<story><title>Why media layoffs keep happening</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1088503510184927233.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>untog</author><text>&amp;quot;all news are fake news now&amp;quot; is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not &amp;quot;fake&amp;quot;. There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that&amp;#x27;s why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all &amp;quot;fake news&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not particularly wedded to today&amp;#x27;s media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I&amp;#x27;m yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.</text></item><item><author>anticodon</author><text>I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don&amp;#x27;t fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I&amp;#x27;ve just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better.&lt;p&gt;Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There&amp;#x27;s immense amount of bots&amp;#x2F;government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you&amp;#x27;d fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I&amp;#x27;m planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there&amp;#x27;s no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostromo</author><text>It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives.  Facts outside of the narrative are simply passed over.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism.&lt;p&gt;And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years.  But this form of bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like NPR and the NYT.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why media layoffs keep happening</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1088503510184927233.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>untog</author><text>&amp;quot;all news are fake news now&amp;quot; is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not &amp;quot;fake&amp;quot;. There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that&amp;#x27;s why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all &amp;quot;fake news&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not particularly wedded to today&amp;#x27;s media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I&amp;#x27;m yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.</text></item><item><author>anticodon</author><text>I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don&amp;#x27;t fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I&amp;#x27;ve just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better.&lt;p&gt;Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There&amp;#x27;s immense amount of bots&amp;#x2F;government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you&amp;#x27;d fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I&amp;#x27;m planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there&amp;#x27;s no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adnzzzzZ</author><text>When people speak of &amp;quot;fake news&amp;quot; they&amp;#x27;re generally not talking about news with factual mistakes, but often times where the fact picking mechanism is biased. You can produce a piece that is 100% factual that still omits important facts that are relevant to the story and would paint a completely different picture. Most of the sites you mentioned do that very consistently.</text></comment>