They also basically told you fantasies about the Russians and many other bullshit and convenient stories that put superhero de jure in a good light.

Word clouds are silly and a bit out of fashion, but very useful to find common rhetoric. If there is a dissonance between reporting and common users, you might have found content that is more of a suggestive nature.

There was and is a lot of that. Maybe popular writers just have common groups for information interchange. That on its own can be detrimental because the number of perspectives shrinks.

Complexity isn't an excuse. Legislative frameworks have a tendency to get more complicated since they often lack mechanism to deprecate unfitting laws, but overall complexity didn't really increase. It is an excuse and rationalization for these kind of lies. Projection of hegemonial power and securing strategic resources isn't complicated.

Undermining trust has to be an existential threat of newspapers. Many people are slow learners but they learn.

The common journalists is a pretty poor slob and the economic situation of newspapers is pretty grim. It was also a "safe" option to lie on Iraq. But what can be just as a large problem is when journalists a easily impressionable.

It's easy. They have to hold themselves accountable for their own (weekly?) mistakes. People would trust them again (imo) if they called themselves out and proactively fixed their mistakes.

I think that's not as simple as you describe.

The glib answer is, "They publish corrections." Which many do.

But I don't think that addresses the (valid) criticism about the Iraq invasion: while there were some errors of fact, there were primarily errors of omission, where the media were too willing to act as uncritical stenographers for politicians' claims.

We see, in a way, the same phenomenon in the Trump era: whatever lunatic allegation Trump or his acolytes would make, the media felt the need to cover it; after all, whatever the President says is inherently news, no matter how crazy.

Yet in both of these examples, the problem isn't that the media represent some sort of powerful cabal, which I think was what the OP implied: it's that the media are too spineless to truly hold to account those in power (in both cases, the President of the US). Viewed that way, the premise of the original question is incongruous: it's deeply strange to criticize only the "Princeton and Columbia"-educated "media elites" who too-uncritically reported on the claims of the President, and not the Yale- and Harvard-educated President (and son of a President)--or the billionaire heir to a fortune President who came later--who uttered those false claims.

The media absolutely deserve to be criticized for their uncritical reporting before the invasion of Iraq, as I said before, but the original criticism sounded like we want a weaker media who will be less able to question false narratives espoused by powerful players. And I think if you look at these stories more closely, you'll realize we want the opposite.

Nielsen TV and radio ratings are the functional equivalent of "an algorithm that rewards CTR", and that system rewards polarization and outrage in exactly the same way. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the longstanding mantra of TV news.

IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?

None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.

The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.

The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.

Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.

So what, in your mind, is a more “democratic” news media?

I don’t think most journalists would accept the view you attribute to them—that they are opponents of democracy—but the logic seems like it applies to any expert specialization. Is that your argument—that all experts are inherently opponents of democracy because they “tell us what to think?”

> So what, in your mind, is a more “democratic” news media?

Assuming the problems of voter participation are solved, I would like to see publicly funded journalism and the position of editor-in-chief as an elected position.

My criticism of US journalism is that they lay claim to legitimacy by being above the rabble. That is why they are able to decide what's in the best interests of the country. That's a claim to 1) a political role based on 2) an anti-democratic premise. I don't know of any expert specialization which makes a similar claim.

So, like, NPR? That already exists, of course.

Or should there be more direct political influence, as you suggest—NPR, but the editor in chief is elected every four years? That seems deeply problematic, for somewhat obvious reasons.

I’d love to know what those obvious reasons are, and whether they don’t ultimately boil down to paternalistic conservative bromides that people can’t be trusted to govern themselves.