The Media: Examples of Good AND Bad Journalism

[etienne]

Two interesting articles in the Guardian :

Escape from the rabbit hole: the conspiracy theorist who abandoned his dangerous beliefs
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/04/escape-from-the-rabbit-hole-the-conspiracy-theorist-who-abandoned-his-dangerous-beliefs

‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/may/04/youre-going-to-call-me-a-holocaust-denier-now-are-you-george-monbiot-comes-face-to-face-with-his-local-conspiracy-theorist

[morganism]

The strange trajectory of Tucker Carlson’s first 100 shows

Tucker Carlson last night released the 100th episode of his show on X, his comeback project following an unceremonious departure from Fox News. The milestone episode, featuring conservative commentator Dan Ball, addressed long-standing areas of interest for Carlson, such as congressional efforts to censor Right-of-centre voices. Indeed, it felt like a throwback to his cable days — more a lament of government overreach and the erosion of free speech than his continuing turn towards eccentric content about UFOs and the legal travails of alt-Right internet personalities.

Carlson’s shift towards fringe content was arguably necessary to maintain viewer interest outside of Fox’s huge mainstream platform. By featuring controversial figures such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, manosphere advocate Andrew Tate, and “Gay Obama” truther Larry Sinclair, Carlson has banked on the sensationalism and divisiveness these guests bring to sustain high engagement levels.

When I spoke to people close to Carlson’s current and previous shows, there was a consensus that these wackier episodes have negatively impacted the credibility and broader appeal of his platform, while also overshadowing more intimate and interesting conversations he has conducted with the likes of iconoclastic golfer John Daly, disgraced former CNN journalist Chris Cuomo, UFC boss Dana White, and trucking-industry writer Gord Magill.

To that end, Carlson’s well-publicised conversation with Vladimir Putin, which was criticised even by the Russian President himself for its lack of challenging questions, highlights the diminishing journalistic rigour of his highest-profile interviews. This shift towards embracing edgier guests and subject matter indicates a deeper commitment to niche content, which risks isolating a more varied audience.

Declining viewership statistics substantiate that view. Initially, Carlson’s X episodes consistently garnered over 100 million impressions, reaching their zenith around the middle of last year. However, a precipitous drop is evident from mid-December, with episodes struggling to surpass the 50-million-view mark and most attracting 10-30 million views. Additionally, this metric, which counts views regardless of viewing duration and even includes autoplays occurring in newsfeeds, does not tell us how long or in what ways most viewers actually engaged with these episodes.

Genuine growth would come from working to broaden that declining base, not merely shoring it up. According to insiders, while the absence of a traditional corporate structure has granted Carlson increased autonomy, it has also eliminated a crucial layer of editorial oversight. These sources have noted a shift towards targeting a less discerning audience, emphasising sensationalism over substantive discourse in order to keep the attention of more credulous viewers — one insider notes a current “audience minus about 10-15 IQ points from the prime-time show” — interested in space aliens and Obama’s alleged gay trysts.

Insiders tell me that previously, at Fox News, Carlson’s show was carefully crafted as appointment viewing. His prime-time slot at 8pm was built around a tightly scripted monologue, the result of hours of preparation by his production team. This format ensured that each episode was a polished delivery of Carlson’s viewpoints, designed to capture and retain a large national audience. The goal was to take innovative Right-wing views from Twitter and present them in a format accessible to a broader, not necessarily online-savvy audience. This strategy successfully mainstreamed what were often fringe opinions, making them palatable to a larger viewership.
(more)

https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-strange-trajectory-of-tucker-carlsons-first-100-shows/

[morganism]

Goldfish Memories by He Jiyan

*Machine-translated from a Chinese webpost on the Internet Archive, because this post was almost immediately censored and obliterated in China. It appeared (and disappeared) in May 2024.


Let me ask you a little question first:

If we search for the word “Jack Ma” on Baidu and set the time from 1998 to 2005, how many pieces of information can we find? Is it 100 million, 10 million, or 1 million?

I asked in several groups, and the general guess was that it should be in the millions or tens of millions. After all, there is so much information on the Internet. As a revolutionary entrepreneur of that era, Jack Ma must have left a lot of traces on the Internet.

But in fact all the results that can be found are as follows: 1

Using Baidu search, the selected date range is “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005”, which contains information about Jack Ma. There is a total of 1 piece (data on May 22, 2024).

(snip)

But in fact, this is not just the case with Jack Ma. We search for Ma Huateng, Lei Jun, Ren Zhengfei, etc., and even Internet celebrities like Luo Yonghao and Sister Furong who were very popular at that time, or like Jay Chou and Li Yuchun who once became popular all over the Internet. Celebrities, the results are the same. For example, in the case of the Lei Search Army, the result is as follows:

After testing different websites, different names, and different time periods, I discovered a shocking phenomenon:

Almost all Chinese websites that were popular in that era, such as NetEase, Sohu, Campus BBS, Xici Hutong, Kaidi Maoyan, Tianya Forum, Xiaonei.com (Renren), Sina Blog, Baidu Tieba, and a large number of personal websites, etc. Information before a certain year has completely disappeared, and even information from most websites for all years has disappeared. The only exception is Sina. Some information from more than ten years ago can still be found, but it is only a very small number. More than 99.9999% of the other content has disappeared.

No one is aware of a serious problem: the Chinese Internet is rapidly collapsing, and the Chinese Internet content before the advent of the mobile Internet has almost disappeared.

We originally thought that the Internet had memory, but we did not expect that this memory turned out to be a memory like a goldfish.
(more)

https://bruces.medium.com/goldfish-memories-by-he-jiyan-d11e6888bac6

Why does this happen? I guess the main reasons may be two reasons:

One is economic reasons.

The existence of a website requires servers, bandwidth, computer rooms, personnel for operation and maintenance, and many miscellaneous supervision and maintenance fees. These are all costs. If it has strategic value (for example, the information the company wants to display needs to be displayed to the outside world), or has short-term traffic value (for example, more people come to watch from time to time), and the company is not short of money in its account, then there will be Motivation to maintain.

But if the company takes a detour in business and runs out of money, the entire website will die directly. For example, Renren is a typical representative.

Even if the company still has money, from an operational perspective, if few people click on a web page all year round, it will become a burden to the company. The most economically rational way is to shut it down directly. This is the reason why Sohu and NetEase lost a large amount of their early content, as well as the collective demise of BBS represented by Tianya Forum.

The second is regulatory reasons.

Generally speaking, the supervision of Internet information is a process from scratch, from lenient to strict, and from strict to more stringent. Content that could exist legally in the past no longer meets regulatory requirements; or content that could exist in gray before was later defined as black. These contents will be clicked directly.

Others are that as the times change, the polarization of public opinion becomes more and more extreme. Content that was “just normal” in the past has become very sharp and sensitive in the subsequent public opinion environment. Although it is not illegal, it may intensify conflicts. If it creates chaos, regulators may also ask for it to be dealt with.

Generally speaking, the supervision of Internet information is a process from scratch, from lenient to strict, and from strict to more stringent. Content that could exist legally in the past no longer meets regulatory requirements; or content that could exist in gray before was later defined as black. These contents will be clicked directly.

In addition to official departments, angry netizens also act as public opinion regulators from time to time. They will dig out a sentence that someone accidentally said more than ten years ago, hold on to it, and bring people online to “social death.”

But the most important impact of regulation is not the handling of regulatory authorities or the attacks of angry netizens, but the “self-censorship” they will cause companies and individuals.

Because no one knows which piece of content exists on the website or which sentence someone once said will bring disaster to the person concerned a few years later. The best way is to directly eliminate all these potential “time bombs”, that is, shut down the website or delete all the content.

[sidd]

Lukyanov at rt: blasts from the past

"In late 1986 Yegor Ligachev, the secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, and Viktor Chebrikov, then-head of the KGB, proposed that the country end the practice of jamming foreign radio stations. ‘Enemy voices’ was the popular term used at the time to describe these broadcasts from abroad."

"blocking was expensive but not very effective, given the size of the country. So, it was suggested that signal-jamming be abandoned and that funds be diverted to counter-propaganda measures."

"US Secretary of State Antony Blinken devoted an entire speech to RT, which is subject to ‘full-blocking’ ... sanctions for its supposedly destructive and subversive work around the world. "

"The more comprehensive the information and communication environment, the greater its impact on people’s behavior, and the more acute the desire of governments to tighten control "

"the demands for information pluralism, then and later, reflected the confidence of Washington that it would emerge victorious from any competition. And so, after a few years, the US achieved a de-facto monopoly on the interpretation of everything."

" attempts to explain internal strife and accumulated contradictions in America by pointing to a pernicious external influence. This was also the Soviet experience."

"American history teaches us that monopolies do not last forever."

https://www.rt.com/news/604221-us-losing-monopoly-sanctions-rt/

sidd

[sidd]

Media in a bygone age: pamphlets

" the first German edition of the pamphlet is reported to have been
limited to only 2,000 copies, as was also the original English edition"

https://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf

sidd

[etienne]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCZT9KxvPU5/?igsh=MTQzbnpkemkzcWV1aA%3D%3D

A presentation of how the press communicated about the behavior of Israeli hooligans.

[morganism]

Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy

The truth is going out of business as technology turns us into a folk-story society, ripe for influence by a demagogue.

(...)
I wanted to elaborate some more on Alex’s question from the interview about what I meant when I said we live in an increasingly postliterate media economy. It’s a regime in which the truth is going out of business for macroeconomic reasons, not because a few editors picked some bad stories and headlines:

    The work of obtaining facts has a major economic disadvantage against the production of bullshit, and it’s only getting worse. I’m a pro-labor person, so I often think about the problems of our journalism through a lens of how we do our work, why it’s done, and who’s paying for it. After many years of watching my fellow journalists suffer at legacy newspapers, digital startups, big commercial newsrooms, small nonprofit outlets and public media all alike, here’s what I learned the hard way: America’s marketplace of ideas has a competition problem. The biggest story about media and the internet is that new technology — AI, social media, smartphones, etc. — keeps driving down the cost of producing bullshit while the cost of obtaining quality information only goes up. It’s getting more and more expensive to produce the good stuff, and the good stuff has to compete against more and more trash once it’s out on the market.
(plenty more)

https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in

[Freegrass]

I don't know if anyone here is familiar with the story that Joe and Mika, from Morning Joe, a show I watched every day, went to Mar-a-Lago, to meat with Trump last weekend. A man they called Hitler. The backlash has been tremendous.

This is a great article about it from Steve Schmidt, a hardcore solid republican, and friend of Joe and Mika, who helped create the Lincoln Project. I don't agree with his politics, but I do like him and his opinions from time to time.


These are some small excerpts I put together as a summary. But better to read the whole thing.
It's a pivotal moment for American mainstream media.

Nothing good comes from fear

Running a newsroom in America is going to take a lot of fortitude and character. Most of the people running them today are inept, feckless and completely out of their depth. This is a moment for tough, smart, serious and principled people.

They are legitimately terrified of the man about to become president in 2025 America — even though they make tens of millions of dollars a year, and host four hours of network television a day.

Nothing good comes from fear. It is an ugly emotion and a precursor to panic, betrayal and erratic judgment.

Fear captures people and holds them hostage. Sometimes, it doesn’t let go. When it takes hold it can make the world very small, very dark and very isolating.

Their fear has destroyed their show.

They went to Mar-a-Lago for fear or retribution when their job required them to demonstrate toughness and courage. They failed in a moment of truth. It doesn’t make them bad people, but it renders them unworthy of the moment and their audience, which has collapsed.

Self-interest above national interest is the shared ethos of America’s power class. It is why the American people hold so much of the American elite in such abject contempt.

For Joe and Mika it turned out nothing was more important than the fear except them. They were powerful people, who perfectly suited a moment of time now gone. Gadfly journalism and clique curation have their place, but it won’t be morning television on MSNBC because there won’t be an MSNBC anymore.

Comcast is a $164 billion market cap company, which just put its cable businesses up for sale for $7 billion.

Why?

Why now?

Fear. 

[morganism]

 The ABC Settlement Is Just the Start of Trump’s Press Crackdown. History Shows Us What Comes Next.

American presidents have often gone to war against the First Amendment — and won.

(plenty more historical)
It is by no means impossible to imagine a world in which the Trump administration transitions from using civil cases to bully journalists into silence, to using the Department of Justice. The border and fentanyl crises certainly provide the veneer of “national security” interests, and as was the case from Adams to Lincoln to Wilson to Truman, an administration need only make a few examples of opposition journalists to send a chill over the entire profession.

What was true then is likely true now. The courts won’t save independent journalism. It will be up to American citizens to decide how much they value their First Amendment rights, and how vocal they will be in defending them.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/22/presidents-attacking-the-press-00195726

[etienne]

The Guardian advertises the Azov brigade.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/10/ukraine-combat-unit-azov-recruit-english-speaking-soldiers

Travelling to Ukraine to fight in its armed forces is not illegal, unless you are a member of the UK armed forces, though it is not encouraged.

Non-Ukrainians seeking to join Azov have to complete a recruitment process, including interviews in Kyiv, which Karl said includes a psychological assessment “and a polygraph test, to check they do not work undercover for Russian special forces”.

Quite awful, why should people be given such ideas? There are more peaceful ways to act for peace.

[Neven]

Quite awful, why should people be given such ideas?

Because The Guardian has become an authoritarian war-mongering neoliberal/conservative propaganda outlet, ie very bad journalism.

Not only is it a warmongering idea those sick sadists promote, but on top of that, the Azov brigade has been and still is a neo-Nazi outfit. If you'd bring a Ukrainian Bandera Nazi from 1940-1945 to The Guardian main office, all the editors would probably give him a standing ovation, just like they did in the Canadian parliament.

[etienne]

About the Azov brigade during WW2,  it is also a story of "the enemies of my enemies are my friends", and when  you are between Staline and Hitler,  it can't end well.

In the second short story in the book "The bride of Odessa" by Edgardo Cozarinsky, probably is about it (Google translated from the french edition).

In February of last year, at the Yalta Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt bowed to Stalin and not only handed over half of Europe, but also promised him our lives... Nothing so dramatic was said, of course. The operation is called "Repatriation," although none of us, need I tell you, were citizens of the Soviet Union. There are a few of us, the older ones, who fought under Krasnov when England and France entered Russia through the port of Murmansk in 1919. (Murmansk! Five months of night and fifty degrees below zero...) That first defeat should have taught us something. But it didn't. How many of us, a hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand, followed the Wehrmacht in 1941, believing that we were going to liberate our homeland from the Bolsheviks? It seems that Stalin showed a very particular desire to win us back at Yalta... You have no idea, Natasha Safna, what the exodus of Russians and Ukrainians was like following the retreat of the German army: entire families, on foot, along snowy paths, sometimes pulling an old woman in a cart, people who had never taken up arms, as we ourselves did, who had never "collaborated with the invader", as the Americans say... (The Americans! Who have never been invaded or occupied, who have always waged war on other people's soil...) People who had only one goal, to flee the Soviet Union on this unique occasion, this final opportunity that was offered to them. I have no illusions about what awaits us. We first ended up near here, at Dachau... When we were brought there, our attention was drawn to the fact that despite the absence of trees in the camp the ground was covered with yellow leaves... I picked one up. It was made of cloth, in the shape of a star, and the word Jude was printed on it in Gothic letters... Two weeks earlier, the Jews who were interned there had been liberated... We have now been taken to Plattling and for five days we have not slept. Every morning, before sunrise, American soldiers enter our barracks with baseball bats and hit the metal legs of the bunk beds with them, shouting in broken German "Mach schnell!" until we are all gathered in the middle of the yard, in the snow; then they load forty or fifty prisoners a day into trucks which take them to the Czech border, where a division of the Red Army awaits them. In Dachau, eight of our officers committed suicide, here Major Samoilov cut his chest open by rubbing himself against the barbed wire... The Americans, as their only reaction, filmed him before taking him to the infirmary... I will be one of the last because they need me as an interpreter... This is what our readings have become... Lyrisches Intermezzo, Tom Brown's Schooldays... Yesterday an American non-commissioned officer was returning from the Czech border, our eyes met and he had a fit of tears. He looked like a child. He kept stammering "trees covered with hanged men, there, in the woods"... General Krasnov, always old school, sent a message to Churchill, reminding him that he had been decorated in 1918 with the British Military Cross by Sir Winston himself... Is he expecting a response? Does he think it is possible? From the English? The English, who at the beginning of last year bombed Dresden, which was not a military objective, and who destroyed the most beautiful city in Germany and killed hundreds of thousands of refugees from the East who had managed to get there... (As for the Americans, it is said that they detonated a new weapon in a Japanese city, a bomb whose destructive capacity is unimaginable.)

The book is very good.

[Neven]

You can discuss the matter further here: Ukraine, Nazis and Western support