Journalism's trust problem is about money, not politics

My default position has been that all journalists are liars since the early 2000s.

In the early 90s I was interviewed for a newspaper for winning a writing contest and an exact and precise 0.0% of the quotes attributed to me were spoken by me.

Later I was in the Army and I was interviewed by a major national news network while preparing to deploy overseas.

The 7 seconds of me talking, extracted from the five or so minutes of interview, that made it to air was so chopped up and out of order in relation to the questions being asked that it formed an actual, intentional, lie on the part of the person who created the video.

If "intrepid" reporters are willing to lie in a four-paragraph story in the middle of the Metro section of a newspaper, what are they doing for the big stories?

There is a multi-billion-dollar industry that has been specifically created to train you on how to communicate with journalists, to make it harder for them to lie on your behalf.

As far as I can tell, the journalist combines the morals of hollywood producers, the ethics of used car salesmen, and the smug self-righteousness of mid-century urban planners into one profession.

I admit to be on the side that is very suspicious about journalists, but I haven't given enough thought as to the role of money in their bias. Money obviously trumps everything (pawn not intended :) ), but there's also the question of where the money comes from, or what money is to be made from applying certain manipulations on the public. All in all I think the notion of an 'objective' media is absurd to the point of puritanism. In democracies, the media is just another political force, like the parliament or the government, only it is not appointed by elections and less regulated, but also has no actual force, only 'soft force' (which in some cases is stringer than 'force force').

I agree the sample size is way too small to mean much.

But it's very obvious that the press plays to eyeballs over veracity.

A whole article making bold claims about a whole industry based on 34 people interviewed by Zoom?

The author links to a study to back up their claims, and that study is a single survey of a grand total of 34 people. A survey of 34 people was turned into a vast, sweeping, manipulating, headline + article which claims that the journalism trust problem is about money, not politics. From a single survey of 34 people, they're decreeing what the problem with journalism is.

I'm not going to attempt to point out all the other litany of logical fallacies, disgusting social manipulation tactics, and other problems with the rest of the article, I could type page after page. It's so ironic how many problems exist in this article which writes about problems in journalism. They have no self awareness.