This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
Some are obviously “go out and find what you want someone to be saying”.
This is a very poorly-kept secret in journalism, with certain genres (entertainment, politics, business press-releases, fashion industry) being especially prone. See pg's "Submarine" essay. The practice isn't entirely bad or unethical --- obituaries in particular are frequently written in advance with details filled in on publication. For particularly notable names, they're updated regularly. Similarly election outcomes and major technological events (e.g., space mission launches / milestones). It's much easier to have something prepared than to start from scratch as the event occurs, and these in particular have predictable deadlines.
From the 1980s through the aughts, the term "fake news" applied to VNR and ANR (video and audio newsreels), which were pre-packaged "news" segments for television and radio prepared by corporations and/or PR firms. See: <https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news>
But in other cases, especially where something's being sold, it's at the very least deceptive.
I'm struck by the parallel to typing the right prompt into GPT-3.
It also sounds like a Wikipedia editor's job
If these Twitter journos had better spelling and grammar, they would likely be indistinguishable from GPT-3 output.
News consumers no longer need the journalist middle man, they can go directly to the source of the news.
Journalists should now, more than ever, be focused on traditional journalistic efforts. Succumbing to the temptation to just "find a story on Twitter" is just cementing the fact traditional media is dead and the era of the citizen journalist is here.
If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on twitter or a participant in the story itself.
That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, and make note of how the sources are identified. I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.
IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth become part of the war.
But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have always been doing.
[1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme for a reason.
Your point seems to be, what, that people who disagree with you are posting on the internet? Should we make the same criticism of Substack too?
Am I just supposed to know that the string "/culture/" in the URL means it isn't real news and I shouldn't trust it? Even as a big proponent of media literacy, that seems unreasonable. News organizations must be aware that people will believe them when they publish things.
Are you seriously arguing in good faith that you were fooled into thinking that this was a piece of objective journalism?
You are providing a perfect example of my point, which I'll endure the downvotes to point out: rather than see an opnion article with which you disagree and just accept is as an inevitable result of large populations of people living together, you feel the need to explain the disagreement as some kind of existential flaw with the whole field of journalism. Then you feel justified in extending that "mistrust" engendered from Vox authors writing articles you don't like to pieces of real journalism providing real facts with which you also disagree.
And so the whole field of journalism is sullied in your mind, simply because (in this case) you don't like the fact that some people think black mermaids and elves are kinda OK and want to defend their casting against those who don't.
But you seem to be saying it's not journalism at all. So what I'm trying to understand is:
* What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
* Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
* Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Right now I can't answer any of these questions, which makes the entire edifice seem more like a trick than a real distinction. It's not obvious to me why a news organization would want to publish bad articles which don't live up to their journalistic standards in the first place.
This becomes a problem when they go and put it on the same website as "serious" journalism...
> What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
For the NYTimes, anything from the opinion section, anything the second half of the category list (Arts, Books, Style, Food, Travel, Magazine, etc.) I would consider is held to a lesser standard than the first half (World, U.S., Politics, N.Y., Business). Also, articles in those sections were less likely to be about current events specifically, and might include reviews, interviews, and other content that isn't "of the day". The Opinion section is actually a nice divider.
> Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
Outside of explicit tagging of Opinion pieces as such, no. In the old days, in paper form, you generally knew that anything in section A was solid journalism, other than the opinion pieces in the back, and in Column 1 of the front page. Section B (Local news), was usually okay, but could get a little weak further to the back. Section C (Sports) was good on game facts, but other stuff could be weak. Section D (Business) was usually good again, but was much more likely to also include PR fluff pieces and other similar stuff. Section E and beyond (Arts/Calendar, Comics, etc.) was all less serious. Parade Magazine, an insert that showed up in many publications across the US was complete garbage.
> * Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Most people knew about the opinions section, it was pretty clear back then that the paper didn't stand behind those pieces, and they only represented their author's opinion. The feel of each section and the advertisements included therein did give some sense of the importance of the section.
I have felt for some time that the loss of the metadata around opinion pieces has done real damage to Journalism, and that it would be good for publications to come up with some standard for identifying that, to reduce the instances of breathless reports of "The Washington Post is a socialist rag!" after a single opinion piece by an actual socialist is published.
On a more serious note, Twitter has been a very valuable source of info about the Ukraine War in general, which also makes it ripe for psyops from the Russian and Ukrainian governments. Several people on Twitter are very reliable sources, much moreso than the official state sources, and they get the news out faster. It makes sense for those sources to be used by journalists.
“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
> Throughout the summer, the Network Contagion Research Institute noticed a spike in extremist activity related to the Dutch protests on Twitter, Telegram and 4chan, the message board on which conspiracy theories spread largely unchecked
The source for that statement is quite clearly NCRI. It's reporting news about twitter. It's not looking to twitter for news.
And frankly your attempt to blur the distinction is exactly the kind of memery that I was takling about. The NYT is your enemy, so you feel justified in spinning arguments to "attack" them.