Seems to me that the reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election has been pretty good - it has mostly lined up with the findings of the special counsel investigation. Are you referring to cable news and opinion journalists not being serious because of the Russia investigation, or are you including regular journalists as well?

I start with a different attitude towards media than you do. I think if you focus on a news diet that is less opinion and more straight news that most of the major newspapers do a decent job of telling the truth, although not always all of it. Cable news is worthless imo.

I do think you have to be aware of the editorial stance of your sources. For instance, The Economist has excellent international reporting, but you have to be cautious because of their strong editorial stance in favor of free markets and trade, liberalism, etc. The NYT's international reporting is pretty bad imo, way too focused on social justice issues that are interesting to Americans than what is actually going on in other countries. Nonetheless, they are usually factually accurate.

In general, I am suspicious of the pattern-matching that you do between what you perceive as being in the interest of the corporate class and how news organizations behave. Typically this pattern-matching is unfalsifiable and so is not susceptible to being overcome by evidence. It is also based on priors about the ability of corporations to influence straight news reporting in a way that seems implausible to me, especially now given the low barriers to entry for news.

Uh, if you actually pay attention to what liberals say about the media, you'll see that they have all manner of criticism about sensationalism bias, presenting both sides to be "unbiased" when one of those sides is false, and, yes, being overly deferential to big business, but that doesn't mean that they made up Columbine, nor does it mean that they are all the same.

Let's not forget either that most of my discussion has centered around Fly believing that there is a concerted effort among at least some aspects of the mainstream media and especially the "right-wing media" (again from a true left perspective it is all right-wing) is pushing white-supremacism on the masses in order to benefit large corporations.
So don't pretend like I am the only here arguing for a media conspiracy.

I think when it comes to public opinion the distinction between straight news and opinion gets lost really quickly if it was ever there originally. But I don't think either come away unscathed. The opinion makers--people like Maddow who devoted months of her show (from what I understand) to sensalationaling every aspect of the story obviously come off the worst, but I'm referring overall to mainstream media and in particular outlets like msnbc, cnn, Wapo, NYT, and a whole host of other print outlets.
I would need to read the report to know what the findings were in regards to Russian interference, but I'm deeply skeptical of the narrative that "guccifer" hacked the DNC and it will be interesting to see what happens with Assange now--but beyond that I know Mueller indicted the Russian troll farm which spent a paltry sum of money on stuff like Black Lives Matter ads that hardly lived up to expectations. So I'm referring more to the disconnect between rhetoric and reality that led people to believe that Mueller was going to be the downfall of Trump that was in large part fueled by msm speculation, lies, and sensationalism. I'm sure for those who are fans of those media outlets the Russia story won't be enough to convince them of much but from the outside it looks bad.
It's important to note that anything too controversial just wouldn't go to print. It is generally assumed by people who want to pooh-pooh conspiracy ideas that whistleblowers simply never exist or that there are never people with stories to tell--but that just isn't the case and editorial control is a real thing. Before that there is self-censorship and before that comes the ideological biases of the reporters who live in the same world we live in and are usually just as influenced by the mass media as we are. So there are lots of barriers before "real news" has a chance to make it into the news.
Usually the editorial stance--like you mentioned can be enough to swing the coverage of something wildly in one direction or another and reporting on a difficult topic--like say Venezuela--will be almost impossible for any outlet to do in a purely objective manner.
When it comes to "factual events"--a great deal will depend on the event and whether there is motivation for lies. Certainly anything involving international conflict needs to be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism, and especially when the reporting comes entirely based on government sources.

Oh I picked a perfect example. Look at how you can't help yourself from defending Alex Jones even as you try to keep him at arms length.

No, bad faith posting is you pretending to be an honest media skeptic while you consume paranoid conspiracy youtubes without any skepticism. "We shouldn't take your critique on the Russiagate reporting seriously because your ability to tell actual news from fantasy is hamstrung" is an actual, good-faith response to your Questioning the Narrative storyline.

I'm not talking about public opinion and how it responds to media, but the press itself. Here the distinction between straight news and opinion is quite clear. For instance, Rachel Maddow is not straight news. From my reading of WaPo, NYT, WSJ, etc, their reporting on Russia's interference in the 2016 election has been largely borne out, so I'm still curious why you think this destroyed their credibility. As for MSNBC and CNN, again, cable news is mostly worthless. They do little original reporting, mostly just putting into visual form stuff that has already been reported by newspapers and then having people talk about it.

If you haven't read the Mueller report yet, then why are you claiming that the reporting about Russian interference was so bad? The most serious charge in the special counsel investigation was about how the private information and strategy of many of our most important election organizations and leaders were hacked and stolen by Russian agents, which are under indictment by the DOJ. This information was then released to the public in a way obviously meant to harm Clinton's chance of winning. The FB ads, whatever. But the wikileaks stuff was not a minor part of the election.

I don't agree with this claim. There are too many outlets now that are willing to print something even if the more traditional ones won't. And social media is too powerful now for the traditional media to easily ignore things just because they are controversial. No doubt it's true that many secrets are still hidden, but lot's of very controversial stuff goes to print.

Meh. Reporting in a purely objective manner is not possible. Instead, we should be looking for journalism that is fact-based, open-minded, and can report on stories that go against their editorial stance. It is still the case that traditional newspapers are the best source for this kind of reporting that is publicly available.

Okay. We should always try to stay skeptical and independent-minded of what powerful people say is true when it benefits them. But we also shouldn't adopt ideologies that make it very difficult for us to learn what is true.

We had an entire thread on calling out the MSM, like 90% of it was questioning the cozy, incestuous relationship between people like Maggie Haberman and entrenched power. There is only one side that has good-faith principles about journalism, only one side that is critical of both liberal and conservative reporting.

It seems superfluous. You can already convince the marks of preposterous **** without any fancy CGI.

Just put them in front of a TV. It is easy. CGI does help though.

Even with Maddow, you can definitely make the criticism she was sensationalist about Russia, gave the story too much priority, or gave her viewers false hope, but she was mainly just reporting on intelligence community or Mueller investigation findings. She was never just straight lying or making stuff up. If someone believes otherwise go ahead and cite.

This is completely different than Trump and much of right-wing media who did/do completely make stuff up with regular "COMPLETE HOAX!!! PAID FOR BY X...." type tweets with absolutely no evidence. Its simply lying by calling others liars.

Lockbox is an outlier right now, not many people can look at a Alex Jones interview and a Matt Yglesias interview and come away believing they are all part of the same con. Or believe that 911 was allowed to happen or w/e. When you can produce videos that are impossible to tell from an actual video of, like, AOC praising clean coal or something, there are going to be even more Luckboxes out there.

It's almost like you're saying that I base at least part of what I think on things like photographic and video evidence as opposed to what journalists are saying. I resent that implication.
As far as Yglesias. I'm not too familiar with him but I looked up his bio. Harvard educated, current Vox editor and co-founder, writer for a number of other major propaganda rags. Yeah it isn't looking great.

I don't get my news from the mainstream propaganda machine. I do whatever every good citizen does and read every bill in Congress, personally interview every gunshot victim, and sit in every city council meeting in every city in America.

I remember not too long ago he tweeted something about math being a racist conspiracy and he took a bunch of heat for it and deleted it. Maybe you also agree math is a conspiracy and you guys have something in common?

Sure, we all remember how BruceZ taught us that math is racist.

i like the fighting the good fight that is going on, but you guys have to understand you cant argue with conspiracy theorists. their brains dont work right. studies have shown they are equally likely to believe diametrically opposed theories regardless of logic.

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Probably I could beat you at scrabble though. I thought you avoided threads with me because you couldn't handle "abstraction"? Link to study?

False.

Dismisses Harvard-educated writer out of hand as untrustworthy propagandist, treats former Harvard professor Jordan Peterson’s word as gospel. Yep, story checks out.

Try again for my Peterson take.

You really should give Matt Yglesias a listen. His podcast is usually interesting and he is a great interviewer.

You can actually get pretty far without any sort of mainstream media consumption though. Just follow any potential candidate on twitter, and don't vote for the people that use all caps and aren't capable of putting coherent sentences together.

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Nah, I don't agree. If you want to know what is going on in the world, there isn't a better publicly available source than newspapers. Following candidates is primarily about elections, but that isn't the only thing happening.