way to politicize it. Yet an article can be
written that most people would agree is factual and avoids bias.

------
simonkafan
Not sure if anyone here has heared about the case Claas Relotius before.
Relotius was a German journalist mainly working for "Der Spiegel" and well
known for his remarkable, well-written articles. He wrote primarily about
civil war, refugee children, racism, often with a pillorying undertone about
the heartbreaking cruel world we live in. His view of the world (which he
incorporated subliminally into his articles) was well received in his circles;
he was awarded over 19 prizes.

Long story short: In 2018 was revealed that most of his articles were fake or
embellished. He got away with it for so long because everyone _wanted_ the
world to be the way he portrayed it, almost nobody looked closer.

I think this is symptomatic of modern journalism: Many journalists are only
interested in getting recognition in their circles, so they do whatever is
necessary to get it, even if it means bending facts. This is also problematic
because it casts a bad light on reputable journalists who reflect the events
of the "boring" world correctly and not through lies or Hollywood stories.

~~~
GenericsMotors
One of the last drops in the bucket for him was his story about a town that
voted for Trump:

[https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-
journalist-m...](https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-
messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7)

What made all this worse was the fact that Der Spiegel was looked up to for
(supposedly) having a solid team of fact-checkers.

As the medium post shows (and the magazine's own investigation afterwards) was
that not even basic and publicly available info was checked, such as the
percentage of pro-Trump voters, let alone the rest of the original article's
hilariously ridiculous claims.

Another Der Spiegel reporter who was suspicious of Relotius tried raising his
concerns with the management after he did some digging of his own, which
almost cost him his job and reputation:

[https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/02/26/inenglish/15511...](https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/02/26/inenglish/1551176169_246969.html)

Der Spiegel enjoyed the profits of Relotius' fiction and peddled literal fake
news to the world for years, and the magazine's readers lapped it all up
because it reinforced their biases.

------
marcusverus
Objectivity has been dead for half a decade. Sure, the explicit statement of
opinion has been (mostly) relegated to the Op-Ed section. But journalists are
experts in spin. You can spin an article in a million ways without explicitly
stating an opinion.

1) Bury the lede. Make your argument above the fold, hold the counter
arguments near the end. 2) Use sneaky language instead of numbers/statistics,
unless the statistics support your position. 3) Misinform the public, then use
polling of the misinformed public to push lies (one egregious example[0]) 4)
Misrepresent a situation with technical truths that leave out pertinent
behavior. 50 million USD in property damage in Minneapolis becomes 'some
destruction of property by a small minority of protesters'. 5) Selectively
fact-check 6) When mentioning a person you dislike, remind the reader of past
controversies. 7) Use loaded language. A person you like 'punches back' a
person you dislike 'lashes out'. A person you like 'gives an impassioned
speech', while a person you dislike 'goes on a rant'. Someone you don't like
is trustworthy "Person A says [yada yada]". Someone you don't like is suspect
"Person A, without evidence, claims [yada yada]" 8) Editorialize the headline,
include snark in headline. 9) People you like are described by their allies.
People you dislike are described by their opponents. 10) Find anonymous
'sources' with convenient 'inside information' that always seem to support
your biases. 11) Make statements as fact about the state of mindset of your
opponents. You can say what they fear, when they're anxious, etc, with
impunity.

[0][https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/majority-
ame...](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/majority-americans-
say-they-expect-their-taxes-stay-same-or-n991416)

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
>Objectivity has been dead for half a decade.

Half a decade? 5 years?

------
lordnacho
I think the issue is really whether people can make up their own minds. Early
on it seems there was this idea that you could simply give people the facts,
and they could decide for themselves what to think.

This seems to not be the case. Both in the sense of whether people can think
for themselves, and whether anyone thinks they can. How often do you see a
comment that blames public opinion on the media? For me, it's all the time.

Now that everyone thinks that people will just think what they're told, you
have a paternal class of writers who feel they need to be very vocal in what
they direct people's opinions towards. It's clear that if you think people
can't think for themselves, persuading them of one opinion or another is going
to look very different from if you thought they were rational agents that just
looked at evidence.

~~~
watwut
Early journalism was highly opinionated and inflammatory.

There was period where objectivity was defined as asking both sides and then
being seemingly neutral. But it is debatable how objective it was and how much
it was just shared consensus.

But tabloids always existed even during that period. And they were not
objective at all.

~~~
dfxm12
_There was period where objectivity was defined as asking both sides and then
being seemingly neutral._

Unfortunately, that period is still here. A lot of cable news is based on this
idea, for example. Of course, most issues are way more nuanced than just two
sides, and to be frank, even in the context of being objective, not each
argument deserves to be represented.

Consider a debate about treating creationism and evolution as equal when
talking about science curriculum in schools, as an example. It would still be
an objective stance to not even consider teaching creationism as science...

------
drtillberg
In practice, newspapers just have different thought leaders now. Once,
reporters parroted "a government spokesman confirmed that" \-- this was
treated as pure fact. It wasn't perfect, but in the U.S. context it generally
didn't seem far off the mark.

Now the narrative is provided by the opaque party apparatus of the DNC and
GOP. This leads to one result-- factual inaccuracy. Media coverage of key
issues thus has become little better than the political propaganda from non-
free global rivals in the 20th century. Quite a fall.

~~~
phkahler
>> Now the narrative is provided by the opaque party apparatus of the DNC and
GOP.

No. I still get the NYT daily email briefing and it shows a clear bias and
agenda every day. Which reminds me, I need to cancel that.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
You label the NYT as biased not because of its bias, but because you disagree
with its reporting (i.e. your own bias.) instead you will go to somewhere you
agree - and you will be worse off for it.

Things can be biased towards the truth just as much as the untrue. The NYT
does have some truly eye-roll content for me - but they also have some very
good articles. Just like the WSJ has eye roll content.

~~~
phkahler
>> You label the NYT as biased not because of its bias, but because you
disagree with its reporting

That's really impressive psychoanalysis on your part. NOT. I've considered
that and looked at it from a number of angles and the conclusion is that they
are biased.

My own biases are not partisan, but tend toward a dislike of things like
hypocrisy and misconstruing facts - behavior I see often at NYT and WaPo.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
> That's really impressive psychoanalysis on your part. NOT. I've considered
> that and looked at it from a number of angles and the conclusion is that
> they are biased.

Not? Haven't heard that one since the 4th grade. Keep on "owning the libs"
man.

------
Miner49er
Objectivity is impossible in journalism. Even if you only report facts, what
facts you choose as important enough to cover or not will introduce a bias.

~~~
mStreamTeam
This is such bad take.

Perfection is impossible as well. But we should all strive to better
ourselves.

Objectivivity may be impossible. But journalists can still strive to be as
unbiased as possible.

~~~
haberman
It reminds me of the "All models are wrong" aphorism. It may be true, but it's
still better to call the Earth a sphere than a plane or a torus.

No one would defend a flat-earther on the basis that a sphere isn't a correct
model, either.

------
mvanga
Not entirely related to the article, but rather why I think we're seeing all
these problems in journalism of late.

The rise of the internet gatekeepers (Google, Facebook, Twitter) has forever
destroyed the old business model for journalism.

Today, in order to have any success at building an audience on these
platforms, one needs to appease the algorithms that these gatekeepers employ.

Unfortunately, their algorithms are designed to bring out the sinister side of
human nature; tribalism, extremes of opinion, polarization.

I suspect anyone that tries to stay on the neutral side of journalism will
eventually be forced to pick a side to stay afloat. Not because of the
gatekeepers themselves anymore, but because the gatekeepers have amplified
qualities in all of us that have irreversibly changed individual behavior
itself.

I'm not sure of what can be done to ebb the tide. The problem is you can no
longer look to fixing the gatekeepers. The real problem is how to turn back
the clock on individual behavior en masse.

~~~
Nasrudith
The algorithms are a scapegoat for them sucking at their job. The news media
was already a rotten corpse who couldn't even compete with bloggers in
accuracy and fact checking. Rainbow parties, breathlessly publishing grudge
slang made up wholecloth, and satanic ritual panic for one.

Compounding that they were blind enough to use the youth and their hobbies as
punching bags while getting the most basic details wrong. Then wonder why
their demographics keep drifting older.

------
iagovar
Hm, I expected more of the article. I did my thesis for my bachelors degree
about the agenda-setting theory, with nothing really remarkable, but learned a
lot in the process. So here are my takes.

> A new generation of journalists is questioning whether, in a hyper-partisan,
> digital world, objectivity is even desirable.

Journalists that use their position as a way of aggressively pushing an agenda
are not outliers nowadays. I'm not sure about the US, but in Spain this people
reads Gramsci & Laclau and similar people, or it's familiar with their theory.

When I stumble upon news that smell like propaganda I always do the same, see
who wrote the piece, look at his name in social media, and 99,9% of the times
is someone who's actually very partisan of his particular ideas. I've donde
this with Spanish and US news with similar success, not so much with
Portuguese and French (maybe cos I have a lower understanding of the
environment), but still.

This people is not even trying. You could argue that everyone defaults to his
biases and we do a very good job of tricking ourselves but IMO there seems to
be a conscious effort of framing and priming information, and as a broad
patter of behavior in journalism.

In my particular case, when I watch or read mainstream news, I do it almost as
an anthropologic exercise, what they want people to think about? How they want
people to think about it?

There are so many instances of propaganda that it's not worth to filter any
more. I just go to some finance, niche blogs or specialized publications when
available.

> And so objectivity became journalism’s new lodestar. As Lippmann put it, the
> journalist should “remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined,
> his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding and presenting
> the news.”

And

> A study for the API in 2018 found that 75% of Americans could easily tell
> news from opinion in their favoured outlet, but only 43% could on Twitter or
> Facebook.

The problem is that people in newsrooms are perfectly aware on how news are
consumed today, so they mix information and opinion in their pieces and their
opt-in channels which is typically social media.

------
belorn
I find it odd talking about objectivity in journalism without addressing the
issue of narratives that create facts rather than facts creating a narrative.
When a narrative is allowed to create facts what usually happens are lies
which represent bias of the author and publication (which is supposed to fact
check).

The article talk both about alternative facts and value loaded language, but
outside of intended bias where news paper are directly involved with a
political party, narrative generated facts are likely the culprit for most
alternative facts.

Looking at old news papers I think I see much less of narrative designed
articles. It might still be biased for all I know, but they seems to be less
about trying to tell me a coherent narrative that will draw me in and more
about writing up what happened and who said what. The stories seems to
generally lack narrative structure, and maybe that allows the author to avoid
falling into the trap of filling in facts which does not exist.

------
jacquesm
Social media disrupted journalism in a way that can only be described as a net
negative. Tbh it was headed that way with news cycles getting ever shorter.
Twitter and other sites like it (including this one) have shortened that to
the minimum we can achieve today given the tech available. Within minutes any
idiot with a megaphone can make themselves heard with a voice that is just as
loud as a carefully researched piece of work, and quite possibly reach more
people if the right trigger buttons are pushed.

Democracy has survived quite a few assaults, let's hope that if the 5th estate
dies it will manage to hang on. I get a lot of mileage out of social media but
it isn't without its problems and they're hard to solve. But TV and before it
radio (and before that print) were quite disruptive in their own right and
depending on who you ask the outcome was fine.

------
mlthoughts2018
> “ Over 500 at the Washington Post endorsed demands for “combating racism and
> discrimination” at the paper.“

I’ve always viewed journalism as a career as something very, very similar to a
hated defense attorney.

A defense attorney’s job is to set aside all personal beliefs, moral points of
view on racism, violence, inequality, whatever, and execute the best possible
legal defense for a client.

The attorney may utterly hate rapists, but may also be highly skilled at
defending them in court because the civic function of requiring evidence and
due process to lead to a legal standard of a guilty verdict is an even greater
moral requirement for society than punishing someone accused of crimes which
elicit outrage.

It’s similar for a journalist. Your job is to set aside all beliefs about
what’s right or wrong and do the best job of executing a record of eye witness
observations, quotations and facts that give a holistic view of every story.
If any component of your own preferences for social movements or causes has
come through, you’ve failed badly.

But it seems like society is pressuring for journalism to go the other way,
and largely academia too. You cannot dispassionately pursue analysis of facts
and observations. You _must_ color them with a definitive edge or stance that
injects an active agenda based on the prevailing moral opinions of whatever
in-group your employer belongs to (usually left vs right in America).

Journalists have some extreme self-aggrandizing view that their function is to
carry out missions of morality or causes and to “do good” with their
journalism. It leads to editorializing both what is newsworthy in the first
place and also what discourse is allowed to be had about it.

I personally think it’s really frightening. If journalists at our most major
institutions believe their work should pursue an agenda like combating racism,
that’s horrific.

Racism is deplorable and despicable. Journalism ceasing to be an unglamorous
job about executing observatory faculties to let others draw conclusions for
themselves is cosmically worse, in the exact same way that rape is deplorable
and despicable, but a situation where defense attorneys view it as their job
to railroad people accused of rape without executing their best possible legal
defense is cosmically, immeasurably far worse.

~~~
nkozyra
Journalism - good journalism, anyway - is constrained by rules and best
practices to do exactly what you describe. And many journalists consider that
_alone_ to be "doing good." And I agree.

Bias is inevitable, even given the constraints. Resource allocation to
stories, physical space and dealing constraints, advertisers ... so many parts
of the business and reality of producing journalism make the ideal
unachievable. The goal is to be as close as possible.

The BIGGEST problem is journalists are now highly visible social media
presences. Their casual pseudo personal accounts give an eye into the
thoughts, preferences and opinions of journalists. And that brings their
potential biases to the forefront

~~~
raxxorrax
The people with the best opinions have the most ad-blockers. So why write
stuff they would click?

------
tomp
this works: [http://archive.is/0Vyx0](http://archive.is/0Vyx0)

~~~
Digit-Al
Also: [https://outline.com/btGuzC](https://outline.com/btGuzC)

------
pcmaffey
People mistake a desire for politically moderate journalism with objective
journalism.

How do you objectify atrocities, corruption, lying etc without coming across
as politically opposite the perpetrators? The simple act of reporting becomes
political.

------
seneca
It died in a wave of post-modernist thought crashing on the west. Post-
modernists genuinely believe that objectivity is impossible. You'll see it in
this very comment section, I'm sure.

And, interestingly, at the core of it they're right. It's impossible for a
human being to be truly objective. The value is in the pursuit of that ideal
though, like many others, not in expecting to perfectly attain it. People seem
to have lost that idea.

~~~
shkkmo
Are you saying that the impossibility of objective truth is objectively true
but effectively useless?

~~~
seneca
I don't think I said anything objective truth, if it read that way I did a
poor job.

I am pretty far from believing that there is no objective truth. I was simply
saying that there is merit to the idea that human beings themselves can not
communicate objectively. Wittgenstein talked about it in a way I tend to agree
with. Post-modernism runs wild with his ideas and ends up at things like
"there is no objective truth".

------
maxfan8
I can’t seem to load this page (getting infinite redirects from
[https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/15/how-
obje...](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/15/how-objectivity-
in-journalism-became-a-matter-of-opinion) <->
[https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/16/how-
obje...](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/16/how-objectivity-
in-journalism-became-a-matter-of-opinion))

Also looks like Wayback Machine is experiencing these redirects as well:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200716120005/https://www.econom...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200716120005/https://www.economist.com/books-
and-arts/2020/07/15/how-objectivity-in-journalism-became-a-matter-of-opinion)
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200716120005/https://www.econom...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200716120005/https://www.economist.com/books-
and-arts/2020/07/15/how-objectivity-in-journalism-became-a-matter-of-opinion)

~~~
wazoox
Works for me, see [http://archive.is/3Nn1P](http://archive.is/3Nn1P)

------
cik
The increasing integration of the news cycle and social media serves to
opinionize objectivity. If the notion of social media is tribes, and tribal
adherence/management/connectivity managed by upvotes and downvotes one can
logically assume "engagement" on social media if tracked by upvotes just
exacerbates this example.

It would be more interesting if engagement on the newsroom side were met by
the combination of actions (i.e up, down, retweet, reads, etc). At the same
time that ultimately means that articles are now aiming for engagement - at
the very least confrontational opinions and thoughts would be measured as
"interesting".

This is dangerous thought control popularized.

------
rdtwo
I wonder how we’re going to teach kids about goods sources. When the real news
comes from blogs and tweets and the garbage comes from “news” agencies. I
don’t think it’s really possible to filter out what’s real and what’s fake
-perhaps it never was.

------
rjkennedy98
Of course we have to get rid of objectivity, otherwise people couldn't claim
obviously false assertions like publishing an op-ed “puts black @nytimes staff
in danger.”

In the spirit of the new AP guidelines which say “Do not use racially charged
or similar terms as euphemisms for racist or racism when the latter terms are
truly applicable,” let's have the same criteria for "Stalinism".

What's going on is pure Stalinism.

~~~
pnw_hazor
The concept of objectivity is being attacked as being of white-supremacy
culture or whiteness.

[https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-
whit...](https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-white-
supremacy-culture-training/)

------
JanneVee
> The final reason for the turn against objectivity is commercial. The shift
> away from partisanship a century ago was driven partly by advertisers.
> Today, as ad revenues leak away to search engines and social networks,
> newspapers have come to rely more on paying readers. Unlike advertisers,
> readers love opinion.

Readers love opinion? How do they know this? Is it because Ezra Klein said so
in the following sentences, that people want to be coddled by their media?

~~~
amanaplanacanal
It seems obvious. Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham are the top rated “news”
programs. All are opinion shows, not straight news.

~~~
JanneVee
Just because some opinion shows "top rated" it doesn't necessarily mean that
"news reader" audience like to be treated the same way. Right? Somewhere I
would like to have a little more qualification to that a "reading audience
likes to read opinions".

------
Rochus
Publishing opinions and assumptions has always been cheaper than proper
research. Obviously a large part of the content is also a "reuse" of other
content (in plain language "copied"). The peak of this development is, in my
opinion, when journalists even interview each other (instead of the actual
sources). I no longer read the newspapers for this reason. The trees could be
saved for better things.

------
cowpig
This article is really interesting, but I think an important part of this that
it didn't discuss is misinformation.

The Chinese[1] and Russian[2] governments are known to be engaging in
misinformation at a scale never seen before, and across geographic boundaries.
Many other misinformation operations are also in force.

Meanwhile, the primary source of news for a significant portion of the globe
does little to combat it[3]. In fact it has an explicit policy of treating
falsehoods the same as truth.

That was never possible before the age of information, and I think it changes
the landscape of news enough that it merits a place in this discussion.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/national-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/national-
security/russian-propaganda-skripal-salisbury/)

[3] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akz7qa/facebook-
finally-a...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akz7qa/facebook-finally-
agreed-to-a-civil-rights-audit-and-surprise-surprise-it-failed)

~~~
Aunche
It's ironic that you listed the Wikipedia entry as evidence the 50 cent army
is engaging in disinformation at an international scale. The only cited source
for this describes a Huffington Post commenter disagreeing with an article and
the author claiming that the commenter is a paid Chinese shill.

~~~
cowpig
Here are some more sources:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-built-a-
twitter...](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-built-a-twitter-
propaganda-machine-then-let-it-loose-on-coronavirus)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-wuhan-writers-
life-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-wuhan-writers-life-during-
the-outbreak-censorship-misinformation-and-
anger/2020/07/01/f2919df6-ab4a-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/world/asia/china-hong-
kon...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/world/asia/china-hong-kong-
propaganda.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/05/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/05/19/the-chinese-government-fakes-nearly-450-million-social-
media-comments-a-year-this-is-why/)

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-twitter-
disinformat...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-twitter-
disinformation/twitter-takes-down-beijing-backed-influence-operation-pushing-
coronavirus-messages-idUSKBN23I3A3)

~~~
Aunche
I don't disagree that China engages in global disinformation. I wouldn't have
any problem with your comment if you had originally listed any of the sources
above instead of the Wikipedia entry for the 50 cent army. My issue is that
people on Hackernews and Reddit claim that anyone who says something that can
remotely be interpreted as defending China must be a 50-cent shill. These
supposed fighters of disinformation don't even bother to check whether is any
evidence that the CCP is paying people to comment on English websites.

------
m1aw
I have been search for quite a while for a service that I could subscribe
(pay) to get a list of high quality, information dense, writing, about current
world events.

I haven't yet found anything that I would be satisfied with. I looked at
Substack but most journalist there seem to be basically running blogs.

~~~
crazygringo
I mean, that's the _Economist_ , literally the publication this article is
from.

There's literally no other English-language news publication for a general
educated readership that is higher quality, denser, and focused on the whole
world rather than any single country.

~~~
m1aw
I read the Economist from time to time, never subscribed, but always seems to
be a bit longer, trying to give some sort of opinion even if very politically
unbiased then I would want.

I straight up just want to get a list of things that happened and some context
information. I can do research on the topic if I find worth the time.

------
gHosts
Supposedly [https://www.britishpathe.com/](https://www.britishpathe.com/) was
an icon of journalistic objectivity in it's day.

Today it looks like an icon of British Imperialist jingoism.

------
Guy2020
When journalism is paid for primarily by corporate sponsors, the premise of
"objective journalism" is absurd. People have to pay for their news if they
wish to have the slightest hope of it being objective, but with the ubiquity
of free content, paying for journalism now seems like an unwelcome deviation
from the norm in the eyes of many. Ad sponsored journalism, and media in
general, has poisoned the well. When you are used to getting something for
free, it feels wrong when you have to pay for it. This cripples alternative
media that isn't reliant on corporate sponsors...thus the ecosystem for
"objective journalism" is weak.

The current environment, with respect to the aforementioned incentives, makes
objectivity difficult -- not to mention the political/economic instability
which adds tons of fuel on this fire.

~~~
xamuel
I sometimes wonder what the authors of the U.S. constitution would think about
the modern "press". I wonder whether in some alternate universe the
constitution could have been interpreted in such a way that special
protections for the "press" only apply to the LITERAL press, i.e., to those
who physically print news onto paper with a printing press. The world could be
a lot different today if that's how our interpretation of the constitution had
turned out (such a world would be better in some ways, maybe worse in others).

A physical newspaper has a natural tendency to incentivize payment models
where the reader pays for the paper; a physical newspaper is much harder to
alter after-the-fact; and a physical newspaper lends itself to a daily news
cycle which gives writers time to think more carefully about what they write
(with "Extra" editions being reserved for truly rare occasions like war
breaking out or presidential assassinations).

~~~
shkkmo
The constitution doesn't have any special protections for the "press".

Generally, the courts have fairly consistently held that there is no
constitutional differentiation between journalists and non-journalists in
protection of free speech.

Special privileges and rights for the press are granted by means other than
the constitution.

~~~
xamuel
Gosh, thanks. I never cease to be amazed at my own ignorance. So I guess that
makes all the rhetoric about "the fourth branch of government" even sillier
than I already thought it was. (If journalism were to be a fourth branch, then
it ought to have some "checks and balances", but right now it seems to have
about as many "checks and balances" as Xerxes the God-King of Persia...)

~~~
Nasrudith
Well of course it lacks checks and balances - it doesn't have any legislative
power. To pretend otherwise is to conflate state power with personal rights.
States don't have rights.

------
matt_s
There is bias in selection of what news to print/air as well, I think that is
more of a problem than objectivity inside of articles. Balance should come
from covering sides of an issue, presenting facts, but from maybe multiple
angles.

Social media has brought about a factor of being first. First to report that
so-and-so athlete signed with a team will trend better than an in depth or
behind the scenes analysis on what happened.

Maybe news companies should form a scoring system of sorts that they will hold
themselves and each other to regarding journalistic integrity/objectivity. A
certification of some kind.

They could offer that to social media companies as a way to filter the un-
certified junk. Some people might pay for that.

------
hirundo
It's not new that news outlets aren't very objective. It is new that so many
no longer aspire to be so. That aspiration has a lot of value, particularly
where we fail to attain it.

Two other areas where the same is true: color blindness and meritocracy. These
things are worth striving for, especially where we fail at them. The recent
trend of dismissing these things even as worthy goals is damaging to our
collective pursuit of virtue.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/0Vyx0](https://archive.is/0Vyx0)

------
martincmartin
This exact same URL was submitted 13 hours earlier here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23853239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23853239)

Why wasn't the second submission redirected to the first? There's something
about Hacker News submissions I don't understand. :(

------
tgv
And like that, an unholy alliance between left-wing and right-wing agitators
and ad-buyers puts objectivity in the press at stake, and with it the future
of democracy.

------
Digit-Al
I've thought a lot about the plight of newspapers, but still struggle to get
my thoughts into black and white. I apologise if this ends up overly wordy
and/or makes no sense at all.

The way I see it the newspapers are now facing an existential crisis, and I
personally see no easy way forward for them. Print sales have been on the
decline for the last 20 years and with it a decline in their ability to sell
valuable advertising. I think we all know that newspaper prices are subsidised
by advertising, so falling advertising sales, will inevitably lead to a rise
in newspaper prices.

With online advertising dominated by the big internet companies that leaves a
small slice of the pie for the newspaper publishers, and correspondingly a
need to chase the algorithms to try to get clicks. This, inevitably, is
leading to a race to the bottom to chase every last penny of advertising.

The only way to save themselves is to get people to pay for journalism, but
this presents many obstacles. Nobody wants to pay for anything on the internet
- we have all been trained to expect everything for free. Even those of us who
are willing (and financially able) to pay for journalism now have an
expectation of being able to access a variety of sources and won't necessarily
want to pay for subscriptions to a variety of publications. Far too expensive.
Unfortunately, a paid news aggregation site seems like a pipe dream right now.
No publication wants to lose their brand under someone else's banner; and you
can't really blame them for that.

Even if you could find a way, no one would be able to agree how payment should
work. A payment per article click would just lead to a similar situation to
today, with click-bait headlines designed to draw you into clicking on poor
quality articles. We all know that micro-payments haven't managed to make any
kind of traction.

So we have the current situation where those publications that do have quality
journalism have a hard time getting reader attention away from a deluge of
click-bait articles designed to stir base emotions so they will be shared
widely by incensed readers, thus earning more money. Those that can are having
a hard time finding funding, usually relying on a mixture of advertising,
begging for reader donations, and paywalls.

Meanwhile, the industry as a whole is on a slow death spiral whilst readers
are begging for ways to get articles from a wide variety of sources at a fair
price, but no one can think of any feasible way to offer this.

That's my own personal, probably biased and non-objective, view on the
situation. What do you all think? Am I right? Wrong? A complete idiot? I'd
love some feedback.

Something else I'd love to know: how many of you out there have subscriptions
to one or more news publications or make donations to a small news
publication?

------
trabant00
What is up with this nihilism?

Ofc there is no such thing as perfect objectivity, democracy, justice, etc.
But it's critical to strive for all these things!

"Media has never been objective or impartial so might as well go for my
political/moral stance and destroy everything else." Fight wrong with wrong,
eh? No wrong tactics only wrong targets? This is progressive and "on the right
side of history"?

Don't go down that path, this is not what US ideals stand for. And yes, they
are ideals, dreams, I know, but they make a huge difference when compared to
what I lived under communism in eastern EU. The world is watching and copying
everything it sees in the US. What you do matters more than you think.

------
raxxorrax
> but to many the distinction between right and wrong now seems obvious. A new
> generation of journalists is questioning whether, in a hyper-partisan,
> digital world, objectivity is even desirable.

They are part of the polarization because they profit from it and I think they
are entertainers instead of journalists. They know how to channel the hysteria
and lust to condemn. Maybe not by experience, but their metrics certainly
would show it. Some moderately serious youtube channels are more in line with
facts and many online articles became profoundly lacking. Granted, it was the
users that clicked them. And certain topics were clicked by all political
factions. Racism and sexism are popular topics here. Having an opinion doesn't
need any qualification, so those topics can reach anyone. Engagement shows
these articles are much more popular than boring politics.

Of course the more left or libertarian inclined journalists deliver the better
content than their conservative contemporaries with few exceptions. But I
think it is the older generation that created that image.

> American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is
> a failed experiment,” tweeted Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer-winning 30-year-old
> now at CBS News

This price is probably given by click rate. So the most outrageous claim wins.
Again, I can name bloggers that could compete... no, that are vastly more
poignant to the matter at hand. Seriously, read the articles, they aren't
really good, but judge yourself.

> unconscious bias

gas-lighting, original sin or completely useless information. It is like
discussing free will where the quality of the wine is important, not the
result. I think to have bias is completely fine, but I can still separate my
perception of facts from my opinion. That isn't actually too hard. Won't ever
be perfect, but beating online journalism isn't hard.

> One is Donald Trump’s rise and the challenges it has posed to traditional
> reporting.

I think the press is vastly responsible here too. It may actually be a good
idea to vote a president the "4th estate" is critical of. An angle I would
think is beyond Pulitzer price winners of today.

> Objectivity has been “turned into a cartoon”, he said. Better to aim for
> values such as fairness, independence and empathy.

Sure, here bias wouldn't matter...

A few journalists still try at least. They often don't have large twitter
followings but you are always shown a new perspective if you read their
editorials, which indeed do give context to their articles. The perspective of
the conventional journalist is utterly mundane in contrast.

> Amid more diverse recruitment

More racist recruitment is the objective description. Because race matters
here. For most people it doesn't.

> The final reason for the turn against objectivity is commercial

Back to the start. Why did some journalists condemn Fox News for being a scam?
Ah yes, none of you are in a position to do so anymore...

