Item — HN Reader

Didn't read the book but I think it's more insidious than what you wrote. The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.

In the end if a journalist can get their story out faster by leaning on a few 'trusted sources' and then move onto the next article, most of them will and their managers will encourage it. Maybe you'll get a more in depth story if it makes it to On The Media a week or two later but that's basically all we have at this point which is very sad.

3 comments

> The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.

No, they know what they are doing and you can tell they know what they are doing by the careful way language is used differently for similar facts when the police or other favored entities are involved vs. other entities in similar factual circumstances (particularly, the use of constructions which separates responsibility for an adverse result from the actor, which is overwhelmingly used in US media when police are the actors—and also, when organs of the Israeli state are—but not for most other violent actors.) This is frequently described as “the exonerative mood” (or, sometimes, “the exonerative tense”, though it is not really a verb tense.)

Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.

I think your observations about tense and mood are very true, but you are undervaluing the extent to which someone can do something automatically and out of habit, especially when their paycheck depends on it.

I absolutely believe that a journalist can present two analogous sets of facts in two completely different ways without even consciously realizing it. These assumptions and biases are baked in deep, especially when you are writing day-in and day-out on short deadlines.

When the good guy riots it's called "unrest".

> No, [journalists] know what they are doing ... Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.

The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith. The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith, which makes me believe the arguments of the parent ("The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative") more so than the argument you're making here.

> The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

Maybe, maybe not. It is also true that the incredible vast majority of people in the world aren’t corporate journalists, also.

> The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith

Nearly all American corporate media has a conscious, top-down policy starting with the owners and editorial board to favor certain institutions, which is enforced by hiring, firing, promotions, and assignments of staff. The specific beneficiaries of this vary somewhat between outlet and outlet and over time, but both American police broadly and State of Israel are common beneficiaries across most outlets.

Journalists either comply are they aren’t journalists in the corporate media covering the issues to which these biases are relevant for long. Corporate media journalists aren’t independent actors.

Chomksy to Marr:

"...I'm sure you believe everything you're saying, but ... if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=597&feature=shared

>The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

this a very westerner perspective on society. Ask an Eastern European (like myself) how the vast majority of people are really acting.

Can you elaborate?

How well has that worked for East Europe?

Really well, thanks for asking

> The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.

We have fundamentally different priors.

Which areas or circumstances are you observing otherwise?

I see routine bad faith in:

- politicians of both parties (eg, speaking disingenously on issues of relevance to their corporate sponsors)

- corporations

- judges, including in the Supreme Court, who abandon espoused judicial philosophies the moment they conflict with political expediency

- government administrators, much more so with Trump's appointments

- media organizations (The self-censorship of coverage around Gaza has been eye-opening.)

The problem is that it is essentially impossible for a journalist to exist in the western world and not have heard of the criticism about how cops' actions get reported.

The term 'past exonerative tense' is dated to 1991.'"Mistakes were made" was popularized by Nixon.

To continue pulling this nonsense is wilful ignorance on the journalists' part, and effectively equivalent to bad faith.

It's more perverse than that. Journalists know if they don't toe the party line, their access to voluntary information from law enforcement will be cut off entirely. Hard to write an article when everyone refuses to talk to you.

I thought insidious means sinister/evil, but what you point out just shows that we as a society don't value news enough to pay for anything more than the 1-4 hours of time invested per news article.