The main issue I have woth journalism in the digital, and social media age, is the sometimes utter misrepresentation of primary source material. One recent example was the article about UPS driver salaries, which based the headline on the UPS CEOs statememts. The reasons why stuff like this comes of as manipulative or agenda-pushing is:
- it ignores that the salary agreememt was signed by UPS as well, hence it was acceptable from a business point of view
- people tend to only read the headlines, and this headline created the impression of over paid UPS drivers and played of peoples jealousy
- the journalist did not reference the publicly available salary agreement, nor did the salary maths themselve or compare the results to industry salaries
Throw in that journalists simply cannot have the necessary domain knowledge to properly understand all the subjects they cover, the pressure to generate content, clicks and hence revenue, well, that means publishing content, and headlines, that have the potential to generate outrage / engagement is a very common thing. And that is, at the very least, borderline manipulative, even without any biases or agendas said newspapers or journalists have to begin with.
And that is even ignoring all the outright lying journalists (there were two prominent examples in Germany recently, one made up whole stories and interviews while the other pretended to be jewish to write a jewish opinion collumn). Or the pitfall of constantly two-siding issues. Or the fact that lying with numbers is just extremely easy. Or the clearly manipulative approach of publications like the the New York Post, The Sun or Bild.
- it ignores that the salary agreememt was signed by UPS as well, hence it was acceptable from a business point of view
- people tend to only read the headlines, and this headline created the impression of over paid UPS drivers and played of peoples jealousy
- the journalist did not reference the publicly available salary agreement, nor did the salary maths themselve or compare the results to industry salaries
Throw in that journalists simply cannot have the necessary domain knowledge to properly understand all the subjects they cover, the pressure to generate content, clicks and hence revenue, well, that means publishing content, and headlines, that have the potential to generate outrage / engagement is a very common thing. And that is, at the very least, borderline manipulative, even without any biases or agendas said newspapers or journalists have to begin with.
And that is even ignoring all the outright lying journalists (there were two prominent examples in Germany recently, one made up whole stories and interviews while the other pretended to be jewish to write a jewish opinion collumn). Or the pitfall of constantly two-siding issues. Or the fact that lying with numbers is just extremely easy. Or the clearly manipulative approach of publications like the the New York Post, The Sun or Bild.