True and within articles those experiences can serve to inform, which isn't a bad thing. It's actually sort of the point; interpreting the facts and outputting them through your lens of experience
And generally journalists are aware of their biases and good ones actively work against their impulse to favor one side.
The idea that journalists can be biased is not something the profession was somehow unaware of previously.
In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility.
But of course society is presently at the adolescent phase of realizing you can physically say and do whatever you want...whether bad science and bad journalism are confronted by the social analog of thr prefrontal cortex is uncertain. Maybe repercussions will help (collapse of democracy and global warming being the two most likely)
> In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility
Unless what they are saying (journalists and scientists) conform to the dominate politics of the day. Plenty of major media outlets run stories with anonymous, non-corroborated sources but since those stories fit the desired narrative of their consumers, they get away with it, credibility intact.
A conservative outlet can have corroborated evidence, multiple sources and be chastised strictly on the basis of their conservative angle, while an outlet like The NY Times can publish anonymous op-eds without any corroboration and it doesn’t make a dent in their credibility among the majority of their readers. How many anti-Trump stories feature “anonymous” sources without a single shred of on-the-record corroboration? Yet, since the story confirms the bias of the readership, again, credibility remains intact. The Supermicro story is another example: completely uncorroborated, yet I bet not a single person cancelled their terminal subscription because of it.
Credibility only matters if the writer is going against the biases of their readers.
As far as global warming, plenty of scandals, such as Climategate, but the credibility of the climate-alarmists hasn’t been affected one bit among those that are predisposed to believe that the sky is, in fact, falling. Climategate was a serious scandal that calls into question the entire premise upon which the climate industry is based, yet that probably changed not a single person’s mind. It’s would be like telling Christians that Jesus never existed. It wouldn’t convince anyone who is already a believer. Global Warming is the modern world’s version of “going to hell if you don’t repent.”
Credibility doesn’t matter as long as you affirm fashionable biases.
To be completely fair, this isn’t a leftist phenomenon: plenty of anti-Obama news outlets could play loose with the facts and still have “credibility” with those predisposed to have opposed Obama’s policies. Same for the anti-vax crowd, the anti-GMO crowd and every other crowd where any challenge of their reality is tantamount to sacrilege.
Their interests in efficient delivery of healthcare and effective protection of the environment align with the general population's. Not so their interest in laws restricting the contracting rights of employers.
It's not in the general population's interest for collections of workers to be able to extract wealth from employers by imposing collective bargaining on them. This is Econ 101. You don't raise the standard of living through expropriation of wealth.
In the long run, involuntary transfers of income and other violations of market rights stunt wage growth by reducing the incentive to invest, and to perform well at one's workplace, both of which inhibit growth in productivity.
Wealth can be expropriated in both directions. Employers by default have more power; collective bargaining is just a check on their ability to exploit laborers.
It also doesn't follow that increased incentive to invest in employers translates to higher wages for laborers — why wouldn't employers keep wages stagnant and pocket the money themselves? (In practice, this is often what happens.)
Employers in a market economy have no power in the general sense to expropriate wealth. Their only power is in offering employment terms better than the next better offer. Offering the market rate for a unit of labor is not wealth expropriation. It's compensating people for exactly what their labor is worth.
Force people to pay any more than the market rate for labor, and you're artificially under-valuing investment capital, and thus disincentivizing delayed-consumption/long-term-investment. In other words, you'll be incentivizing people to save/invest less of their income than is optimal for maximum economic development, and it is economic development that is responsible for virtually all reductions in poverty and improvements in quality of life for the general population.
>>It also doesn't follow that increased incentive to invest in employers translates to higher wages for laborers — why wouldn't employers keep wages stagnant and pocket the money themselves?
Employers have to compete with each other for employees. Why else do you think wages would ever increase? I really recommend you study standard economic theories on wage growth, or the economic history of any major country, to better understand the interplay between per capita production and wages. Look at China over the last 20 years, where wages have tripled. There is no force that increases wages as much as economic growth, which hinges almost entirely on investment capital.
