12/7 - Terrorist attack

[Dill]

(12-16-2021, 12:16 PM)hollodero Wrote: Dill Wrote:Just trying to get a sense of your standards

Sure, my standard are possibly European news. And my country is way less perfect that maybe Germany (lots of political influence still), but there's hardly a current anchor that I can identify with a certain political party or a certain political leaning here. Imho, that's how actual news should be. No favors, no moderation already clearly showing what the opinion of the network is, hard questions for everyone. They still can call a lie a lie and given the current state, they still could paint the Republican party on the brink of becoming subversive and anti-democratic.
For sure, we have somewhat transparent press subsidies and hence the news are not so much made for profit. Which I guess makes a lot of differeence. FOX or MSNBC has to serve its audience and give them what they want.

Sorry I am days late responding. Again, you've put a lot of serious matter on my plate, Hollo, and as usual, I must work to do it justice. 

I am not arguing that CNN/MSNBC be declared immune from all criticism just because they are the counterpart to Fox. But I do think that criticism of them should proceed from a larger recognition of 1) the division of news labor, not only between print and tv, but also between reporting and commentary, 2) what is possible in U.S. for profit news organizations dependent upon ratings, and most importantly, 3) some comprehensive understanding/determination of what the public needs to know, how that should be determined. 

So before I get to MSNBC and CNN (in another post), here I want to say something more explicitly about standards. 

You prize a kind of disinterested independence in journalists. I do too. I agree they should be honest, not shills for a party, but I don't agree that they can function without some sort of political leaning. One cannot pick, from the thousand potential stories that appear each day, which ones to report on, and then decide which of those go front page, without a set of social values and epistemological standards which allow one to determine which the public most needs to know, in what level of detail, and to vet sources. 

Liberal and social democrats agree that the primary roles of journalism in a democratic society are to 1) keep watch on power, and 2) to inform voters so they can participate effectively in their own governance. (That’s why sports and leisure are in the back pages of newspapers.)

From this it follows that a, if not THE, primary measure of journalism is how informed—or disinformed—its news audience is.

Social democrats (leftists-without-quotation-marks) differ from the liberals in that they do not view the above mentioned primary roles as apolitical. Journalists on this model are “biased” in favor of civil rights, progress over tradition, science, and voices silenced by power or obscurity. Social dems just see that as an appropriate bias, and so preferable to more illiberal models, whereas liberals tend to regard it as being without bias—which infuriates conservatives.

Pluralism is another value of the abovementioned model—the assumption that different (political) angles on news events create a fuller, richer account, like reconstructing the elephant from the description of all the different blind men who touch it.  On this account, if it were really possible for reporters to rise above politics, that would impoverish the press. In any case, from a leftist perspective, that is not a possibility. Editorial decisions are impossible without a political perspective, embodied in some notion of the common good, which allows some facts to be more salient for that good than others, or, frankly, to be “facts” at all. This pluralist model puts a burden on citizens though—they only become better informed by sorting through various news sources, not by proudly ignoring Fox altogether and/or relying on one or two supposedly authoritative sources. (You, Hollo, seem an ideal participatory citizen in this regard, reading a variety of sources in foreign press as well as your own—though it seems we don’t agree that on the question of whether reporting can be apolitical.)

One negative side to this model is that the pursuance of important values, like voicing both sides of an issue and factual accuracy, become uncritical to create "balance."  Flat earthers and anti-vaxxers get equal time, an equal platform, and so for many, equal authority. The kind of commentary/backstory which draws out the relevance, exposes false equivalence, and disqualifies pretenders is diminished in favor of the Fox model—“We report, you decide”—in which commentary becomes alternative fact.

Leftists-without-quotation-marks are critical of this Dragnet ideal—"just the facts, ma’am!” It is grounded in a value we too affirm—that of factual accuracy and integrity, but based on an underdeveloped notion of what “facts” are, and a notion of editorial process, including that of news “consumers,” which mystifies confirmation bias and constructs impervious news bubbles. "Agendas" and "narratives" appear in every other camp but one's own.

Which brings me to my final point—right now the U.S. press is broken, not because the MSM is "biased," but in part because democracy is breaking. Voters elected and continue to support an anti-democratic autocrat, backed by a regime party and two openly partisan news networks riding for decades an opposition to the “liberal media.” Issues like using private email in government service, which in 2016 appeared to raise enough concerns about a candidates honesty and judgment to cost her an election, were so diminished by greater and continuing scandals and disinformation that voters hardly noticed when the winner of that election brought his own family into the WH staff using private emails, right along with former Congressmen who originally made this an election deciding issue. 

This is a systemic crisis which requires revaluation of some past “standards,” formal and informal. A case in point would be objecting to air time for mental health professionals explaining “malignant narcissism.” The job of the press under these conditions is to enable voters to understand how rhetorical symmetry—e.g., both sides accuse the other of not “following the science”—does not at all imply a symmetry in factual accuracy. It also requires greater integration of historical knowledge, especially of autocratic politics. So that’s the stand point from which I want to evaluate your valuation of MSNBC and the Communist News Network in my next post.