American trust in the media

[skuthorp]

yeah. I better go for a bike ride. What really gets me is the acceptance of popular general terms as having some specific meaning through frequent use. The Media is a dumb ass general term. It’s not a person, it’s not an organization, it’s not a news service, a news outlet, it’s not effing news at all. People are conflating tik tok with Walter Cronkite then declaring “no one trusts the media!”.
Jesus this is dumb.

What he said, and #21.
As a catch all for news organisations it sucks. It includes propaganda bodies like Fox and Murdoch's organisations in general, let alone Jones (we had a RW Jones as well) and others of his ilk. But the blame largely lays with the politicians you elect, and the USSC who were the major facilitator.

[David G]

The reason so many RWW fools watch Fox News is they trust it to serve up lies that don't challenge or contradict their bias and hate.

Yes... kinda like that saying about religion: If your god hates all the same people you do... YOU may have created HIM in your image. Time to back up and think again.

[LeeG]

See right here MTG says Trump won in Georgia 2020 and a Georgia Republican official says that isn’t true. Now it’s presented on a YouTube media clip of a news program that’s another media platform. Now MTG will link a five second clip of her performance on TikTok another medium. How can anyone trust the media when they all say different things? oh woe! I can’t trust the media!!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxGE55s6VA0

[sandtown]

i the biggest problem with journalism and media today lies in the uneducated and superficial consumption - the key is being able* and willing to find it, and being willing to consume news from more than one source

Some deflectionism you have going there. You strive mightily to impose uniformity of UKR sources.

Again, that is not good journalism.

And the media whipping up war frenzy has a long history . . . Go Caitlin !!

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/0...-war-protests/

[bamamick]

When there are people like Tucker Calson given press credentials how can you trust them? A friend of mine who calls me a pinko commie tree hugger, just like someone else around here, asked me one day where I got my news? I told him from the BBC and NPR. His response? 'well, there you go!'. Like I am supposed to know what the hell that means. You won't trust the BBC and NPR but you will trust any idiot that Fox trots out there, when the whole rest of the world knows that Fox's FCC license should be pulled for fraudulent reporting?

Mickey Lake

[Tom Montgomery]

the biggest problem with journalism and media today lies in the uneducated and superficial consumption of it
there are still reliable and honest and even unbiased sources of news out there - the key is being able* and willing to find it, and being willing to consume news from more than one source

* this is a big deal, large parts of our society are too ignorant to find it; now who's fault is that?

I agree wth this 100%

Call me prone to "deflectionism."

[sandtown]

Call me prone to "deflectionism."

Well, to the extent that you blather on about the "uneducated" news consumers who fail to look at multiple credible sources . . .

while at the same time you attempt to shut down contrary sources on the Ukr thread . .

then I would conclude that you are indeed a deflectionalist.

[skuthorp]

Russia invaded Ukraine, twice. End of that story.

[Nicholas Carey]

Actually there is none.

Between news about stolen elections, COVID origin and the legitimacy of Hunter Biden's laptop. Americans have become even more distrustful of the media.

What do ypu mean by "media"?

The old-school media - NY Times, WaPo, New Yorker, Boston Globe, . . . .

Are as reliable as ever. They have competent fact-checking departments that ensure that nothing goes out that can't be verified.

Anything owned by Rupert Murdoch is suspect. The fact-checkers are long gone, and the news is subservient to sales/ratings and political objectives.

[Tom Montgomery]

Well, to the extent that you blather on about the "uneducated" news consumers who fail to look at multiple credible sources . . .

while at the same time you attempt to shut down contrary sources on the Ukr thread . .

I have?

That is news to me. Tell me more… can you provide a linky to where I have done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Personally, I think you’re just slinging sh!te.

[Peerie Maa]

I have?

That is news to me. Tell me more… can you provide a linky to where I have done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Personally, I think you’re just slinging sh!te.

He is probably still miffed because his favourite go to source of misinformation has been shown to publish terminological inexactitudes about the gas pipe sabotage.

[Hallam]

Americans like their news like they like their food. Fast, cheap and easy.

……with generous amounts of fat and sugar while lacking in nutritional value.

[Hallam]

I had a very uncomfortable experience with this yesterday. A relative keeps sending me propaganda from American Thinker, a horrible right-wing propaganda machine. They argued that Santos' lies are Biden's fault and they did it rather smoothly. We got into an unpleasant exchange where she declared herself to be open minded and I was not. At the same time, I know she won't read conventional sources like Associated Press, NPR, etc.

There is a very deep indoctrination happening in our society and I do not know how to reverse it. I tried challenging her with quotes from the article, but she is trained in deflect and accuse to the point there was no reaching her.

This May have more relevance than most are giving credit. The psychological tools available that were first studied and utilised in highly successful influence campaigns during the McCarthy era have only become more sophisticated and targeted in the years since. I have read a fair amount of documents released by the CIA I think under FOI etc and also some papers from the Rand corp that point in this direction. That Murdoch is a player in this sphere is not by chance. I believe.He was probably networked as a young man following on from his Father and came to be known as the right man for the job with all the qualifications needed. The right of politics has always had the cosier relationship with the various secret service agencies for obvious reasons since the consolidation of the Cold War era. That was the foundation on which all else in this arena has been built. As a tool of American ‘clandestine diplomacy’ he has been well positioned and is always on message, first established in Oz then UK and USA. He is only one arrow in the quiver but the wider networks are extensive, relatively disciplined and co ordinated in trajectory. Whatever the current game plan is going I’m at a bit of a loss but it could be that once they got the ball rolling with the tea party era on top fo the betrayal of the 2008 crash things have gotten a bit out of hand in the Trump era. Trump may be more than they bargained for. MThat would also explain a reluctance to bite the hand that they have fed. If the destabilisation is a deliberate strategy then has the Apple gone bad and the agenda is to establish an autocracy?

[Hallam]

This was an easy find:

Foundations of Effective Influence Operations

A Framework for Enhancing Army Capabilities

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG654.html

[Hallam]

From The UK this video about current politics dominated by NeoLiberal backed politics using the power of Oliagarc financing and funded think tanks:

https://twitter.com/doubledownnews/status/1577574544478507009?s=21

[Peerie Maa]

From The UK this video about current politics dominated by NeoLiberal backed politics using the power of Oliagarc financing and funded think tanks:

https://twitter.com/doubledownnews/status/1577574544478507009?s=21

It is hardly dominated. The Tories do luuurve rich donors, but Liz Truss? Seriously?

[Hallam]

It is hardly dominated. The Tories do luuurve rich donors, but Liz Truss? Seriously?

Looking at the trajectory of policy over the past 30 years, dominate is a suitable description. Irrespective of how pathetic the demonstrations of leadership are corporate economic interests are a priority over the interests of the vast majority of constituents. So here we are in the West confronted by the reality that Democracy has evolved into a dysfunctional system in serving the people that elected officials supposedly represent.

[David G]

Looking at the trajectory of policy over the past 30 years, dominate is a suitable description. Irrespective of how pathetic the demonstrations of leadership are corporate economic interests are a priority over the interests of the vast majority of constituents. So here we are in the West confronted by the reality that Democracy has evolved into a dysfunctional system in serving the people that elected officials supposedly represent.

We are deep in the throes of the Acton Dictum. It ain't incurable... but we've got plenty of work to do...

"When there is an accumulation of money and power into fewer and fewer hands, people with the mentality of gangsters come to the fore. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- Lord Acton <Keep in mind that he's British, and a historian, and he said this in 1877. This is not the first time the pattern has played out>

[LeeG]

I am working with the medium of seeds, red clover today, millet next week.

[Dave Hadfield]

OP -- Americans trust the media they select, enormously.

Because so many have no books in their houses.

Every time I visit, and look around a home there, I'm astounded.

[McMike]

OP -- Americans trust the media they select, enormously.

Because so many have no books in their houses.

Every time I visit, and look around a home there, I'm astounded.

You do know there is an internet . . . right? I have listened to hundreds of audio books, closer to a thousand than not, but I don't own most of them physically. I've also walked into homes that look like fox news in book form, does that make them smarter for having read that crap? Seriously, get a better metric for judging people.

[McMike]

As for the media; it's our fault. We only want validation, the boomers invented the echo chamber, voted for the man who destroyed truth. . . Freedom of the press . . . what does that mean if the press is bullsh17? All of these ideas put into the constitution . . . not one written to protect us fro the powerful's constant need for control.

[Paul Pless]

OP -- Americans trust the media they select, enormously.

Because so many have no books in their houses.

Every time I visit, and look around a home there, I'm astounded.

you'd be pretty astounded by the number of books in our home i think, shelves crammed full and sagging, stacks of books on either side of most lounging chairs, books on desks and tables, books in our vehicles, digital books on our tablets
kat and i give have given away thousands of books

[sandtown]

OP -- Americans trust the media they select, enormously.

Because so many have no books in their houses. .

That makes them easy pickings for the media of the Reich.

[Nicholas Carey]

You do know there is an internet . . . right? I have listened to hundreds of audio books, closer to a thousand than not, but I don't own most of them physically. I've also walked into homes that look like fox news in book form, does that make them smarter for having read that crap? Seriously, get a better metric for judging people.

Books in the home, whether or not you've actually read them are aspirational. They are symbols indicating [to you, and others] that (1) you are learning, and (2) you understand that there are things that you do not know (but wish to).

There was an interesting article published not very long ago on this very topic, but as did not bookmark it, and can't find it.

Further, the mere presence of books in the house improves academic outcomes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...49089X18300607

Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies

Abstract. A growing body of evidence supports the contention of scholarly culture theory that immersing children in book-oriented environments benefits their later educational achievement, attainment and occupational standing. These findings have been interpreted as suggesting that book-oriented socialization, indicated by home library size, equips youth with life-long tastes, skills and knowledge. However, to date, this has not been directly assessed. Here, we document advantageous effects of scholarly culture for adult literacy, adult numeracy, and adult technological problem solving. Growing up with home libraries boosts adult skills in these areas beyond the benefits accrued from parental education or own educational or occupational attainment. The effects are loglinear, with greatest returns to the growth in smaller libraries. Our evidence comes from regressions with balanced repeated replicate weights estimated on data from 31 societies which participated in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) between 2011 and 2015.

Introduction. How does culture enhance life chances? The most prominent theory of this tradition, Bourdieu's argument about cultural reproduction, builds on Max Weber's insight into the importance of culture in boundary maintenance by elite status groups. It posits that elite families equip their children with &ldquo;widely shared, high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviours, goods and credentials) used for cultural exclusion&rdquo; (Lamont and Lareau, 1988: 156) thereby securing educational advantages for their children and reducing opportunities for other children. Critical to this argument are three elements: (1) the signals are arbitrary &ndash; they do not actually enhance educational or occupational performance; (2) the signals are difficult or time consuming to acquire, so they are hard to fake; (3) the elite have near-exclusive access to these signals. A host of empirical studies inspired by this argument conclude that cultural capital, misconstrued by teachers as academic excellence, provides elite children with unfair advantages in securing desirable socioeconomic outcomes. Importantly, this tradition assumes that the high-status cultural signals are linked to a monolithic highbrow culture. However, every test of the dimensionality of high culture finds not one, but rather two distinctive groupings: a books and reading-related dimension and a beaux arts/arts appreciation/arts spectatorship dimension. Building on this distinction, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that when book-related forms of cultural resources are distinguished from other forms, the former and not the latter account for much of educational success. This is because book-related resources have a substantive link to academic-related skills such as vocabulary building, counterfactual thinking, and cognitive flexibility, whereas highbrow arts consumption or extracurricular activities have no substantive impact on academic skills. It is only when the books and reading measures are (incorrectly) incorporated into a single &ldquo;cultural capital&rdquo; measure with arts spectatorship that the signals as a group have an effect. In short, scholarly culture is separate from arts spectatorship and, moreover, scholarly culture has a major impact on educational performance and attainment, but arts spectatorship has little or no effect. This is important because it undermines the claim that cultural resources are arbitrary signals used by the elite to exclude or disadvantage others: instead, highbrow arts (the arbitrary signals) are of little or no importance to education, while engagement in book-related culture raises educational attainment.

The implication, which we shall examine here, is that scholarly culture endows children with cognitive skills that intrinsically enhance academic performance, rather than scholarly culture being merely an arbitrary signal of elite membership. If that implication is correct, we should be able to detect effects of scholarly culture on cognitive skills &ndash; this is consistent with prior research but has not previously been tested due to data limitations.

Another important aspect of the scholarly culture theory is its proposition that involvement in books and reading benefits most disadvantaged children and not the children of the elite. This contrasts with cultural reproduction theory and builds on the cultural mobility model, as detailed below.

Our goals in this paper are to

1) validate the scholarly culture hypothesis in the context of new outcomes that are essential to the claim of intrinsic connection between book-oriented childhoods and educational and occupational success, namely, adult literacy, numeracy, and solving problems using information and communication technologies (ICT); and

2) to illuminate the inter- and intra-generational mechanisms through which scholarly culture operates. We will also consider, more speculatively, if culture conceptualized thus is likely to remain relevant in the era of digital literacy.

In service of these goals, we present evidence from 31 societies which participated in Rounds I and II of the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).

[Nicholas Carey]

You do know there is an internet . . . right? I have listened to hundreds of audio books, closer to a thousand than not, but I don't own most of them physically. I've also walked into homes that look like fox news in book form, does that make them smarter for having read that crap? Seriously, get a better metric for judging people.

Further, there are quite a few studies that show that your brain processes information differently when you read printed text on paper, rather than reading it on a screen or listening to audiobooks. Reading printed text on paper improves comprehension and understanding.

[Nicholas Carey]

you'd be pretty astounded by the number of books in our home i think, shelves crammed full and sagging, stacks of books on either side of most lounging chairs, books on desks and tables, books in our vehicles, digital books on our tablets
kat and i give have given away thousands of books

There are books everywhere in our house. And more in boxes in the basement because we didn't have room for them all when we moved into the current house.

[I really should go through them and unload a lot them - quite a few are science fiction and fantasy novels that I'll never, ever read again.]

[heimfried]

We've accepted all of this as 'free speech'. I've been a fairly lonely voice in arguing that politicians and those operating under NEWS ought to be required to get matters of fact correct.

Free speech is not absolute. It has limits. There are lines. "Beat the hell out of him. I'll pay our legal bills!" certainly crossed one of those lines, but there were no repercussions from it.

I completely agree on this with you.

[skuthorp]

One thing to remember about 'the media', especilly the commercial media is that, as Rupert and Fox have recently admitted, money and ideology trumps truth and principles.

[WI-Tom]

……with generous amounts of fat and sugar while lacking in nutritional value.

The idea that dietary fat is bad or lacks nutritional value has been pretty much debunked.

Sugar and excess carbohydrates are the problem in the typical U.S. diet, which is related to an extreme reliance on processed foods, most of them based on high-fructose corn syrup. If you eat only actual FOOD (plants, meat, dairy), about 90% of the typical U.S. supermarket becomes completely irrelevant.

Pretty much every study suggesting that dietary fat is bad has failed to make a distinction between a high-CARB/high-fat diet, and a LOW-carb/high fat diet. As it turns out, the bad effects are related to excessive carbohydrate consumption. Carbs trigger an insulin response, leading to loss of insulin sensitivity, fat storage, and diabetes. Dietary fat triggers absolutely no insulin response. There is no relationship at all between consumption of dietary fat, and body fat accumulation.

Tom

[birlinn]

One thing to remember about 'the media', especilly the commercial media is that, as Rupert and Fox have recently admitted, money and ideology trumps truth and principles.

Trump's truth and principles- he has none!

[Hallam]

I am working with the medium of seeds, red clover today, millet next week.

Sounds like your solution is complete withdrawal from society and the economic market in pursuit of the off grid prepper lifestyle?

[McMike]

Further, there are quite a few studies that show that your brain processes information differently when you read printed text on paper, rather than reading it on a screen or listening to audiobooks. Reading printed text on paper improves comprehension and understanding.

Tell that to my brain. Get off your high horse. Don't yuck my yum. Stop gatekeeping knowledge and how we learn as individuals. Stop judging people on how they learn. I hired my replacement, a super smart kid. He, Like me, coasted through primary school, they simply passed us but neither of us should have graduated. He at 22 makes 70k a year now, he's smart and capable. I trained him for 6 weeks and we got to know each other. He asked me, "why did they just give up on us? They just threw us away." I said, they are the stupid ones as you make more than most of your high school teachers do in just 4 years and they've been at it for more than 10 most of them. Who won, I asked him. The system sucks, conventional knowledge is overrated when it comes to education. And your study is bullsh17 for a large segment of the population, maybe even approaching half of it. That's the trouble with people who think they're smart, they stop looking for answers.

[WI-Tom]

Tell that to my brain. Get off your high horse. Don't yuck my yum. Stop gatekeeping knowledge and how we learn as individuals. Stop judging people on how they learn. I hired my replacement, a super smart kid. He, Like me, coasted through primary school, they simply passed us but neither of us should have graduated. He at 22 makes 70k a year now, he's smart and capable. I trained him for 6 weeks and we got to know each other. He asked me, "why did they just give up on us? They just threw us away." I said, they are the stupid ones as you make more than most of your high school teachers do in just 4 years and they've been at it for more than 10 most of them. Who won, I asked him. The system sucks, conventional knowledge is overrated when it comes to education. And your study is bullsh17 for a large segment of the population, maybe even approaching half of it. That's the trouble with people who think they're smart, they stop looking for answers.

Mike,

you clearly had bad experiences with formal education. I've been teaching since 2003 and I wholeheartedly agree that the system leaves many behind, or even actively damages them.

But the science is pretty clear that reading on screens does different things to our brains--changes them in different ways--than reading on a book. I'm less informed about audiobooks, but they don't appeal to me. I like the visual of printed words. My wife, on the other hand, listens to audiobooks all the time, and loves them. She is far from dumb.

One of the things that seems to be evolving from our shift from book reading to Internet reading is a much shorter attention span for texts, and much less ability to focus on a sustained narrative in writing.

Is that good, bad, or neutral? That's a different question. Is it happening? I don't think that's a question anymore. Being aware of that is not riding any kind of "high horse" and it's not "gate-keeping" and it's not "judging" and it's not "yucking anyone's yum."

Tom

[LeeG]

Sounds like your solution is complete withdrawal from society and the economic market in pursuit of the off grid prepper lifestyle?

Not really, I think the term “The Media” is misued so as to diminish the responsibility of those who use it. Which part of “The media” is being referred to? The entertainment part, the informative news part, the social networking part, etc. So I interact with my environment through the medium of planting. I get an Atlantic magazine in the mail and read an email, they’re both part of media. Along comes a poll that says “Trust in the media is 33%” If some seeds come up and some don’t I don’t immediately think “Oh gosh, my trust in these seeds has gone down” I think “what’s different about the different ares they work, what was the temp and rain when planted.

So I don’t blame The Media for me getting an incomplete picture or misunderstanding of a situation. That’s on me.