The NYT and WaPo make stuff up every day. As long as they can attribute it to known liars in the government.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I talked to reporters. It is in my nature to be helpful. Didn't last long because what got reported always missed the point to some degree. My sense was that they simply didn't have the background to understand the subject and/or were just phoning it in. I was no longer willing to be party to publicizing material that was off. So, it makes no sense to me that sources would continue to feed reporters once known to distort what they were fed.
I understand how reporting can get muddled. I understand how sources can be misunderstood. But making stuff up makes no sense from an incentive perspective. Someone will catch it, either a source or an editor or a competitor who wants to show you up. Reputation is everything in that business and the job is reporting. Too much risk for reporters to make things up.
OTOH, sources thought to be reliable could be lying to the reporter. Unattributed sources are an iffy proposition. You have to trust the reporter's judgment of what is accurate and that could be faulty. So they go for multiple sources, which mitigates the risk but doesn't eliminate it. Still, the WaPo and the NYT attract the best, presumably not likely to be taken in, which also mitigates the risk. If they only published official press statements. which is the alternative to using unattributed sources, what's the point? Would spoon-fed, anodyne pablum really make us more informed? I wouldn't pay a publisher for that.
I think that when y'all say they make it up you really mean that you don't believe it because it just doesn't resonate. I'm a fan of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation IMO for those media being out of sync with your narrative is who their reporters are. I've written this before. They are educated, cosmopolitan people engaging rationally with educated, cosmopolitan people by certain standards, professional and cultural. Those are the people that you find in professional classes in big cities with prominent newspapers. One might call that cohort a silo but it is the default silo. The default silo is establishment until it isn't. The default status means that what it says is presumed to be largely valid until and unless someone demonstrates otherwise. If you want to demonstrate otherwise, you have to do so by criteria and standards that they respect, by which they were trained and rewarded. They won't go for something illogical or seemingly made from whole cloth.
Some of the MAGA stuff may be arguable but it has to be actually argued to prevail, not just believed and asserted strenuously by outsiders. That much of it has been shown to be risible on its face, there's a credibility handicap re other stuff that might have potential to break through. Even harder when those trying to break through seem willing to tear the whole system down rather than make their case.
I've long said that the majority of disagreements stem from people having different defaults. They get started in different directions and ne'er the twain shall meet. Your default is that everybody else is lying and cheating. The mainstream default is the status quo, that which has been normally established. |
