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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

This is from May 7th, but I hadn’t seen it.

Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.

He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.

But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.

Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party

. . . And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.

Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.

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[-] oxjox@lemmy.ml 100 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

MOTHERFUCKER - JOURNALISM IS THE FOURTH PILLAR OF DEMOCRACY. ITS YOUR LITERAL ONE JOB - TO DEFEND IT.

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.

Ah, that’s your problem right there. And this is going to be the major issue for generations to come. The algorithms are determining what’s popular and will generate content to maintain engagement. What used to happen is news rooms would find important stories and report on them then the people would read those stories to determine what actually matters in their lives.

I subscribe to my local paper. The mobile app is essentially ‘what the people want’. Meanwhile, the newspaper itself (print or digital) has almost entirely different content and it’s certainly organized differently. When I want to learn about things in my community and the world - the reason I subscribe to a newspaper in the first place - I read the paper, not the app. The app is just like a blog.

It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.

[-] Blackbeard@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[-] oxjox@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months ago

Fantastic 👏👏👏

To add to that, all I keep seeing in the news is about Biden's poor performance. Yeah, we knoooow. Can we maybe get some coverage of the report of Trump raping a child or how many mentions he has on Epstein's list? Is there anything else going on in the world we should know about? All the news is doing is grabbing hold of the most sensational topic that every other outlet is ~~reporting on~~ speculating about so they don't lose ratings / clicks.

The world we live in is not about genuine creativity or challenging perspectives or journalistic responsibility. All we have going forward is what generates ad revenue. What's "engaging". And our dumbass brains only care about dopamine. So anything that challenges us to think outside the box is too difficult for us to engage with. The corporations and special interest groups have won. I wouldn't be too worried about climate change at this point, kids. I doubt you'll be aware of your surrounds enough to realize what's going on around you.

I'm just hoping for a new Age of Enlightenment. Maybe people will realize that having everyone else do the thinking for us isn't such a great idea.

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I'm just hoping for a new Age of Enlightenment. Maybe people will realize that having everyone else do the thinking for us isn't such a great idea.

That sounds wonderful. However I'm not expecting it anytime soon.

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Another part is just straight up computer illiteracy. You can bet Kahn wouldn't know an algorithm if it bit him in the ass.

What that translates to is an unfamiliarity with how social media works - or rather a distorted familiarity.

It's the exact same reason it took federal courts a decade to decide Microsoft was a monopoly, and we still have this problem in any legal situation. Judges and newspaper editors know sweet fuck all about how the modern world communicates. Or rather, what they know is an extreme distortion.

[-] Jerkface@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

From the article

University of Illinois professor Nicholas Grossman wrote:
Biden’s age isn’t among voters’ top issues in polls, but the NY Times made it a recurring top story anyway. Voters sure didn’t say they care about the president of Harvard, but the Times made that the number one story for days. When NYT editors care, they don’t defer to polls.

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.

You can say that again.

this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
299 points (96.3% liked)

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