A lot of people here are arguing that mainstream media had it coming for them because of bias, arrogance, pushing an agenda, etc. But I want to ask all of you: what replaces it as arbiter of truth? For all of the media's problems and imperfections, they have acted as a quasi-independent institution holding other powerful institutions and individuals in society in check. They have focused popular attention where it was needed to prevent corruption (think Watergate Scandal, Panama Papers, Edward Snowden, and many others).
Their importance to the free distribution of accurate information was such that even the government itself in the form of federal courts and law has repeatedly recognized the privilege the press has in things such as keeping sources secret. They recognized the importance of such a space in keeping America's democracy powerful. Now, the media is completely being driven to the sidelines. With the rise of personal branding, content distribution, and disinformation, this once-independent place to examine society is going under.
For all the pomposity in this piece, the question is quite relevant: what will replace the media as an arbiter of independent information and truth? For now, it seems that the news and content space is being swallowed up by the information networks of various individuals and institutions, each with the focus of pushing their own image rather than coming clean to the public. If you can't trust any of them because all their perspectives are manipulated, have we reached an end to free and independent discourse?
That's over 100 years ago. We can stop pretending that the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden. There is nothing to replace it in that role because it was never in that role. It has always been a tool for one group of powerful people to spar with other groups of powerful people and the truth rarely enters into it.
Maybe in another 100 years historians will figure out what the truth was, but for us today, the truth is whatever gets the most clicks. 20 years ago it was whatever got the most people at home to tune in. 50 years ago it was whatever sold the most newspapers.
The saving grace is that for the vast majority of people it just doesn't matter. Whoever the President is, you'll still have to go to work, pay the bills, buy groceries etc. Not much about your day to day life will change.
I don't read grandparent as saying the media is selfless or perfect, just as saying that it did play an important role in uncovering scandals, and that nothing seems able to replace that role. I don't see that (indisputable) past examples of propaganda and fake news harm that argument.
Your last paragraph seems to imply a kind of quietism, as if it just isn't important whether a country's rulers face constraints and challenges. That isn't true: eventually, bad politics screws the economy, which is why Russia is a poor country.
I don't think you're being very fair. There's no single entity that is "the media." Individual journalists and yes, publications have been at various times principled arbiters of truth. Obviously, there has been quite a bit of sensationalism and yellow journalism as well.
There is currently very well written and researched fact-based reporting. What we lack is consensus. So, the truth is out there currently. But many people don't believe, or haven't heard it. (and, not relevant to the point you're making, but I believe that many people cannot understand the truth in the first place, unless the truth happens to be a simple moral narrative. ie, "one person was bad, and another person was good.")
> That's over 100 years ago. We can stop pretending that the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden. There is nothing to replace it in that role because it was never in that role. It has always been a tool for one group of powerful people to spar with other groups of powerful people and the truth rarely enters into it.
Oh come on. That's like condemning democracy on account of all those people guillotined during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, or the whole field of software engineering on account of the Therac-25. Maybe a few changes have happened in the intervening generations?
The idea that "the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden" is an ideal to be strived for, but like any ideal, there will always people examples of people who fail to achieve it.
Also, there's another ideal that the media there cast a skeptical eye on things, to peel back the paint and expose what's really there underneath it, which is probably more pertinent here. That kind of journalism usually pisses of the fans of whatever the journalist is examining. Fans usually want fluffy puff pieces.
>The saving grace is that for the vast majority of people it just doesn't matter. Whoever the President is, you'll still have to go to work, pay the bills, buy groceries etc. Not much about your day to day life will change.
The fact that the average person has been led to believe the opposite, shows how much power the media really has. If you asked most average people the importance of the office of the President and who holds it, I think it would be ranked pretty damn high. Not that I disagree with you. I think a lot of problems in society could be fixed with an honest retooling of society (but that finding people to do that impartially is as much of a challenge, if not moreso, than actually retooling society).
Why wouldn’t they tell the truth? Why do we need someone else to be arbiter of truth?
Take feminism. Why do we still hear this deceit statistic that women earn .73 cents on the dollar, without any list of the assumptions built into those very gross average? Barring that, why do journalists never put it into perspective? Barring that, why do journalists never interview counterpoints on this topic, when they would always have a feminist on panel if a man gets interviewed? Hence, what does anyone mean with “arbiter of truth”? They are not seeking truth in appearance, let alone in depth.
I understand that this is about power, but, when even a layman can study the underlying science and prove the journalists are blatantly “forgetting to say the big hypothesis that makes the statement a blatant lie”, then your question becomes:
“What can replace media as an arbiter of lies? Who would be capable of misleading more than they do?”
(For the record, media is now trusted even less than congresspeople, with less than 21% Americans trusting them)
> quasi-independent institution holding other powerful institutions and individuals in society in check
The sentiment among an ever growing body of people is that "independant" his has never been less true.
Big media has probably always been heavily biased but had some modicum of professionalism that helped maintain a perception of objectivity. In recent years it feels like they have crossed that line and lost the trust of the people.
An interesting question to ask is WHY has big media been more and more willing to cross that line? I think it comes down to money. Big media's bottom line has been pulled away from them over the last 10 years and so they're getting desperate; More willing than ever before to lean into click bait partisan stories that rile people up.
I agree with your observation about the growing sentiment of distrust, but not your causal claim.
There has been a well-organized and well funded campaign to get people to not trust. It started with the cigarette lobby realizing that they couldn't argue the science, but that science was hard to understand. So they spread doubt and confusion.
that strategy is now well known and practiced globally.
Fox News didn't just happen.
I know a few journalists, and many of them do take their professional ethics very seriously.
And yes, many of them are struggling. And watching others in their field able to make a living selling clickbait.
Who does the shame go to? The people who are tired of starving for upholding standards, or the people who starve them for upholding those standards?
>>> But I want to ask all of you: what replaces it as arbiter of truth?
A strongman.
An idea that I attribute to Imre Lakatos, is that if you strip people of the ability to debate and discern facts, you create a power vacuum that can only be filled by those who can act in the absence of debate and facts, notably thugs and tyrants.
I believe this is the actual motivation behind the "war on truth" and the flood of misinformation.
This is my biggest fear about the media. If they don't come clean and reclaim their integrity (this goes for both left and right outlets), the public will reject them. Discourse will move to blogs, podcasts, private networks, etc. In the process, the laws and protections for journalism will be weathered and may be abolished altogether (who needs those pompous journalists, right?). Then we'll be no better than a propaganda state, where you can be jailed or sued for publishing a perspective that offends or exposes someone.
This is obviously a worst-case scenario, but I think that to prevent anything similar from happening Americans need to step up and pressure their news outlets to do better, and for social media platforms to be choked with regulation until they start preventing manipulative shit from spreading.
>social media platforms to be choked with regulation until they start preventing manipulative shit from spreading.
Manipulation is an unsolved human problem as old as humanity.
The core business model of social media is fundamentally based on manipulation.
Asking social media corporations to protect us from manipulation is salmon asking grizzly bears to protect them from getting eaten. It's contrary to their fundamental nature.
> if you strip people of the ability to debate and discern facts
If you dare to debate and discern the wrong facts, you get a hit piece published on you like Slate Star Codex. Or you get fired like the NY Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr.
It seems some of the media play an enthusiastic part in stripping people of that ability, not in protecting it.
I don't think there is a war on truth. What we are seeing is fundamentally economic. If you can't make money reporting, only activists pushing an agenda will remain. This leads to a justified decline in trust.
Also if you can make money or build a career being an activist...
Many "smart" activists found that with a little faux rage (and in the end, believing their own BS too), all these pundit, policy advisor, and advocacy jobs are there for the taking...
I think you are absolutely right. I can see the fallibility of 'Old World' media as well, but I think those who (actively) try to discredit them are playing with fire.
They're really not though, that's part of their marketing. It seems like there is a long history of news media being used to push agendas, being arrogant, and running politically motivated smear campaigns.
They might occasionally tell the news without opinion but that seems like an added benefit, not their main goal.
What we have now is competition. The replacement for the mainstream media will just be more media and like always, people will have to determine for themselves if something is accurate. It's weird to think you believe our government, our lives, are so fragile that without mainstream media we degenerate into fools led by a strongman.
>>> But I want to ask all of you: what replaces it as arbiter of truth?
If "journalism" is entertainment, but nobody wants to pay for it, then it has no use and we should let it die.
If it's an important resource required by our society, (so that we are not ignorant of whats going on in our neighborhood and world), then it's not entertainment, it's an essential service, and it should be publicly funded like our other essential services.
As we transition to publicly funded "news" (things that happened) we can examine the various formats, and design them to to be easy to query and verify.
While publicly funded news works well in some places, there is an inherent conflict of interest when the publicly funded journalists start investigating the source of their funding.
This is especially the case when a proto-strongman is attempting to consolidate power.
Publicly funded journalism cannot be the only way it works.
(I say this as a left-learning person generally supportive of public funding).
(Also, "entertainment" vs "an essential service" is a false dichotomy)
The solution (albeit not a perfect one) is to make the decision on funding independent from political parties. For example, have a comittee (or jury) that is recruited randomly from the general public and decides on the plan for next year's budget.
Or you can just put your own money towards media outlets that you think are providing more truthful content. Why would I want to give my money to someone else to decide what they feel is objective news? No thanks.
What you want is control over what other people think.
We have government funded police and judiciary sending government officials to jail when they break the law, I think we could set up an independent journalism arm as well to publicly report what is going on in the halls of parliament.
The vast majority of essential services (e.g. food, housing) are not publicly funded, so the analogy doesn't really work. Also, there are obvious reasons why government-funded news might have problems, if its essential service involves investigating the government.
>The vast majority of essential services (e.g. food, housing) are not publicly funded, so the analogy doesn't really work
Those aren't "services", so there's that.
In many countries, however, power companies, the water company, central banks, rails, the hospital system, universities, etc, are, or were before the neoliberal attack, public.
And, of course, to the point, many have a state paid public broadcaster for news and other programs (BBC, France does, Germany iirc does, Italy, etc) - and it's not some niche channels delegated to upper middle class viewers (like, I think, NPR is, if that's indeed public).
Publicly funded news will never be independent or truthful. You can't give tax money to the government and let them control money flow to media outlets and expect them report truthfully and honestly. That's a recipe for disaster. All you need to do is look at totalitarian governments and how they control their media. You will NEVER have a free and independent media if it's money is coming from public funding.
I have no idea why people think the answer to fixing a shitty government is handing more money over to them and hoping they'll do the appropriate thing with it when they prove the opposite time and time again.
Nothing will replace the media, and it's ridiculously easy to get to the truth nowadays insofar as it is known already - very often the truth is merely a few mouse-clicks away, as opposed to the past where you had to study for hours in the National Library, interview experts and witnesses if necessary, and scan through old microfiches if past events were involved.
We're over-informed nowadays and spend too much time on news without even distinguishing properly betweens news, editorials, and infotainment.
> Now, the media is completely being driven to the sidelines.
I still see zero evidence for that. As far as I can see, there is a bunch of political zealots who for various political and personal reasons state something like the following (roughly and deliberately polemically paraphrased): "The 'mainstream' media are crooked and wrong. Everybody is mislead by them and a victim, except for me, I am a victim but also know everything better than hordes of journalists. I am reluctant to back up any of my claims, though, because my sources are mostly opinion websites and blog posts, but if I must and you pressure me, I am willing dig through the Internet to selectively chose a few random articles to back up any claim I made, no matter how unfounded it might be. I do not really know any 'non-mainstream' media that would hold up to superficial scrutiny but I'm hell-bent on insisting these exist. The reasons why I do this are psychological and irrational, I feel uneasy in a complex world and spend too much time online."
> what will replace the media as an arbiter of independent information and truth
Lament of the Catholic Church during the Reformation: Who will replace the Church as the arbiter of truth.
Maybe it is best that we not have people and institutions that claim to be the “arbiter of truth.”
Anything that gives power to the people is messy. Democracy is messy and the elite wondered how people would be able to rule themselves without an absolute monarch telling them what to do. Now we have the journalistic elite wondering how the people will be able to figure out truth without the journalist high priesthood telling them what truth is.
The Catholic Church pivoted from being a policy maker to a spiritual leader for billions. Maybe journalism can do the same. Now that everybody has a voice and network to distribute that voice, journalism can shift from being the chief reliable information source to the role of a thought leader and promoter of the highest quality public discourse.
Like the commenter above indicated, it does not work that way.
'The Press' is already a structure of independence and decentralization.
Without integrity in those systems, someone will come along and dictate the Truth.
15% QAnon, 35% Trump (those willing to go along even if they don't fully agree), and then the rest are compelled when the President orders the press to communicate his words, verbatim, without criticism etc..
Twitter does not actually give power to the people, or the Truth - it concentrates power in the hands of those who have the most popular Truth.
But yes, the press needs to be less biased, but that's also partly our fault.
We don't read the less biased news, unfortunately, we like tabloids and click bait.
the press is both an idea and an institution, today it is not unreasonable to say that the institution is both showing signs of diverging from the idea of free press and is showing problematic signs of corruption.
this is not a debate of press vs no press, but one of good press vs bad press
The media is already decentralized; there are many news sources and they often do not entirely agree with each other. People understandably are keen to prioritise the accounts of outlets they believe to be generally reliable over those they don't. Those considered most reliable fulfil the informal role of "arbiter of truth" for their audiences.
I don't think further decentralizing so each individual has to carry out original research with primary sources to obtain any sort of picture of what happened in the world yesterday would represent a feasible improvement, and I suspect the conclusions people would draw instead of doing that research would be [even] worse.
I don't think that idea even works in theory, let alone in practice. In lieu of making a longpost about why this doesn't seem like a good idea to me, I'm just going to defer to the story of the Tower of Babel. You could also see Lippman's 'Public Opinion' on the problem.
Freedom to speak and think for yourself is a fundamental element of any democratic system. If you like, you can make a long post about why you think those values aren’t a good idea, but you can’t undermine them without also undermining the entire basis of democracy.
People that want a central authority just want control over what other people think. The reality is that this problem with main stream media will fix itself as people drop it to find sources they deem more truthful. A central authority loses the ability to have checks and balances of opposing news sources and it's a terrifying idea. Disagreement is A GOOD THING. This keeps these outlets in check. Anyone asking for this needs to realize they're advocating for the real life Thought Police.
The “problem” we have today is that too many different commentators, and the people who consume their commentary, are free to make their own decisions about credibility, motive, interpretations of events... Which of course leads to people disagreeing about those things.
Some people would say this is a fundamental feature of a liberal democracy. Others will look at those they disagree with, and say they are spreading misinformation, that every avenue they have for expression must be restricted, and controlled by a central authority responsible for determining what is true and what is not true.
I would say that having a free democracy, and having an arbiter of truth are mutually exclusive states. The people who see the need for a truth arbiter, and try to implement solutions for the problem of lacking one, can only ever do so at the expense of democratic freedoms.
> The “problem” we have today is that too many different commentators
No, the problem is the so-called "democratisation" of journalism and the corresponding cross-fade between "shill", "pundit" and "journalist". It's not the diversity in voices, but rather the lowering of the bar. Any random YouTube hack can proclaim themselves a "journalist" or "commentator", regardless of their credentials or affiliation.
Meanwhile, traditionally trustworthy media channels are trying to be "fair and balanced" by including both sides in a debate, regardless of whether both sides are sane. Think anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers or flat earthers versus their rational counterparts. Then there are more complex issues like "stolen" elections and Brexit.
This "both sides", "marketplace of ideas" approach also stimulates polarisation, making everything a partisan issue, especially in politically bipolar countries like the US or the UK. Suddenly, even well-accepted facts are "controversial", generating clicks because all that matters is engagement.
> Others will look at those they disagree with, and say they are spreading misinformation
That's a very modern (as in, post-modern) take. There is no denying there is a lot of actual misinformation on "both sides". It's not so much who you disagree with, but journalistic integrity, of which I frankly don't see a lot, regardless of whether we're talking about the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, the Independent, Fox News, Newsmax or OAN. They're all mainly pushing an agenda, during which they at least lie by omission. What's more, they no longer distinguish between OpEds and news reporting.
> free democracy, and having an arbiter of truth are mutually exclusive states
That's a false dichotomy. There doesn't need to be a single arbiter ("Ministry", if you will) of Truth. The purported added benefit of the fourth estate is its many voices would each do their part in verifying the veracity of claims and elucidating the context of events.
It's required for a functional liberal democracy because powerful voices can otherwise dominate the narrative and peddle messages like "regulation is at odds with a functional economy" or "fact checking our statements implies bias". With the number of journalists decreasing by 75% in the US since the advent of the Internet, the fourth estate has obviously become increasingly dysfunctional and shallow.
this is true, but on the other hand a society needs to be coherent (at least insofar as it is needed to support social interactions).
a society built on several isolated nucleuses can vary wildly, a society where we expect people a thousands kilometers away to campaign in social media for local elections needs to be more uniform not to split
Powerful people will still be held in check by public opinion, market forces, and other powerful people. We don't need a centralized MiniTrue gatekeeping with its own agenda.
> Powerful people will still be held in check by public opinion, market forces, and other powerful people. We don't need a centralized MiniTrue gatekeeping with its own agenda.
Actually, in the absence of the professional journalism, they'll be "held in check" by things like QAnon and "Stop the Steal," fueled by things like partisan talk radio.
The media isn't a "centralized MiniTrue" (I mean that's obvious), it's just industry where people with the profession of gathering and disseminating information work. It's taken time to develop professional standards, and if it's destroyed, the main thing that would be destroyed are those standards.
They have already been replaced in fact and popularity and slowly they will be in form and power. Social media, with more fine grained approach to information is better for anyone who knows what to look for, but the problem remains the same the biggest platforms are concentrated power and power is always used against truth.
The media hasn't been an independent arbiter of truth for quite some time now and this last year has exposed it for what it was. For all Trump's faults at least his presidency showed the media's true intentions. All you need to do is look at Biden's inauguration and their fawning over it to see what who/what they support. The guy completely ignores tough questions and reporters bend down to lick his boots.
The only fix I see right now is to get information from as many sources as you can and stop listening to media outlets when you catch them lying about things. For me CNN/MSNBC are completely off the table because they're just propaganda machines.
I suspect the answer will be that nothing will replace it, at least for awhile, and that will cause society a great deal of pain in the short term. That there is a lesson in it doesn’t make it easier to stomach, but people should at least get the lesson out of it.
Media isn’t alone here, though they are the cannery in the coal mine. In the legal field, there has been growing pressure to harass and blacklist attorneys who represented Trump and his associates (beyond the ordinary universally applicable ethical rules for making misrepresentations in court or filing frivolous suits). Now the legal profession has a long-standing set of ethical codes, in which helping a murderer get off in a technicality is deemed virtuous. There is pressure to draw a line and say “well but Trump is different.” I’ve been watching these efforts with horror because, while attorneys don’t exactly have tons of trust and credibility, there isn’t a widespread belief that the profession is using its institutional power as a fulcrum to advance the political viewpoints of its members. The way to shred whatever credibility attorneys have is to “draw a line” and put the former President of the United States, who secured the second highest vote total in American history, on the “untouchable” side, while putting Exxon, Philip Morris, etc. on the “will happily represent so long as they pay their bills” side.
Doctors and public health professionals similarly shredded their credibility in the past year by taking nakedly political stances on protests in the middle of a pandemic.
There are professions which form the “social and political infrastructure” of our country. The political debates of the day are often played out through them—factions sue each other in court, bring to bear medical knowledge and science to support their positions, and leverage the media to cover it all. But there has to be a modicum of trust amongst the political factions that this infrastructure itself isn’t trying to stack the deck in favor of one side or the other. And I think historically there has at least been this baseline level of trust that this was true.
In reality, of course, even Walter Cronkite had his biases. And lawyers and doctors have used their professions to advance their political interests in various ways. But there was at least the pretense of objectivity, and for most people it was a sincerely held end-goal even if it was imperfectly achieved in practice. These old belief systems are being abandoned today. The media is at the forefront, but it’s happening throughout the educated professions. And I fear that we’re going down a dangerous road. If people begin to perceive the system and our institutions as being overtly tilted against them, they’ll simply lose trust. And society simply can’t work if the various political factions don’t have institutions that they all trust.
I am also afraid that the legal profession is too political and that it defeats its own purpose. Is it possible to be so disliked by people that you can't get legal representation? Could law schools stop admitting people along political lines to prevent lawyers they disagree with from existing? I believe both of those are true now and that is very bad.
Lots of large firms (one which has long represented Philip Morris) aligned themselves with the Resistance from the outset. This was long before the election fraud stuff.
Do you mean the Resistance to Donald Trump or is that a reference to something else?
It's their right to do that I guess, but I personally believe strongly in the Constitutional rights we have even if it is unpopular or kitschy to say that. I thought lawyers were people who believed strongly in fighting for their clients' civil rights even if they despise their clients because they think the rights matter. Without them we aren't a democracy.
Dershowitz defending the rights of Nazis to have free speech is a great example of that but I guess that kind of thinking is obsolete now. At least lawyers should stop saying they care about civil rights or democracy in that case.
> I thought lawyers were people who believed strongly in fighting for their clients' civil rights even if they despise their clients because they think the rights matter.
Afaik, this particular thing does not require you to not have political opinions. And in particular if some party or politician seem to trample all over civil rights or legal defenses, you might argue against him or align yourself with his opponents.
Also, if your motivation if pure civil rights, you wont attempt to trample civil rights of opponents of your client in the process. As in, you will defend your client as vigorously as possible, while keeping defense squicky clean. And you wont try to smear their victims etc. And you will defend all kinds of clients, not just nazi, but also their victims once in a while.
A small point: Congress, the House, and the Senate, are not courts or form a court. The Members of Congress are not necessarily lawyers. Strictly and literally, then, lawyers are not needed for the arguments when Congress does an impeachment. Again, Congress is just not a court of law. So, if an impeached person wants help in their defense, they don't have to hire lawyers.
My point: If a person helping with a defense is not a lawyer, then the legal profession can't disbar them.
Their importance to the free distribution of accurate information was such that even the government itself in the form of federal courts and law has repeatedly recognized the privilege the press has in things such as keeping sources secret. They recognized the importance of such a space in keeping America's democracy powerful. Now, the media is completely being driven to the sidelines. With the rise of personal branding, content distribution, and disinformation, this once-independent place to examine society is going under.
For all the pomposity in this piece, the question is quite relevant: what will replace the media as an arbiter of independent information and truth? For now, it seems that the news and content space is being swallowed up by the information networks of various individuals and institutions, each with the focus of pushing their own image rather than coming clean to the public. If you can't trust any of them because all their perspectives are manipulated, have we reached an end to free and independent discourse?