8 Comments

Excellently written, comment analysis. And I do have the following comment. You say:

"Journalists who care about an informed public must do a better job understanding the political implications of decisions they make in the process of trying to simplify news stories for daily publication."

The problem is, corporate journalists do not have the luxury of taking such considerations into account, much less acting on them. Their careers would be over in an instant. The corporate press will never tell the public what it needs to be truly informed, as that's the last thing the power structure wants. That's why I stopped listening to corporate journalism of any kind 33 years ago--I realized then that I couldn't trust any of it.

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Jun 5, 2023Liked by Alec Karakatsanis

One thing I think you touched on, but could be expanded a lot more is the fact that wealth is power (not the only form of power, but a major one), and that most times when people talk about distortions of politics, newsrooms, etc. they're talking about a built-in feature of a political-economic system that promotes endless accumulation of capital. I think you could actually refer to these things not as distortions, but as the regular functioning of our economy and politics. As long as people are allowed to endlessly accumulate capital (and therefore power), we will keep reaching points where an individual or a monopoly distorts systems (news, trade, politicians, academic research) in their favor. I'm currently reading Capital As Power and they've put words to some powerful ideas. The authors made it available free online https://blairfix.github.io/capital_as_power/

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Jun 7, 2023Liked by Alec Karakatsanis

Would you consider editing the Part 1 post so that it contains direct links to Part 2 and Part 3, for convenience?

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Jun 1, 2023Liked by Alec Karakatsanis

Beautiful work! Even though I'm aware of the manipulation and the enduring political landscape, your work gives me another level of insight. Thanks.

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The funny/ not funny thing is that a lot of proper framing can be done with just a few sentences.

Of course, that said, the first thing is publishers care. Which approximately no for profit publishers care to do for reasons that should be obvious.

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I think the intentions of powerful people are exactly what we need to understand, but we can't know them from their own explanations (or their spox) which is all political reporters are allowed to talk about.

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What a brilliant series!! Thank you Alec; It always takes awhile for me to digest all the information and excellent analysis. (The refocusing of non-profits was very thought provoking).

However, reading the other very thoughtful responses to this third article I sense there is question about the ‘fixability’ of most news/media in this neoliberal world?

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So discouraging. Just read about NYPD “courtesy cards”. How do we fight this ?

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