The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".
It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.
Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable.
It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.
(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)
It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?
Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)
The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.
The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.
The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.
There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent:
https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Glenn Greenwald:
https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians...
> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?
> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.
They're a dying breed.
And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.
If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.
There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.
I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".
Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions.
Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed.
Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.
It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact.
The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.
People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all.
You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?
> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
>Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour.
This is not the definition of a journalist.
>"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
This is written as if reduction of journalistic opinion is the goal. I don't agree this is a goal. I'm not interested in a reduction of subjectivity in journalism. I'm interested in an increase in factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting and analysis. If that comes with 3% journalistic opinion (whatever that means) or 83%, I'm fine with it.
What's not ok is journalistic subjectivity filling in for factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting. However, there are plenty of journalists who are clearly capable of avoiding this issue.
Exactly. But that doesn't mean that journalists (or anyone else, as that's important in many non-journalistic contexts) don't or shouldn't have opinions.
Rather the goal should be to report the facts without bias.
That may sound like hair-splitting, but it isn't. We're humans and we all have opinions, biases and ideas of our own.
But when it comes to reporting news or just facts/results (e.g., revenue figures, safety/efficacy testing results, etc.) the idea is to consciously set aside those biases.
Some do that better than others, which prsents an arbitrage opportunity that allows those with no desire or intention to report honestly/factually to insert blatantly false and/or misleading information.
Quality reporting of news and fact doesn't require a lack of opinion or bias about the subject at hand. Rather it requires the desire, willingness and ability to set aside those things in support of trustworthy reporting.
There are many reasons why that arbitrage opportunity exists, but the existence of opinions on the part of those reporting isn't a major contributor, IMHO.
As the old saw goes, "opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."
If people are running around lying with partisan motivations, the most important thing you can have is a source of information trusted to be at least mostly objective. Someone to take the time to do the investigation and tell you what really happened in any given case, and carry good faith arguments from each side, not institutions that pick a side and defend them no matter what.
Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?
Glenn Greenwald on Trump during Biden inauguration: "Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away." I really dont know what he wanted Trump to do, he was way more critical of Biden and democrats then of Trump last months. Leaving during innaguration without causing issues sounds like exactly what is expected.
But the very same day, he called the "chills" tween inappropriate, claimed that such tweet is overly emotional and equated that tweet with being on public tv. Glenn Greenwald is last person that has any grounds to pontificate about objectivity and bias.