Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/01/50m-centrist-news-site-shuts-after-one-year-of-wealthy-owners-insisting-thats-what-everyone-wants.html
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It’s almost like no wants centrism… but that can’t be right… lots of really rational people told me that that is the only correct perspective on the world… that both sides are equally bad… /s
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$50 Million in one year? You could almost fund the Donald Trump Legal Defense Industrial Complex with that kind of scratch.
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Journalism is the art of curated bias. It’s not possible, there’s not enough space, to report on even the most commonly understood reality without some bias (“The sun came up this morning” “Ahah! To serve your covert interests you utterly neglected mentioning it went down last evening!”) Yet it’s socially more important to report… the socially more important events and with those need come many layers of bias. The best one can do, and what one should do, is to be honest about, and preferably make occasional clear mention of, one’s biases so everyone may judge the reporting in context. ([at the bottom of every hour] “We’re fox’news’, and everything we do and say is entirely to make our rich old white owner and friends richer still”) By the bye, my father often accused me of being “left of Trotsky”.
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I’m not sure I agree. There are plenty of people on the Fox News network who are perfectly frank about which side they’re on but that’s no substitute for trying to keep one’s reporting within the bounds of objective reality.
Journalism can do better than “I’m giving you partisan propaganda but at least I’m honest about my biases.”
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a news site that launched last year with $50m in funding and the promise of “unbiased,” unpartisan news,
Isn’t that basically AP and Reuters?
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i bow to your awareness of “plenty of people on Fox News” and fully admit my bias against fox’news’ along with and my humble doubt that they are “perfectly frank about which side they’re on” insomuch that they regularly state that the next report they provide is unsubstantiated pure propagandistic lies all lies [big wink]
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I think there is a big difference between real ‘Centrism’ (recognizing that there is a broad spectrum of opinions between the extremes) and ‘Both-sides-ism’ (giving equal time to both extremes) which is what is over-represented in US media.
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I do think there is still value in at least attempting neutral news coverage, in that it helps establish a baseline of shared reality. And I would speculate that this is as much a failure based in the fact that journalism online doesn’t have a way to make money anymore outside of clickbait and outrage-reinforcement. The legacy organizations still make it because they have cable tv and name recognition, but even their websites are very unpleasant to use from all the ad strategies. I’m not sure this is “nobody wants centrism” as much as “journalism as a financially self-sustaining profession is dead”. No one can figure out how to make it work outside of the extremes of clickbait, non-profit, or rich person’s money pit hobby.
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As “centrism” is usually declared, it’s midway between Democrats and Republicans. That’s not between two extremes.
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There’s reporting facts, but you still need to have some sort of critical lens to say what those facts mean, and those aren’t really “neural” in the sense that analysis is entire neutral - it really can’t be, because people live in the world and experience life, and come with their own biases, for good or ill. Who gets to decide what is “neutral” and what voices do you highlight to tell facts anyway?
It’s not that simple that the news can be “neutral”, especially when fascism is a real and growing problem, here and abroad. Not acknowledging that and pushing back against that is dangerous, and generally speaking that is where demands for neutrality has led us…
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The thing about rich twits in the business of news is you imagine they must have a better business plan (“unpartisan news is deadwood ripe for burning and disruption”) than the dumber one they declare (“unpartisan news can be packaged and sold as such to a public hungry for it”) and eventually you realize what they were really thinking all along (“no-one is doing unpartisan news, we are finding an abandoned gold mine”).
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LMAO! Genius!
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The overarching big news story of the last few years is the Overton window being continually shoved by the right for things to be way less free. If you’re not covering that story, or are saying that that’s not happening, you missed the big news.
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Pretty much.
And always relied on adverts, even when printed newspapers had high circulations and cover prices.
Nobody has yet found any new model that works financially, other than
And even that is borderline failing in many cases as their websites become unusable because of too many blocks of adverts, but the blocks of adverts keep the lights on, so it’s almost as if nobody cares if the page gets read, as long as someone went there, even if they left 10 seconds later because of said page’s unusability.
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Centrism tends to be crushed, especially when fascism is ascendant.
As for bothsidesism (which doubtless would have been present), it’s pretty clear which side this millionaire-funded news venture would have ultimately caved to.
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And since the right have made objective reality a partisan issue, anything approaching journalism must necessarily have a left-wing (compared to them) bias…
Yeah, fundamentally conservative corporate media defines the “extremes” by the parties, i.e. as the far-right and the center-right (occasionally a moderate left). A lot of “both-sideism” is about reality and reality deniers (who are also right-wing), which is perverse and prevents journalism from being done when you can’t acknowledge an objective reality as your starting point.
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I wouldn’t say that either are centrism. Then again, I would say that the real centre is somewhere near the left wing of the Democrats and that most of the American “extreme” left is nowhere near the extreme left.
The Republicans have been engulfed by the extreme right though, so there are a bunch of freaked out conservatives who are calling themselves centrists so they don’t have to admit that the Democratic right wing are closer to what they want now. You have to hate that people treat political parties like sports teams, especially when one team/party thinks that eliminationism is a good thing.
Also, the centre is not unbiased, they have a whole load of biases that they can’t admit to.
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I like a little bit of context to understand the news better, myself. Which is going to carry some bias with it. I figure if it isn’t extreme, I can still filter out the purely ideological stuff without having to second guess how much of the news might actually be true. That would be on top of the selection bias of choosing which stories to print and which ones to ignore.
I find even less appeal with media that advertises itself as basically somewhere between the Democrats and the Republicans. With the right becoming more extreme, the center gets pulled to the right as well to a range of positions and ideological rhetoric I can’t support. The media can claim to be non-biased itself, but they’d still be interviewing people whose opinions I’d find fundamentally dishonest and generally objectionable. I know, bothsiderism, it seems virtually inescapable regardless of where you go.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Good journalism is about finding the sides that are closest to reality, and sidelining the sides that attempt to distort reality for their own political benefit.
But it’s often easier to quote two sources, one from the Brookings institution and one from, oh I don’t know, the Hoover institution.
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