I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.
The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
"Global cabal" might be a stretch, but it is a fact that there are large-scale government projects underway to deceive, mislead, and control the narrative via journalism.
I recently came across an amusing connection [1] to Bernstein's piece and its highlighting of Joseph Alsop. The author of the following is Bernard Fall, who certainly is otherwise pro-West and anti-communist, later KIA while on patrol with American troops in Vietnam.
> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]
> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]
> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]
> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."
This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways.
Agreed, the problem is that there is also palpable, verifiable distortion of facts and "imposition of narrative" within a substantial portion of mainstream and "alternative" news.
We face the problem that many people can't go from "journalism is objective" to "journalism is a mixture of multiple agenda-serving narratives mixed with facts that still isn't a 'grand conspiracy'". Moreover, a substantial portion of media one step from the mainstream really like the "grand conspiracy" narrative because it binds people to them as "truthers".
Why do you say diversity of opinion and experience are not the answer conservative folks want to hear? It strikes me as strange, given that the vast majority of media outlets in the US are left-leaning.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.
The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).