That made me laugh real hard on the inside.

I did download the study you shared after reading the abstract, but it's over 400 pages so we'll see. Life is busy, eh?

>Elon Musk is a fucking moron. He is utterly ruining the profitability of Twitter through his conviction that a "woke mind virus" needs to be combatted. Where does that fit in the belief system that capitalism and the pursuit of profit explains everything?

Oh god, totally agree with you about Musk. Unfortunately for everyone involved wealth, not abilities, is the best indicator for a person's future success in capitalism. If you like studies, there is one from Georgetown University looks at people's socioeconomic status (SES) based off their families' starting SES. I'll put the link at the bottom.

Musk is the perfect example of how messed up capitalism is. Brainless assholes like Musk can gain power and influence - simply because their daddy was rich - and then go on to totally ruin something that is used by hundreds of millions of people. We can argue about how much power the guy actually has, but however much, it includes being able to buy a company that has a hundreds of millions of user. And you know fire 7,500 of the people who worked there. That is a LARGE amount of influence and power simply because he has money.

​

>Sure, ownership matters. But the problem I have with most Marxist-derived capitalist theory is that they reduce "influence" to nothing but money and ownership. Other things matter.

I don't claim that only money and ownership are the only influences in capitalism. I do argue they are largest and typically the most powerful.

​

>For example: the Right wing insists that media has a massive left-wing bias because most journalists identify as left-wing. And part of this is true: a majority of journalists identify as left-leaning. They also have some measure of influence over news production. It's not nearly as much as the Right claims, but it's there.

I am with you here.

​

>Or do you claim ownership of media mean that journalists, journalist unions, journalistic professional bodies exhibit no influence on the media whatsoever. They can't even publicly complain about failure to uphold journalistic standards? Can't strike? Can't do anything at all?

I guess what I'd say is that individual reporters who are bothered enough by issues with journalistic integrity at major news purveyors often leave for smaller ones or try and found their own. Unions on the other hand don't have anywhere near as much power as they used to. The NYT union hasn't been able to prevent their members wages from rolling backward for years. They finally went on a 24 hour strike back in December, but so far I don't think they have succeeded in getting a new contract that comes close to their demands. I hope that they step up their game and win. Considering the talks have been ongoing for almost two years, I wouldn't give them great odds.

Why would journalism be immune to the weaknesses inherent in capitalism? If you don't pay your workers enough to build up savings, if you tie their healthcare to their employment, it makes it much harder for them to stand up to being mistreated. The median wage of journalist appears to be somewhere around 50k, which is not great in today's economy.

​

>In a capitalist system, competition is a thing. Even if just 2 people control all the news (and we have not reached that point yet), just having 2 means that media outlets can and do try to attack each other's profitability in a number of ways, one of which is to jump on another's errors or false reporting, in order to try and look better by comparison. To some extent, therefore, news media in a capitalist system is partly self-policing, if even a slight tendency towards competition exists. Perfect? Hell no. But the pressure is there.

Okay. Sure. But jumping on someone else's false reporting or error can't stop a paper from refusing to publish a story. Or just leaving out details. Or from weighting their coverage to skew one way or the other by surrounding it with opinion pieces. Or from having sponsored articles. Or from having a non-left leaning journalist cover a specific piece because the owners are concerned about ad revenue. Or running misleading ads for bad actors at all.

Look at the "Left-leaning" major news coverage of Steve Donzinger as an example. He's a lawyer who was sued by Chevron after he won a case against them regarding pollution in [edit: Ecuador], where they were supposed to pay out 8 billion to indigenous people there. They never mention the Judges who advanced this case against Donzinger have connections to Chevron. I wonder how many of those news sources take cash from Chevron? I know the NYT does. They have been paid by Chevron to produce ads on it's behalf.

I'm not claiming that both sides are the same. Right wing media would paint Donzinger as traitor or something. But that doesn't mean we can trust major media outlets to not be beholden to their owners.

Links:

1. Georgetown study: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/
2. NYT strike: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-times-union-walkout.html
3. NYT article about Donziner: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/energy-environment/steven-donziger-chevron.html
4. Compare with The Intercept reporting: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/
5. Chevron ad produced by NYT's in house ad agency: https://twitter.com/chevron/status/1182709141669851136?lang=en

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I don’t know what to believe anymore. There is so much information and misinformation. I think I understand what’s going on but I always wonder if I actually do.

> I think Elon musk would disagree with you on your last point there.

Elon Musk is a fucking moron. He is utterly ruining the profitability of Twitter through his conviction that a "woke mind virus" needs to be combatted. Where does that fit in the belief system that capitalism and the pursuit of profit explains everything?

> Money, ownership, and influence are key to controlling narratives and outcomes.

Sure, ownership matters. But the problem I have with most Marxist-derived capitalist theory is that they reduce "influence" to nothing but money and ownership. Other things matter.

For example: the Right wing insists that media has a massive left-wing bias because most journalists identify as left-wing. And part of this is true: a majority of journalists identify as left-leaning. They also have some measure of influence over news production. It's not nearly as much as the Right claims, but it's there.

Or do you claim ownership of media mean that journalists, journalist unions, journalistic professional bodies exhibit no influence on the media whatsoever. They can't even publicly complain about failure to uphold journalistic standards? Can't strike? Can't do anything at all?

> But in a capitalist system where distribution of the news is inherently dependent on funds received via advertising and donations, conflicts of interest are constantly appearing.

In a capitalist system, competition is a thing. Even if just 2 people control all the news (and we have not reached that point yet), just having 2 means that media outlets can and do try to attack each other's profitability in a number of ways, one of which is to jump on another's errors or false reporting, in order to try and look better by comparison. To some extent, therefore, news media in a capitalist system is partly self-policing, if even a slight tendency towards competition exists. Perfect? Hell no. But the pressure is there.

I would strongly suggest reading the study I posted. It includes a good model for how both negative and positive pressures havehistorically shaped news content; it is also a model of news that modern right-wing media ecosystem has completely abandoned.

Both sides are not the same.

Marketing in news and science.

I think Elon musk would disagree with you on your last point there. As would Zuckerberg, Bloomberg and Bezos. Money, ownership, and influence are key to controlling narratives and outcomes. It's one of the key tenants of capitalism.

Here is a study on how coverage of Amazon changed after Bezos bought the WP.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346592052_Media_Ownership_and_Bias_Evidence_by_the_Washington_Post%27s_Reporting_after_Amazon%27s_Acquisition_in_2013

News should be both accurate and challenging towards those who have power, and efforts like the Panama Papers are a shining example of what that looks like. But in a capitalist system where distribution of the news is inherently dependent on funds received via advertising and donations, conflicts of interest are constantly appearing. It's not just about whether they repeat false narratives or propaganda. It's sentiment. It's which stories they choose to cover. Are you going to focus your reporting on a commie spy balloon, which poses no real threat, or the toxic train wreck causing direct harm caused by horrendous domestic policy?

>Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected

> 9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

> ...until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false...

> 8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

> ...producing one of the longest Editor’s Note in memory appended to the top of the article...

> 3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

> ...numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either...

Not to mention the images provided of the original articles in which the corrections are literally highlighted.

Hatred for news media always seems to be based on the premise that the industry is a monolith. I think there is a large swath of naysayers who are neglecting the local newspaper reporters who sit through public meetings, meet and make in roads woth the community and shine a light on these local items that actually matter and affect the lives of individuals.

I'd suggest, if people want a robust and effective media source, they think locally.

Small, local newsrooms are suffering due to large corporations gutting the staff. If communities rallied behind these underpaid reporters, they'd see "news media" as a multifaceted industry that can (and currently does) provide valuable information to the community.

Not spreading misinformation, verifying facts before broadcasting rumors. No good is served other than ad dollars by not waiting for evidence or not publishing a story that can't be verified yet

Glenn Greenwald's misleading presentation of honest errors as deception is more about Greenwald's kneejerk refusal to accept Russian interference as a real news story than it is about whether any media outlets actually engaged in "making shit up".

His false portrayal hinges on accepting this falsehood: "It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories". Besides having no way to confirm whether his cherry-picked list actually included all available inaccurate stories, the real test of whether an honest error occurred has nothing whatsoever to do with the distribution of errors. The real test is as follows: did the media outlet that ran the false story issue a correction?

Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected, he actuallly and bizarrely complains at one point that a story was getting "diluted" by editorial corrections, as if trying to get at the truth and correct one own's errors is some sort of nefarious political trick.

It's ironic that the news outlets that actively acknowledge their fallibility and try to make up for it get this used against them to supposedly prove their nefariousness, while right-wing attack sites can routinely lie and get away with it simply by never admitting error and by leaving huge errors uncorrected, or by deleting false information without mentioning they have done so if they absolutely have to, even covertly altering information in their reporting without ever admitting to it.

Ground News is a fantastic tool for dispelling bias in the mainstream media. I highly recommend it as a tool for media literacy.

> all news is unreliable

Knee-jerk rejection of all news is as intellectually lazy as uncritical acceptance of all it. It's not being critical; it's just being gullible in the opposite direction.

The empirical reality, as evidenced in this study is that American centre-right and far-right media are significantly more insular and more susceptible to pushing propaganda than centre, centre-left and far-left media. Lazy dismissal of the entire media ecosystem because "duh billionaires" is both an inaccurate understanding of how the media really works - ownership is not control in today's world - as well as being demonstrably wrong according to available empirical evidence.

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Thank you! It’s hard to make sense of Levinas’s infinite responsibility and how that translates into duties to others, especially when our relationships with others goes beyond public reasons. I’m satisfied with the analytic approach, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!

If you are directly sponsored you have to disclose as a online content creator, however, its not enforced well (tho it is enforced better than it was)

This is very interesting, and similar to a project I am working out myself. I hope to give this a closer read soon, and a more thorough response.

In the meantime, are you familiar with Emmanuel Levinas? I'd be interested in hearing your response to him. He presents an ontological model of ethics similar to yours, but where freedom is supplanted by responsibility.

To Levinas, ethics comes implicitly written into the event of encountering the Other. The fact of my existence is itself an imposition on the Other: in so far as my existence effects the Other, I am responsible. The other's existence stirs me to a moral accountability. This responsibility, in turn, becomes a meaning for my own existence. "ethics, rooted in responsibility, is the node of our subjectivity, tying us to reality." In other words, my being a subject in the world is a result of encountering the Other, who not only makes me responsible, but also makes me conscious of my own Self.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020

The difference is that at least with mainstream news, some countries require them to disclose when they are publishing a sponsored or embedded journalist piece, and they are often required to pay at least nominal homage to the facticity of an event. No such restrictions exist for online personalities, as far as I know.

Yeah, I agree with you! I'm gonna stop reading anymore comments since they might disagree and would be worthless opinions anyway.

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Agree. Somewhere else in this thread I tried to say that. "Gatekeepers today are as craven as any Youtuber, just with different chains of command" or some such.

Yes. I don't. Poorly phrased. As an Anarcho-Stoic I should have said "Is this improvement or chaos" or...still needs work. Im not a scholar.

> Is this improvement or anarchy?

Odd that you'd consider those diametrically opposed.

Those things definitely do not go together. They should be called "Agenda Media".