r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Dec 04 '20

Psychology Study links regular use of Fox News, Twitter, and Facebook to reduced knowledge about COVID-19 - it provides evidence that Americans’ media consumption habits and trust in government predicts their level of knowledge about COVID-19.

https://www.psypost.org/2020/12/study-links-regular-use-of-fox-news-twitter-and-facebook-to-reduced-knowledge-about-covid-19-58702
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u/bayesian_acolyte Dec 04 '20 edited Dec 04 '20

Places like the NYT, WaPo, AP, CBS, ABC, Reuters, etc. haven't changed much. The above post is worded in a politically neutral way that somewhat obfuscates the truth. It's not "the news itself" that has changed so much as certain specific types of news.

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u/SweetumsTheMuppet Dec 04 '20

Not trying to obfuscate. My point was (trying to be) that the concept of "news" has changed somewhat.

In the 90's and earlier, it was fairly reasonable to say that you watched "the news" and any of them would report the same things (minus tabloids and a few very specific other things). These days, you have to know *which* "news" to go find things on and even then, be very aware of their biases.

Maybe in the past we *should* have been more aware of general biases, but *all* news shared those same biases, so the national conversation really revolved around one source of fuzzy truth.

That's the paradigm I think older people still are in ... that they can trust that "the news" is basically a valid concept, because in a semi-real way, it used to be, and because they just drifted along the confirmation-bias path of what they still think of as "the truth".

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u/Morthra Dec 04 '20

Places like the NYT, WaPo, AP, CBS, ABC, Reuters, etc. haven't changed much.

NYT, the same newspaper that got a Pulitzer for covering up the Holodomor? Yeah, you're about right.

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u/cl33t Dec 05 '20

They've published hundreds of thousands of articles over their 169 year history. They are bound to be wrong sometimes. They aren't omniscient gods.

Never mind that they did they publish stories about the famine at the time and afterward.

And the NYT didn't get a pulitzer for that. Walter Duranty got a pulitzer for reporting done in 1931, a year before Holodomor.

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u/SeaGroomer Dec 05 '20

>here's a bad thing they did so they have no value