a) Being told what to think is just as bad as being lied to.
b) Omission is a form of lying and one that occurs largely as a matter of what that individual finds bolsters their argument rather than as an intent to lie.
c) You can find articles of interviews between the media and Trump’s DHS before the “child separations” issue was released where they are calmly discussing the implications of a mandatory criminal prosecution on illegal immigrants and how that would require that you separate the families since children aren’t allowed in prison.
And then, there was an article that stated that the DHS had lost track of which kids belonged to which parents and, upon encountering that article, the readers, who had not picked up on the earlier news about the minutiae of what all implications there were of the mandatory prosecution policy, went, “What the hell?? They’re separating children from their parents!!!?”
And then the media looked at the view counts on those articles and said, “Yes. Yes, they are. Separating children from their parents, that’s their policy. We didn’t know before, but gee do we now!”
Whereas, say, for example we had that time when the New York Times spent two years and massive labor looking through Trump’s finances and they largely determined that the way Trump was able to buy Mar-A-Lago and his other holdings is, in essence, by liquidating the much larger fortune that his dad had built, after his death.
That article was too long, too boring, and buried the most important details midway through the article. Probably not intentionally - just journalists who were overly optimistic about the average reader’s ability to read a long article - but, in general, that article was a flop and most people probably never read to the part where it actually said what it was trying to say.
As a side effect of that, your average person - even those on the left - is still mystified about how it can be that Trump can be such a “success” and how that must mean that he’s smart and canny. But, no, “dying wealthy relative” is not a smart business strategy. That’s called “luck”.
Importantly, though, that article didn’t get nearly as high a view count as, say, child separations.
So did others re-report the NYT, helping to boost the main message? Did they allude to the key details later, to ensure that everyone knew? Did they hammer on the topic thousands and thousands of times so that you couldn’t help but know the truth?
Nope. Because they are a business and because journalists are people, too. The business is not interested in articles that don’t sell and the journalists have a limited amount of time and don’t know everything, they just know what the business tells them they should write about. If the business tells them to write about the “child separation policy” because it’s getting maybe clicks, then the journalist jumps in, does two seconds of research to get what they need to support the story, and they crank out an article. They don’t really think about it or go in-depth. And they plaster over earlier articles on the subject, which were more nuanced, so that you can’t find them.
But they aren’t asked to write about the fortune of Fred Trump, which appears to have been about 10X the size of Donald’s. And so, no one knows that.
Journalism is a business. The business goes with the clicks and the clicks are not based on rationality. They’re based on emotions, catchy headlines, ignorance, and impatience.
If the sources you read are keeping you entertained and happy… Well, they have the numbers they need to know what makes you entertained and happy. The media on the left and right are vastly different and that is, likely, less driven by management so much as its pushed a particular direction in reward for a particular presentation of the material that appeals to that reader base.
