How much do you trust the media to keep you properly informed?
The media exists to keep you properly informed so that you are an educated voter, consumer and activist. Are they doing their job?
by media, are you referring to every media outlet out there? broadcast, cable, digital, print? history of credibility or not? need a qualifier to vote.
"The Media" is a nebulous term for what is actually thousands of individuals and organizations. Don't be fooled into thinking they all share an agenda.
If you don’t follow the news, you are uninformed. If you do, you are misinformed.
I read InfoQ only, so I won’t be misled.
the media does not exist to keep you properly informed. it exists to make money off of your attention.
The media doesn’t have much investigative journalism, it just announces press releases. Local news = announcements from police and city hall, boosterism of local industry (tech and restaurants and wine in the Bay Area) and even some paid reports on an exiting new service. National news = press releases wired from both parties or major industry groups. International news = either press releases from the White House/pentagon or journalism from other countries where the press might actually investigate. Sure it’s a business but more specifically it’s a business to keep people on the edge so they keep coming back to the advertisers. You don’t need investigation for that, so being a mouthpiece that makes everything sound urgent or really zings a political side is the model. Fox News makes everything sound like you’ll be attacked by “others” at any minute. MSNBC makes it sound like the next revelation after the commercial will bring down Trump.
I can tell you as a journalist on the front lines that we do a lot more than rewrite press releases! It’s a very demanding job of weighing thousands of competing data points and trying your best to get to the bottom of what’s happening. I can tell you most of us take this job very seriously
So most mainstream political news we get is not wired from the DNC/RNC? Access isn’t important to news orgs who then have to play the RNC/DNC game? Local news isn’t mostly police reports and boosterism? News orgs still rely on foreign offices for international news? My point was not to devalue actual reporting, but point out that the costly and time consuming investigative work has all been drastically pruned by people like your bosses. We need more investigative and independent journalism, not less. And your demanding job is not the issue as I see it, but the priorities of orgs. Just like a teacher who works hard can’t individually work hard enough to counter the demands of standardized testing. Besides a wire service like Reuters feeding news is actually creating news content... local news or news orgs are not quite the same. None of this is really new anyway. News as a business is always problematic. It’s just more acute now due to changes in the law and changes in competition which favors increased bombastic editorials and sensationalism over investigation or independence.
Nothing denies that there are hardworking motivated journalists like yourself out there who are driven by right reasons. However, its the behemoth media houses that does not inspire much trust given their priorities - money, eyeballs, clicks, affiliation to political parties, loyalty to sponsors and so on.
I trust Reuters and AP but I'm biased
I trust my gut
Just listen to Fox News & CNN discussing any given event in the US. Propaganda rules the day! None of the media houses care about facts and keeping viewers informed.
How do you become informed then?
you've named two cable news channels that never had to abide by the fairness doctrine. npr and pbs are reliable. then reuters. al jazeera too.