Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to social media bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis
So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.
Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.
The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.
The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.
That, I think, is the loss.
I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.
> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.
Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.
But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.
If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.
The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.
So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
jmclnx•1h ago
I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
tgv•1h ago
tharmas•1h ago
It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.
treetalker•1h ago
jauntywundrkind•1h ago
"Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and good left people every now and then), but these people are there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that be. It's not gonna help .
I agree about limiting the number of media companies. Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how, is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.