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Americans have lost trust in many of their institutions in good part because, despite their assurances to be the arbiters of truth and science, legacy news outlets and establishment institutions fundamentally misconstrue and misunderstand basic aspects of American life. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs go well beyond the decision by many journalists to flatter themselves into thinking that their task was to save democracy. But the first step towards fixing the problem is for journalists to re-embrace the humdrum conception of their own work that served them comparatively well in the past: to cultivate a healthy distrust of everyone, including those you may secretly believe to be on the right side of history, and report the news without fear or favor.

Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy

Source: yaschamounk.substack.com
#democracy#journalism
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And our industry doesn’t just avoid telling the public about their government and how they can affect it. We often see the act of telling our audiences these things as somehow not objective. We rarely explain the structures of our democracy in ways that let people see how to interact with it, which leaves it instead in the hands of special interests who can bankroll their perspectives, even when they’re actively harmful. Millions of people in this country live downwind of polluting plants, or live in communities that foster ill health because they have been systemically denied full participation in this country’s democratic structures and processes, and the news media has played a role in that. It’s no wonder that democracy in the United States is eroding.

We’ll keep pummeling people with facts that leave out context

Source: niemanlab.org
#journalism
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Since World War II, when a young Walter Cronkite flew out on a 1943 mission with airmen, reportedly commandeering the bombers’ machine guns alongside his fellow reporters, the American soldier and the American journalist have been locked in a collegial embrace. American journalism has always needed the military for access and information, but the military has also come to realize just how much it depends on the press for credibility.

Zoë Hu

Source: thebaffler.com
#journalism#war
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An equally blunt assessment today would conclude that a large part of the digital media, trafficking in fake news and conspiracy theories, is now systematically dishonest. The mainstream press, often owned by big business tycoons, maintains its pretensions to political and ethical responsibility, claiming to be a beacon in the darkness where democracy supposedly dies. But the evidence of its inadequacy and even corruption has accumulated rapidly and ominously during my own three decades in journalism.

The Last Days of Mankind

Source: nplusonemag.com
#journalism
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One reason why credibility is so low is because it’s believed that the wealthy elite billionaires “control” the news and push their personal beliefs. Jeff, you know what helps reinforce that belief? You, the billionaire, elite owner of the Washington Post, stepping in to overrule your editorial team on a political endorsement in a manner that suggests that you wish to put your thumb on the scale in order to maintain more control.

Dear Jeff Bezos: The ‘Hard Truth’ Is That Cowardice Like Yours Is Why People Don’t Trust The Media

Source: techdirt.com
#jeffbezos#journalism
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Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.

Chris Hedges

Source: scheerpost.com
#israel#journalism
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You quote their noxious words, taking them at face value — as beliefs, as “alternative facts” — unable to see how they are instead saying these things to signal their belonging to the cult and cause. The call-and-response of Trump and Vance and their mob is the authoritarian ruler’s loyalty test. Arendt observed in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” Guns, abortion, immigration, and trans rights cannot be the central guideposts in the everyday lives of these people; they are flags to fly. In your quotation and coverage, you salute them.

BuzzMachine

Source: buzzmachine.com
#journalism#sclmb
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I see a much larger problem at work: Journalists and news executives — and I include myself in this critique — were never equipped with the tools of theory and history to inform self-reflection on our field and to imagine alternative means and models of serving our publics.  This is why I hold that simply teaching the craft and skills of journalism in journalism schools is wholly inadequate to the profound challenges in our field. Journalists see themselves as producers of the commodity they call content and they define their value according to their roles in that process of manufacture. They would be better served to also learn from the disciplines of media studies, communication, history, sociology, ethics, and others — empowering them to reimagine and reform our field.

BuzzMachine

Source: buzzmachine.com
#nytimes#journalism
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On Journalism and Principles
Thirteenth in the News Commons series. I grabbed the spottedhawk.org domain after hearing Garrison Keilor read this passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself over Leo Kottke improvising on g…
doc.searls.com
I guess I would say that as journalists our core mission is fundamental honesty with readers. That means always telling readers the truth, an accurate story as nearly as we are able to uncover it and understand it, as well as being transparent with the values, commitments and core beliefs we bring to the work we do. We believe in always being fair to everyone and everything we write about. Fairness is really only another permutation of accuracy. Balance is a construct applied after the fact that is often as not at odds with accuracy. A belief in democratic republicanism or civic democracy has always been at the core of what we do. It’s central to what stories we choose to focus on, it’s a value structure that permeates our organizational approach to what we do. I can’t speak for everyone at TPM. But as founder and still a guiding light, I think our understanding of what journalism is or should be is inextricably connected with democratic republicanism/civic democracy. I don’t think I would say we’re activists for democracy. But to me being on the side of civic democracy is inextricably connected to what we do and who we are. We’re on the side of civic democracy as much as we’re on the side of journalism.
I don’t want to label other journalists. But to the extent many other journalists don’t operate in this way, or understand their job this way, it’s because they work for publications whose business models simply aren’t compatible with this approach to journalism. What we now commonly call “both-sidesism” is rooted in the business structure of most contemporary journalism, specifically the need to have purchase across of wide ideological spectrum of the population.This is especially so in large corporate journalism because the need for scale and advertiser buy-in really requires that access to all parts or most parts of the political spectrum. In a hyperpolarized political culture when one side veers off the democratic rail that inevitably pulls a lot of that kind of journalism with it. I see that as fundamentally a structural reality. This goes back many decades, long before the current moment. It was more workable in a different political climate. But in this one that’s how it works. Journalists think they’re following core journalistic principles. But it’s driven really by business models.
Source: doc.searls.com
#journalism#internet
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But the fact is that journalism is dead. The stupid adage that has underpinned our information age — that Information Is Power — should be taken behind the woodshed and put out of its misery. Information isn’t power. It never was. Unless you have power, information is just information. And in our consumerist-entertainment society, information is just that: entertainment. How else can you look at the terabytes of genocide videos coming out of Gaza daily…just the most horrific things you can imagine posted by real people going through it live…things that only used to be witnessed by survivors of wars and then mostly suppressed and kept inside because of how traumatizing these experiences were to them…are now beamed into our feeds like they’re NFL highlights or something, interspersed with ads and selfies and Marvel movie trailers…with running commentary and outrage reaction clips on podcasts and newsletters and TikToks and quote tweets.

Gaza and the Death of “Information Is Power”

Source: yasha.substack.com
#gaza#journalism
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The dialectic within journalism encompasses what could be termed, on one hand, a politics of erasure and distortion, and on the other, a politics of moral witnessing. The politics of erasure is apparent in how corporate mainstream media disproportionately covers Israel’s aggressive actions in Gaza and portrays Trump as a conventional political candidate rather than an authoritarian threat to democracy both domestically and internationally. This erasure is also evident in how far-right journalism consistently distorts the truth when reporting on issues that conflict with reactionary conservative politics.

Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics: Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance

Source: laprogressive.com
#journalism#sclmb
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But now it’s really tough. So you had a few alternative sites that rose up out of the kind of response to the Iraq War; Salon founded by David Talbot, a very fine journalist, Alternet and others. And they’ve all just been bought up by hedge fund managers or private equity managers or something and destroyed. Same was true with Vice News. It’s tough. It’s very tough to continue. And of course, what is really taking a hit is reporting. There’s just less and less reporting being done. And then you have local newspapers atrophying and dying. You have big city newspapers atrophying and dying. And it’s a very dangerous situation. I would say that it’s one symptom of the death of American democracy. I wouldn’t say, it’s a contributing factor, but it’s not… there are many other factors. The biggest being the kind of what John Ralston Saul calls the corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It’s over.

Chris Hedges

Source: scheerpost.com
#journalism
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It’s hard to imagine an outfit like the Voice today. Gawker captured some of its energy, but we all know how that ended. The Voice was the twentieth century’s most influential alt-weekly, and alt-weeklies have largely gone the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the decimation of advertising dollars wrought by the internet. The paper’s wildly profitable apartment listings and personal ads kept it afloat. Village denizens relied on them for their whole lives: apartments, partners, band members.

Who Will Be the Village Voice of the 21st Century?

Source: jacobin.com
#journalism
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