It's... pretty incredible that this comment subtly shifts the blame for fake news from networks of coordinated, decentralized, anti-mainstream actors to the mainstream. It's almost like this comment itself is about "enforcing a certain narrative."
Independent "journalists" are the ones causing a lot of the crisis of truth currently underway. Indie YouTube channels garner credibility by pushing an "alternative" viewpoint that invariably means "asserting that the news as covered by all mainstream sources is actually wrong, and that we are the only ones who can provide the Truth."
We need more sites and journalists working with the strict controls and regulations placed on those at WashPo, NYTimes, The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc., not less. I'm no fan of consolidation, but it cannot be argued that the core of mainstream jounralism is at fault for fake news. WashPo's ability to head off a scam story pushed by James O'Keefe is one of the best examples of why the MSM is specifically credible, and why indie journalism is far riskier.
I disagree that the prior comment "subtly shifts the blame" because the blame as to where the fake news lies has never been widely agreed upon. Refer to "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Damn near all sources of news are biased and have political agendas including the mainstream.
If you see independent journalists as pushing an "alternative" view, then you have a reasonable argument: take your facts from the most credible source. But that's not what is happening. Independent journalists are reporting on stories that the mainstream news isn't touching. And they are often doing it with long-form video evidence which is not easy to fake, especially as it is published right after said events happen. Certainly independent journalists are biased and opinionated, many believing in crazy conspiracy theories, but I've never found their opinions or theories to be contageous, and the video evidence is still very valuable.
A good example of news wthout bias (which is so hard to find nowadays) is Steve Lookner's Agenda Free TV on YouTube. There is simply nothing political about it, and it stands in contrast to everything else. And as others have already pointed out, watching news from both sides of the political spectrum (as difficult as that is) is probably the best way to get at the truth.
Finally, while I think James O'Keefe has very questionable investigative methods, there was no scam story - he was using fake information to draw out a journalist so as to extract information from the journalist. There was no evidence he was intending to publish that fake information as a story and he flatly denies that accusation, and WaPo did a follow up correcting the record (good on them).
The only reason people look to those independent journalists is because they notice the manipulation in the mainstream media.
Some people are personally involved in a news event, and they read/watch about it and notice that the report is completely different from what happened, cause and effect are reversed, and the journalist is obviously pushing a narrative that was pre-decided before doing any research.
Other people read news articles and then look at a more primary source and notice that the news was completely wrong. This is easy to do with science articles. But it also happens with video news - I remember when CNN ran a clip of a black woman addressing a riot related to a police shooting. They labeled it as a call for peace. Go on YouTube, and see the next 20 seconds of the clip that they edited out, and she's calling for violence - she's calling for the black rioters to stop trashing their own neighborhood and instead 'take that shit to the suburbs' and trash white neighborhoods. CNN flatly lied and edited in the most blatant way.
Or perhaps you know someone like Jordan Peterson from his work, and then he makes an argument about pronoun usage, and suddenly he's on the news juxtaposed with a word cloud of 'Nazi', 'alt-right', 'sexist', all framed as a question, and designed to create the association below the level of conscious thought.
Others notice obvious selective reporting. E.g. BBC sings to the heavens a story about some Viking warriors found buried 1000 years ago, because scientists thought they were women, but they were buried with weapons. Oh, it demonstrates that women were warriors, hooray feminism! Not much later, the scientists check more closely (DNA or whatever) and realize the warriors were all men. There is no story about this, or absolutely minimal corrections. They didn't lie, they just selectively report.
Or you just look at the poll numbers and note that in all these organizations, the employees poll and donate to Democrates 90-100% of the time. Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
Or you just see the subtle conflation of concepts to create a false impression when you know better. "10 million native Americans were killed by genocide and disease..." When you know 95%+ of them were killed by the disease, you know whoever wrote this intended to create a false impression. It's "In WW2, 6 million Jews died of disease and chemical poisoning" level lying.
Eventually this happens over and over and it because overwhelmingly obvious that this is happening all the time. You can learn about so many things that ought to be reports but aren't, and see so many reports that are twisted in obvious ways.
So where do you go when it's incredibly obvious the mainstream are manipulating you - and are not owning up to their biases? You have no choice; you go find independent journalists with acknowledged biases and try to peice together the truth that way. The media forced you to do it.
I don't have time to reply to this in-depth, but I think that your comment actually elucidated the biggest issue, which is that this demonization and distrust of the mainstream media has conflated commercialized TV news like CNN (which, I'll freely admit, has embraced terrible framing) with actual news outlets (WashPo, Atlantic, NYTimes, etc). There is a difference between what CNN does and what WashPo does.
Also, having worked in a newsroom myself, I can attest to the fact that the firewall between sales/business and the journalists is real and strong. Not perfect, but it does a hell of a job, and is much, much better than the wild west of financing currently in the indie reporting space.
I think you greatly underestimate how much damage even one bad reporter in news organization can be to the entire outfit. During 2016-2018 things were especially bad in the MSM. Even "trustworthy" papers like the ones you listed were "taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay". And I'm supposed to believe they don't have a vested interest in the narrative of their story?
Meanwhile the official OIG report[1] investigated the relationship between our intelligence agencies and reporters. Here's something awful from that report:
> In addition, we identified instances where FBI
employees improperly received benefits from reporters,
including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings,
drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social
events.
Anyone with a critical mind can see that these things stink. They stink from a mile away.
Just another note on your last paragraph - I'm honestly not as concerned about financial corruption from the sales side. That's fairly predictable and orthogonal to most issues that really matter. It's the ideological bent of the reporters and staff themselves that worries me. No different than if the entire media institution was taken over by Scientologists.
I don't see any major difference between NYT, for example, and CNN et al.
Don't have time to list all the eye-poppingly blatant misconstruals I've seen in NYT.
Big recent one that comes to mind is the Covington Catholic story, where the reporters spent several days blaming the children, even though there were multi-hour videos of the whole event that refuted them available from the first day of the controversy.
> Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
This jumped out to me as a statistic so extreme that it couldn't possibly be true: Google has far too many employees to have literally zero dollars donated to the Trump campaign, no matter what you think of the corporate culture. Sure enough, the example is simple because it is false:
I didn't look up the Clinton donations under the same parameters, but I'm sure it's not even close to an even split. Regardless, it's simultaneously ironic and fitting for a comment on a post about disinformation to contain such an easily-falsified statement.
The "zero" statement seems to really be making the rounds, used by Ted Cruz in a hearing, by various media outlets making the case for regulating Google because of their bias... I guess "zero" is just punchier.
It's certainly possible Cruz was wrong or using an unfair interpretation. I feel safe saying that the donations would be skewed at least 90/10 and probably much more.
> Independent "journalists" are the ones causing a lot of the crisis of truth currently underway.
Perhaps your viewpoint relates to what you think the “big” risk are with fake news. If the biggest risks to you are antivaxers and flat earthers then I can see where you’re coming from with YouTube. If you think the biggest risks are those that jeopardize democracies then I think the big money goes into the MSM to shape our ideas and control the narrative.
It’s made especially dangerous because these MSM outlets are given the gravitas of independence even though the writers are biased, fallible people just like the rest of us. And these news outlets are a commercial enterprise who have owners who themselves have agendas. To pretend otherwise is foolish.
Independent "journalists" are the ones causing a lot of the crisis of truth currently underway. Indie YouTube channels garner credibility by pushing an "alternative" viewpoint that invariably means "asserting that the news as covered by all mainstream sources is actually wrong, and that we are the only ones who can provide the Truth."
We need more sites and journalists working with the strict controls and regulations placed on those at WashPo, NYTimes, The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc., not less. I'm no fan of consolidation, but it cannot be argued that the core of mainstream jounralism is at fault for fake news. WashPo's ability to head off a scam story pushed by James O'Keefe is one of the best examples of why the MSM is specifically credible, and why indie journalism is far riskier.