Has mainstream or large media lost its value and integrity when it comes to the news?

Has mainstream or large media lost its value and integrity when it comes to the news?

It never had much integrity to begin with, but yes, it’s gotten far worse. Far worse.

I think recently mainstream media has to compete with outlets that have zero standards whatsoever so they suffer

Old-school mainstream media is enjoying something of a renaissance right now (in terms of its value to the public at large; I don’t know about profitability). The Washington Post and the New York Times seem to be in a friendly competition to see who can break the biggest stories. More power to them.

They still do a great job of justifying American military interventions, defending the interests of the business class, and defining the spectrum of acceptable opinions for their audience. Not sure what else one could want.

Newspapers have had a very substantial decline in the number of journalists they employ because of the massive loss of circulation and advertising they have suffered. But quality news has always been the exception rather than the rule. Other than the breaking news (the big murder) so much of the articles has always been a rewriting of press releases and similar.

And TV news made the big switch to become primarily an entertainment mechanism decades ago.

the phase you need is ‘corporate media’. The parameters of public debate, and even agenda itself, is defined by vested interests.

It’s demonstrated in everything from 50 years of the horrors of ‘socialised medicine’ to Russia being accepted as an ‘enemy’. You’re being played, folks, every single day.

Yes, for quite some time now.

Based on the responses so far, this is an opinion poll.
Off to IMHO.

One thing to remember about Watergate is that only a tiny number of reporters were doing investigative journalism on it. The overwhelming majority took the Nixon administration statements at their face value and considered an insignificant story. And not just the burglary, but well through the election with it’s illegal campaign money woes.

The media has never done a good job in general in questioning what’s really going on in government or business.

Yes. But the bar was never very high in the first place, perhaps 'cos journos being drunks in the old days kept scrambling over it to grab drinks.
Often the targets were deserved, but from the radical days of the London Times to the unspeakable dictators and causes of the Thirties, the newspapers attacked the powerful as mercenaries, and put their orotund and complacent skills at the service of the ghastly media owners who paid them and promoted an Establishment Weltanschauung that served direct financial interests ( literally during much of the 19th century, when a stock tip could denote the newspaper owner’s pocket-book ) and materialist ideals. Now they have degenerated into attacking easy acceptable targets; destroying dangerous ( to them ) beliefs such as socialism and tradition, and promoting a faux hedonism of empty consumerism.

And whichever political cause had prevailed the outcome would be the same, not just since the servile Soviet media was similar, but the Western media — which covered up Stalin’s crimes when it was profitable or attacked Russian enemies in the McCarthyite rage on an equal basis — was infinitely adaptable to its own degenerative process. And will always follow the money.
Whether or not I agree with, say, Sanders or Corbyn, and each’s undoubted ( and kinda demented, since the mass mind is not on their side ) belief in true democracy, I shall never support those who so slickly traduced them and manipulated their audience to alarmist conclusions, and certainly not by buying their trash.

Kipling’s aphorism on the Press, produced for his cousin, cunning old Prime Minister Baldwin, is always valid: 'Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’

Yes, in the eyes of the public, the news media in general has lost all the trust and respect it once had. I would argue that it didn’t ever deserve that trust and respect in the first place, and that its recent downfall is more of a societal disillusionment process than any actual drop off in quality though.

This is a useless question because the parameters are incredibly broad.

Are you talking newspapers in the United States? TV Channels in the UK?
Are you including RT in the same box as 1011Now radio?
A couple hundred years ago the main newspaper in my city called for parliament to be burned. Is that considered integrity?

A friend of a friend always gets his information from some guy with a youtube channel. Does that work better?

“Yellow Journalism”

People don’t remember just how biased and partisan media used to be.

In the last three weeks in the world’s largest Islamic nation, (by population, Indonesia), two events occurred which never made the news in the West. A group of female clerics, (yes, actual female Islamic scholars!), issued a fatwa of their own. Against child marriage. Secondly the largest Islamic youth organisation in the world issued a statement signaling a challenge to how scripture is currently being interpreted.

Since the Bali bombings there have been outsiders attempting to radicalize Islam there, as is happening in Malaysia. But they are pushing back against it in both places, and most of the radicalized parts of the Islamic world look to these countries with hope.

What did make the news was a story of two men being given 83 lashing as punishment for being gay. Horrifying and indefensible, I openly acknowledge. This event occurred on the single tiny island among a nation of thousands where Sharia Is the law. It represents exactly what drove the other to news items I listed.

Western news outlets ignored two stories that were both positive and the kind of movement within Islam everyone says they’d like to see. And, actually representative of what’s really going on there. In favour of a story that stokes fear and anxiety and is 100% misleading about the country, no context whatsoever offered beyond outrage.

So how fake is the news? Way, WAY more than most people grasp, I believe.

I think the percentage of news that is literally fake , i.e, wholesale fabrications, or say, total misrepresentations of an event, is small. The percentage of news that is blandified so that the import is lost, equal-timed so that liars have equal billing with truth-tellers, or banished to the back pages with a mere mention, is much higher.

I am very pleased to see that a few established organizations (the previously-mentioned WP and NYT for example) have really stepped up to the plate with the advent of the Disaster Presidency. This was made possible, lets not forget, by a gigantic wave of new interest in real news.

Whether the public believes the news or not is a separate issue.

CNN is a piece of shit.

Mainstream news in the US and most of the western world has always been in a tug of war between accurate well-done important news and bland attention grabbing blather.

Mostly because the former is what the newsrooms want to do and latter is what sells papers.

What is new is the sudden rise of very cheap news channels that can compete with the big guys in quantity if not in quality. Like anything where competition suddenly appears, it is taking a while to settle down.

To answer the OP, well-done important news has always been available and right now seems to be growing. This is partly due to the availability of the story, big important news doesn’t happen every day. Right now Washington is churning out a lot of important news.

The ratio of good to bad changes over time. It has never gone to zero-in spite of what some posters here seem to think. :slight_smile: Those of us who want a lot of good news simply have to have several sources of news-no single source has it all. But if you spend the time, you can keep yourself busy being well-informed.

Mainstream news in the western world retains it’s value and a reasonable amount of integrity. I don’t think either of those have changed much over the last 50 years.

As for the negative posts in this thread I simply ask-what is the alternative to mainstream news? And almost all the complaints made about news is due to stories not getting the coverage some individual would like-but the point is they are complaining about news stories so the information seems to have gotten to their attention so how. :slight_smile:

You’re joking, right?

Basic American history books are quite proud of the fact that Benjamin Franklin was (among other claims to greatness) both PostMaster and founder of the first American newspaper. The connection is kind of glossed over for the grade school kids, but was quite explicit in my college Intro to Journalism courses: Extensive material for the newspaper was acquired by reading people’s letters, which were rarely sealed at the time. Investigative journalism? I call that unwelcome prying into private affairs and the reason today that envelopes are sealable and tampering with the mail is a crime.

One can argue, as did the people who put Freedom of the Press in as part of the first amendment to our national legal code, that the general public has the right to know what’s going on in their world. That could have made “Muckraking” an honorable profession of its day. But even the muckrakers were operating via an ‘end justifies the means’ approach, even if they exposed the horrors of mass-production foods and other crimes.

The problem, though, comes when publishers relegate the quest for truth to a place behind their quest for profits. This is most notable in Hearst’s quoted, “You provide the stories, I’ll supply the war.” handling of the Spanish/American war-on-paper-that-served-a-political-agenda. Unfortunately, most people in modern times have never heard the term Yellow Journalism or know what it means.

As a kid in the early 1970’s I was aware of the attention and concern garnered by the news surrounding the Watergate scandal and, only a couple years later, news of the ABscam sting, and thought perhaps investigative journalism might be a good field to go into! The TV show Lou Grant made the field seem pretty important, as well.

But by the time I got to college, my journalism professors were complaining that PR specialists (“Spin Doctors”) were taking over the industry when they really shouldn’t be considered journalists or news-related professionals. And my enthusiasm for the career (I was a photographer) was waning. Then Rupert Murdoch got into TV broadcasting, and I figured it was time to change majors. Any integrity “The Media” had was fading fast.

And then the Spin Doctors came up with the techniques of Sound-bites and political memes and, well, manipulating the media via Spin and it amazes me that, years AFTER Murdoch created his blatantly and openly conservatively-biased network to do just that, the conservative candidates talk about how unreliable the media has become.* Yeah, and conservatives can thank their own biggest cheerleader for that outcome!

–G!
*Ms. Palin’s favorite phrase was “lamestream media” and never once seemed to find it ironic that she was a journalism major. But perhaps her focus was on PR…