
Why everyone hates the mainstream media - elsewhen
https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hates-the
======
TheMightyLlama
I can't stand it because it's not 'news'. It's the latest hot topic which is
subsequently politicised to form part of the latest narrative. And
unfortunately the political narrative up until most recent events has been
intentionally divisive.

This is not news, it's control with a hammer.

Let's take a look at any given nation state. In its day to day life it has
many many events which are of interest. National holidays, regional holidays,
state level events, laws being passed... etc.

To my mind each of these is an event and report worthy. But no, we spend the
majority of our time being guided by the nose from one emotionally evoking
non-story to the next.

~~~
giardini
TheMightyLlama says> _" It's the latest hot topic which is subsequently
politicised..."_<

Yes. MSM _generates_ its own narrative to fit left-wing politics. Most, if not
all, of the narrative is false. E.g., "Russian influence of USA politics" is
now a dead topic to the press, abandoned for the next false narrative.

So MSM lie and lie again, generating a series of (coordinated) lies (usually
based on the lies of others so they have some form of deniability) in an
attempt to overwhelm and mislead. And the narrative is indeed very confusing
to readers. Thankfully it cannot withstand the scrutiny of reporters,
publishers, congressmen and citizens who use the "Five Ws" to investigate. But
that takes time and real effort. Lying is as easy for a MSM reporter as it is
for a 4-year old child. Investigate? Well, that takes time and sweat and
besides, investigation would not support what they (the MSM) believe!

After awhile you begin to recognize when the MSM has abandoned their previous
topic and moved to a new narrative topic (a new lie). They don't even try to
tie up the loose ends of their failed arguments/claims, they simply abandon
the whole narrative topic and move to the next. And you learn to ignore them.
But dealing with alarmed friends/coworkers is always a difficulty.

~~~
ecf
> Yes. MSM generates its own narrative to fit left-wing politics.

Did you pick up that talking point from Fox, also a member of MSM?

------
hotz
Maybe if the facts of the story was more important than the narrative or
opinion of the writer, people wouldn't hate them so much. Everything feels
like an undercover opinion piece. People want to know what's going on and not
be manipulated into what they should be thinking.

------
baldfat
I have no idea why people have a hard time comprehending that facts are always
seen through opinions and worldviews from people who are all unique and have
unique interpretations of what they observe. Everything is bias and eye
witnesses of one event will have different descriptions of what is happening.

Also why do people struggle with basics like primary, secondary and tertiary
sources? They expect all three to be one and the same.

~~~
fzeroracer
There's been this large push on the internet towards this idea of complete
objectivity from my experience. Reviews shouldn't be about your experience, it
should be about the product. News shouldn't be about perspective or opinion,
it should be about objective fact. You can't tell one side of a story without
being perfectly impartial about the other (even if the other is completely
nonsensical). The problem with this is that you delude yourself into thinking
that you're somehow more objective or logical, which then just makes your own
bias cloud your view further because obviously anything that doesn't fit into
your world view is illogical.

As you've mentioned the interpretation and context matters a lot. Every site,
video etc has some sort of bias associated with it and some sort of narrative
it's trying to push. That's the nature of humanity, the key thing is
understanding what it's trying to do and balance that out with other sources
that have different perspectives.

The mainstream media has a very obvious bias towards the status quo, for
example. That much should be apparent because the mainstream media was born in
the status quo and movement away from it will harm them. Alternative sources
of media often have a bias towards a very specific narrative and will shape
their entire channel / site etc around that narrative.

The thing that annoys me the most about this situation is that people
automatically take said alternative sources at face value because they
conflate non-MSM == higher truthiness when usually there's just as much bias
there as anywhere else, it's just bias you agree with.

------
quietbritishjim
The "mainstream media" encompasses such an enormous breadth of different
things that any analysis of it would be unhelpful, and comments here are
likely to be just as unproductive. One person will say something while
thinking about Fox News while another posts a response refuting it while
thinking of The Economist and a third replies with something else while
thinking of The Guardian.

Edit: the article is actually quite interesting (yes I did originally comment
before reading it!), although I disagree with some bits of it (e.g. maybe
they're annoyed you missed a story that they read about elsewhere because it
suggests there are other big stories you missed that they never found about).
But it's not about "mainstream media" in general but a small particular part
of it. Which is fair enough, and I don't think the title needs updating. But
most or all of the comments here are generalising about the whole of the
mainstream media, not just the particular type discussed in the article, in a
way that I still think is unproductive.

------
BiteCode_dev
Even if you hate the mainstream media, they are at least a good source to tell
you:

\- what the big players want you to care about

\- what the people care, or will be made to care about

\- what are the current economical and moral powers fighting to influence us

------
RickJWagner
Why do I hate the mainstream media?

You only have to look at a famous photo to see. It's the one of Anderson
Cooper standing in a flooded ditch, water up to his chest, while a cameraman
stands feet away on flooded level ground-- with water up to his ankles.

That sums it up. And it's not just on one side or the other.

~~~
ardy42
> You only have to look at a famous photo to see. It's the one of Anderson
> Cooper standing in a flooded ditch, water up to his chest, while a cameraman
> stands feet away on flooded level ground-- with water up to his ankles.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-
hurricane/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-hurricane/)

> Photographs document CNN's Anderson Cooper faking the depths of Hurricane
> Florence floodwaters.

> Rating: Miscaptioned

> ...However, the various available clips of the program document that the
> waters in the immediately surrounding area were both fairly deep and quite
> variable. As Anderson noted during that broadcast, his taking two steps
> backwards from where he was standing would have caused him to sink in neck-
> deep water:

> Cooper also noted that the floodwaters had actually receded significantly
> before he began his report, and that although he could have stood in a
> higher-level adjacent roadway where he might have remained drier, he would
> have risked interfering with emergency vehicles and others attempting to
> traverse flooded roads.

> So while Cooper might have been able to find a somewhat drier spot to report
> from and instead chose one that provided a visually dramatic appearance, he
> wasn’t misrepresenting or “lying” about the general state of the flood as
> seen in the finished program. And his positioning seems “fake” only when
> contrasted with that of the camera crew’s, who obviously could not operate
> under the same conditions as Cooper and had to be situated either on higher
> ground or on platforms that kept them and their equipment above water.

------
nerdbaggy
Fear Based Media. That is why I can’t stand the main stream news.

------
giardini
Mainstream media have abandoned the "Five Ws" style of reporting events:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws#cite_note-
Hart-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws#cite_note-Hart-1)

I hope news services that adhere to this style will survive, but they face a
difficult struggle with the political propaganda engines that dominate the WWW
today.

------
xtiansimon
Strange title for a story that's a mix of 'how the sausage is made' and an
editor's observations of 'what people want' based on the letters of criticism
he received. I thought this was going to talk about the 24h cable news
industry--that's a dumpster fire.

This a good piece. I worked in graphic design, for years, and it's clear from
the story he's paper news. But let's get to the point of the title, which may
not be delivered by this piece. Who doesn't know there is limited real estate
'above the fold'? Who doesn't know ...

\- not everything is going to fit.

\- there's only so many hours in the day

\- news stories involve reporters gathering the news.

\- news is funded by advertising more than subscribers

We're all consumers. We're all consumers. Today's news is more exciting than
it was yesterday. Tomorrow's news is going to be even better.

Author Andrew Potter is just having a down day.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"The lesson I took from this is that for a great many readers, consuming the
news is not about gaining information.

Instead, it is about _routine_ (hence the calls about the messed up horoscopes
and crosswords) and _identity_ (hence the anger about missing stories they
knew about).

People don’t pick up a daily newspaper to learn new things.

 _They do it to have their habits, lifestyles, values, and identities
validated and reinforced._ "

------
rado
Because it's propaganda, manufacturing consent.

~~~
rini17
That is useless generalization. I offer another one: Our whole civilization is
little more than manufactured consent.

------
bleah1000
The problem with this article is that they made all of these assumptions from
those people who actually called in. But what if this vocal minority doesn't
match the silent majority? You will get the wrong idea of the issues. I don't
know if this is case here, but I think the author is incorrect about what most
people are looking for in news.

I think the biggest problem with the legacy media today is that they are so
incredibly biased, it's hard to get any good news out of them. A lot of major
outlets flat out refuse to cover stories because of bias (the Tara Reid case),
or they focus exclusively on certain kinds of stories (like Obama is bad or
Trump is bad based on the outlet's bias). Many times I've read an article and
realized the journalist is intentionally manipulating the facts, or using
language that implies something happened that didn't happen because they want
to convince you of something, rather than trying to report what actually
happened.

I don't mind a journalist with a bias, I mind when the article reads like some
propaganda piece I would find in a North Korean newspaper.

