Journalism has become such a tough field. I know a number of people who do OK in it. But I know a whole lot more who do writing-related stuff for companies that sell products.
In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or reading some well researched or written article requires mental effort and investment and almost an appreciation. I personally didn’t appreciate good journalism or writers until I tried writing (mostly technical documents).
I learned two things quickly. Not only did I need to know the subject matter but I needed to convey it in some form that made sense, didn’t just lead to unrelated questions that derail what I’m trying to achieve, and didn’t put the reader to sleep. This is a hard problem, in my opinion.
There are a great many people who would like to know the answer to that question but, for the most part, almost no one has. (Almost because there are a few global brands, especially those that provide financial reporting, that are doing OK but most aren't.
There are a lot of reasons, not least of all that the Internet broke the newspaper bundle that forced people advertising in the classifieds for roommates or the local car dealership advertising a sale to effectively subsidize the paper's prestige foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because where else were they going to advertise?
Plus, you don't need a subscription to SI any longer to keep up with whatever is going on in the world of sports.
The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more effectively.
Unfortunately, such reform is difficult to undertake in a society which mostly doesn't value any of that, and when politicians consider critical thinking among their voters to be detrimental to their own interests.
That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
I think the future will mostly be the best writers being directly supported by people interested in their beat.
I'm not sure how generic media orgs will continue on, but I'd expect the quality to continue to degrade.
Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want.
Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
This is as much of a fallacy as the common "everything is political" refrain. It's nothing but a dangerous rationalization of tribalism which breeds distrust of institutions and disenfranchises political minorities when the entire establishment leans in a particular direction and simultaneously determines the set of "acceptable" or "authoritative" sources. News media, "fact checkers", Wikipedia editors, etc. are implicitly colluding and the results are already manifesting with long term disastrous cultural and political consequences that we are yet to fully witness. There is no excuse for the hyper polarization of modern media, it is a disservice to everyone, and we need to un-normalize the kind of insidious activist journalism that has infested all of our major publications, though the system is self reinforcing at this point.
If doctors just prescribed whatever gave the bigger commission from drug companies, would you ever trust a doctor?
I just know I worked in pharma advertising, and we def identified who helped push product. There's a reason the industry is so heavily regulated, well actually many reasons, but one of them is def because drug companies exploit US insurance practices using copay and other programs which allow. And people doctors definitely have different attitudes when speaking with "Dude with platinum level insurance" and "Dude who has no insurance and works as a waiter".
The Guardian was mentioned above, and is an excellent example of this. The Guardian never made much attempt to hide their social and political biases in the past, but it was still a widely respected and credible newspaper, even to those who didn't necessarily share the same perspectives. Unfortunately, The Guardian, like most other legacy news outlets, went off the rails at some point over the last 5 years. They stopped reporting the news, and starting inventing it. Anyone following their coverage of the Assange saga saw numerous examples of this such as the, "Manafort met Assange in the embassy" fairy tale (including details like what Manafort was wearing to make the lie extra convincing). The problem is, it never happened! Yet still, 4 years later, it sits on their website, no retraction, no correction. The credibility problem is real.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
At the least, maybe explaining the other party’s perspective (as still flawed as this would be).
Ex: situation at the border
Republicans call it a crisis, they cite x, y, z. Their main argument is that illegal immigration causes X....
Democrats argue that the situation is at the root because of Y....
Be out about the biases. We all have biases, deceptively trying to hide them is worse: be completely out with them.
I think this is situation-dependent.
A lot of product review journalism is nigh-worthless because giving robust reviews would cut off the freebies, previews and ad spending they depend on.
It's easy to imagine how that could be more objective: Just stop accepting freebies.
On the other hand, some situations are almost impossible to make objective: If you're a political journalist reporting on a politician doing foo today, and you know previously they promised not-foo, does reporting that context make your reporting more objective or less?
Journalism's financial problems predate "recent years," and perhaps those problems have actually lead to or exacerbated the problems you're complaining about. E.g. investigative journalism is hard, time-consuming, and expensive; an underfunded, short-staffed newspaper may turn to other, cheaper things to fill its pages and attract readers.
Just like one little nugget of anecdata. I used to work at a radio station in a small market that was 1/3 stations run out of the same building by the same owner, an older conservative woman who inherited the business. One station was all-talk (AM) one was country (FM) and the other was classic rock (FM).
All. Three. Stations. Had to carry Rush Limbaugh over the objections of FM program managers. Why? Because Alvina liked Rush. She wanted to blanket the airwaves with his show. And she didn't have to deal with any competition in the little corner of the world where the stations aired. People don't see those decisions, though.
Granted this is a particular egregious example, but by and large TV/radio/cable/etc. programming is at a macro level dictated by upper echelons of the business, not by the front-line reporters or editors.
Print publishing has been gutted over the past 20+ years by a lot of factors. (Radio even longer, see Clear Channel, et al.)
Consolidation. A move from print publishing to web publishing that has required more and more intrusive tracking and obsession with clicks -- not quality, just "how many page views?" and then "how many uniques?" or whatever the metric du jour happens to be. I've been on the publishing side and corporate side, and I've never once heard a company factor quality of content into its advertising decisions. Which means it's a race to the bottom -- not in terms of bias, but in terms of "what gets eyeballs?"
People love to bitch about the quality of journalism, etc. but yet... they keep consuming it. They certainly don't want to pay for good journalism. Not as individuals, not with corporate marketing dollars. If an ad buyer can get 10x the clicks and leads with crap than they can get with well-reasoned and well-researched content? They'll buy crap every time. And blame the journalists/press/publications for the quality and then do it all over again.
Not to mention the effects of Google and Facebook, which are hard to understate.
Google has done a huge number on publications that initially managed to navigate the print -> online model. Its dominance on online ads has done a lot to harm publications, and not only monetarily. Facebook has trained people to expect their information funneled through their feeds and has inserted itself between the audience and publications. Traffic that used to come directly to the publication now funnels through Facebook -- or never actually arrives at the publication at all. Hard to make a buck that way.
This isn't even getting into consolidation of local newspapers by conglomerates and private equity[1].
If front-line journalists are biased one way, I assure you the upper management through ownership are biased in the other direction by and large, excepting (perhaps) some social issues where bean-counters have seen that the winds have changed and it's more profitable to be visibly progressive vs. visibly conservative.
I went corporate a number of years ago because the writing was on the wall. If I'd stayed in publishing as a freelancer / writer / editor it would be years of paddling faster to make the same money. Companies didn't give two shits about quality, just shove something out the door that would play on social and/or SEO. If you think the people doing the work are deciding to embrace that, you're sorely mistaken.
[1] https://prospect.org/health/saving-free-press-private-equity...
"It investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, examples of people working toward solutions. It focuses not just on what may be working, but how and why it appears to be working, or alternatively, why it may be stumbling. Using the best available evidence, it delves deep into the how-to’s of problem solving, often structuring stories as puzzles or mysteries that investigate questions like: What models are having success reducing the dropout rate in public schools? How do they actually work? What are they doing differently than others that’s resulting in a better outcome?"
https://medium.com/@soljourno/what-is-solutions-journalism-c...
Secondly, most of the problems facing publications are market forces that aren't going to go away just because the person at the helm does care about quality.
There are publications that succeed by the skin of their teeth. LWN for example. But that's a pretty rare, niche example that would be very difficult to replicate.
It'd be like the olden days when random people would print and distribute pamphlets like "Common Sense".
It's important to understand the causal direction here. As the industry took hit after hit while the internet gained dominance, media outlet like Fox News pioneered highly opinionated reporting & commentary, and it worked. Viewers & readers were more attracted to content that raised an emotional response. There's blame to put on the industry, but I can't separate that from the how the internet changed the economics of news media & how that mixed with human nature.
Incidentally, if you're looking for a good source of non-opinionated reporting, Reuters is probably one of the best. It tends to be more straightforward factual reporting, and I can't find any media ratings that place it outside the center/minimal-bias zone.
I could start an online paper about my local town and write purely objective stories. "Town council meeting today went as expected, complicated issue without clear solution continued unsolved". That probably won't get very many readers though. For one thing, relatively few people live in my town so few people will care. For another, the internet has conditioned people to get news for free, so the only way to monetize results in getting very little money (e.g. ads) from each reader, and, as just established, we'll have few readers because the town is small.
The revealed preference of news readers is to look at outrageous stuff and polemics. Get involved in a culture war about who did what why and what it means - that could attract millions of readers who you can slightly monetize to earn enough to get by. Do real journalism and few people will read it and they won't pay you won't for it... So...
I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. I don't pay for news either. I read what comes up on twitter, hackernews, linked to by friends, etc. I have an ad-blocker and I skip whatever content has a paywall that I can't bypass. I realize I'm part of the problem, but in a "tragedy of the commons" way. That is, the world would be better if everyone paid for and paid attention to primarily local and "hard-hitting" fair journalism, but there would be zero perceptible positive change if I switched to that model and perceptible negative costs for me for doing so.
Obviously there's bias, but that's the point: journalism has never and should not be "this person said 1 thing, someone else said a different thing". It's the path of "should you drink bleach? Scientists say no, this random nutbag says yes."
(Whoever pays the bills decides the content.)