Don’t get me wrong—I’m the first to say journalists are the absolute scum of the earth but I’d a conversation on how we can make this problem better. People follow their incentives. Currently, those incentives are bad in exactly the kind of ways you say.
Some suggestions have already been mentioned in the comments.
Name and shame certainly seems worth thinking about—but don’t forget the carrot; how do we reward upstanding honest journalists?
I don’t have the answer but it seems to me that it would plausibly be good if we had some longer-term feedback mechanisms with more persistent memory. E.g. although I know that most outlets can be untrustworthy in the ways you mention I would struggle to be able name enough cases in detail to convince a skeptical interlocutor.
Perhaps the first basic step would be to create a database that systematically tracked this kind of dishonesty in journalism ?
New cause area !
EDIT: just noticted the first reply already mentions a good /naughty list for journalists. This seems pretty good.
People mention the problem of ‘objectively judging’ somebody’s trustworthiness. I worry about that too—it seems that this is a reason factchecking websites don’t really work.
Perhaps one could let people do some version of a political compass survey where the questions looks at specific highly contentious cases and ask people to judge those and based on their responses build a model of which journalism and journalists they will consider untrustworthy upon reflection
Don’t get me wrong—I’m the first to say journalists are the absolute scum of the earth but I’d a conversation on how we can make this problem better. People follow their incentives. Currently, those incentives are bad in exactly the kind of ways you say.
Some suggestions have already been mentioned in the comments. Name and shame certainly seems worth thinking about—but don’t forget the carrot; how do we reward upstanding honest journalists?
I don’t have the answer but it seems to me that it would plausibly be good if we had some longer-term feedback mechanisms with more persistent memory. E.g. although I know that most outlets can be untrustworthy in the ways you mention I would struggle to be able name enough cases in detail to convince a skeptical interlocutor. Perhaps the first basic step would be to create a database that systematically tracked this kind of dishonesty in journalism ?
New cause area !
EDIT: just noticted the first reply already mentions a good /naughty list for journalists. This seems pretty good.
People mention the problem of ‘objectively judging’ somebody’s trustworthiness. I worry about that too—it seems that this is a reason factchecking websites don’t really work.
Perhaps one could let people do some version of a political compass survey where the questions looks at specific highly contentious cases and ask people to judge those and based on their responses build a model of which journalism and journalists they will consider untrustworthy upon reflection