How Mentally distressed activists have taken over Journalism
Please Share this with anyone who doesn't know what is happening to journalism. The Media industry is collapsing. Employees are slowly becoming more and more mentally distressed due to their workload and actual journalism is being replaced by activism. The result of this is mentally distressed activists writing stories from a skewed perspective to make you behave the way they think you should behave. Mentally distressed activists have taken over Journalism. Note: Mental Distress is the actual term used to describe those who dont sleep enough, take drugs, or are overworked and not intended to be derogatory. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Today's video is going to be a little different because it's not intended for my regular viewer.
Although, if you are someone who watches my regular content, you will probably appreciate this video as well.
But this video is meant for those who are new to what's happening in media and might not be familiar with what fake news actually is and why journalism is dying.
I'm not going to cover every single problem that is affecting journalism.
That would take much too long.
But I do want to talk about some of the biggest problems that journalism is facing.
But first, why should you listen to me?
Well, if you're not familiar with my work, my name is Tim Poole, and I'm a journalist working in documentary, conflict and crisis, and cultural politics.
I've pioneered some new technologies like virtual reality drones and what's called immersion storytelling.
I've worked for many different companies like Vice, Vice News, and Fusion traveling around the world to some of the most dangerous places to actually learn from the people that are being affected by and affecting some of the most important stories in the world.
And I've been regularly featured in the media for my work.
So, I'm not trying to make it seem like I'm somehow smarter or better than anyone, but I do want to provide some kind of context as to how I know what I know.
That this isn't just coming from A random person on the internet, but someone who's actually worked in this field and has worked with many schools and many companies dealing with these issues.
So first, I want to talk about the current state of journalism.
Many people have repeatedly said over the past few years that journalism is dead.
Donald Trump, for instance, has repeatedly called the news media fake news.
And you may have seen this because it seems to happen every few months, maybe even every few weeks.
There's always something that's being called fake news.
Fake news gets thrown around a lot, and I want to break down the four most commonly used understandings of what the term fake news actually means.
At its core, it's obvious.
It is called a compound noun, and that means you have the word fake and news.
It's very simple.
It's news that's fake.
But it's used in many different ways.
The first way that it's used is deliberately false stories, stories that are entirely made up.
These stories are the most egregious of the fake news.
They tend to be blogs that are made by individuals working alone, and they actually will just make something off the top of their head, a story, so they can generate clicks and make money.
They tend to be small companies, they tend to be small groups or individuals who do this.
The second might actually be more dangerous than the first, and this is what's called mission-driven storytelling.
Often, these are individuals who produce news that are deceitful, manipulative, or misleading in an effort to push a narrative.
Many companies have begun adopting what they call mission-driven storytelling in an effort to generate traffic or, as they try to explain to people, to effect positive change.
But positive change is subjective.
So many companies are actually producing fake stories, or stories that are only technically true, in an effort to push political change.
And this?
It's actually activism.
The third type of fake news is what's called hyper-partisan reporting.
And this is extremely common today.
You'll see outlets like the Huffington Post often have a slant that produces a perspective from what we call the left, or a website like Breitbart that is slanted with a perspective towards the right.
These stories tend to be technically true, they're more often true, and their goal, while similar to mission-driven storytelling, is often much more likely to be accurate reporting, not intended to drive a political policy change, but a certain perspective.
So there is an overlap between what we call hyper-partisan reporting and mission-driven storytelling.
And fourth, the one that I actually love and I think is great, and I'm kind of bummed to see it called fake news, but this is satirical news.
It's meant to be obvious.
You have websites like The Onion, content to make you laugh.
It's obviously not real.
But unfortunately, many people fall for it.
Many people believe these stories are real and share them as though they are.
And this Actually does contribute to the fake news problem.
In our current state, Americans' attitudes about the news media is deeply divided along partisan lines.
And this is a report from Journalism.org and Pew Internet Research.
It says that Democrats are 47 points more likely than Republicans to support news media's watchdog role.
Democrats and Republicans who already tend to place their trust in different news sources and rely on different outlets for political views now disagree more than ever on a fundamental issue of news media's role in society, whether news organizations' criticism of political leaders primarily keeps them from doing things they shouldn't or keeps them from doing their job.
In one of their graphs, we can see that 2017 reveals the sharpest divide ever measured.
And there could be a reason for this divide.
In an article from Politico, it says, News jobs are increasingly clustered in blue counties.
Since 2008, the distribution of newspaper and online publishing jobs has grown less representative of the nation as a whole.
The chart below compares the location of newspaper and online publishing jobs to the 2016 election results.
Figures in blue represent jobs in counties Hillary Clinton won, And the darkest blue represents jobs in counties Clinton won by more than 30 percentage points.
Figures in red and dark red represent the equivalent counties won by Donald Trump.
And as you can see from 2008 to 2016, the numbers have continually shifted.
Although even in 2008, the majority of news jobs were held by blue counties.
In 2016, it has only gotten worse.
So it's no surprise, then, that people who are Republican or consider themselves conservative are less trusting of the media.
But to better understand this shift that is happening in media, we need to look at what has affected news media over the past several years, especially with the rise of digital.
Since the 1950s, print revenue has generally increased, although there have been some dips.
But in the early 2000s, we saw a dramatic collapse in print media, while online revenue is but a fraction of what print revenue generated.
And we can see that even this line only moves horizontally.
It doesn't grow that much.
What we are seeing here is that the majority of the revenue generated by news media is going away.
And online media is not getting anywhere near the amount of revenue.
That means there's not going to be jobs, and it also means we are seeing a collapse of newspaper firms.
Many large newspapers have shifted to a digital strategy.
Many have implemented a subscriber model or a paywall model.
But one thing is for certain.
The amount of jobs available to those who want to work in news media is diminishing.
That means salaries will continue to decline, That means the quality of journalists will continue to decline, and that means these individuals are going to be overworked.
In a story from 2009 in the BBC, it says the economy threatens news accuracy.
Press intrusion and inaccurate reporting are getting worse because the recession has forced newspapers to make cutbacks a report suggests.
The report from the Media Standards Trust says some papers are sacrificing standards to maintain sales.
A YouGov survey found only 7% of 2024 people questioned Trust UK national newspapers to behave responsibly.
And I know that this is talking specifically about the United Kingdom, but there is an overlap in our cultures, and I still think this is very relevant.
What this story shows us, and the previous statistics I've shown you, we knew 10 years ago that media standards were going to decline as news organizations had to maintain sales and save money.
A story from the Los Angeles Times in 2009 said, as newspapers decline, journalism schools thrive.
Young people are flocking to graduate school programs driven by the thrill of deadlines, the lure of a good story, and a belief that they'll play a role in shaping the evolution of journalism.
The article talks about the thrill of deadlines, but what it misses is that many people decided to continue going to school when they realized there were no jobs available to them.
When we take into consideration this incline in applications for journalism school, we need to look at what is expected to happen in the next two to four years.
If more students are going to grad school, and they have more loans because of grad school, they have to pay back more debt.
But we know that the news industry is just declining.
And digital media isn't growing that quickly either.
We have to realize that there's going to be a saturation of the market.
We have to realize that these companies are going to continue to sacrifice quality, and they're not going to be able to provide salaries to students who have exorbitant student loans that need to be paid off.
We end up seeing stories like this in NBC News.
Highly educated, underemployed, and tumbling down the ladder.
And while not entirely related to journalism, this story talks about how people can't find low-level work because they are too educated and companies don't want to hire them.
Overqualification is a problem.
And we're seeing other examples of grad students realizing In an article from Bustle, a student talks about how even though they've paid $18,000 in student loans, they still owe the same amount in student loans.
So here's where we are so far.
The news media has been rapidly declining.
They can't make money anymore.
What people need to realize is that news isn't necessary at this point.
If you want to know something, you can go on Twitter, you can go on Facebook, you can go on YouTube.
When news breaks, the news becomes almost instantly available to those who are looking for it.
In the past, a reporter would have to track down a source, and track down a witness, and get verification.
They would then publish that account.
But today, the account, the witness, the source, they go straight to Twitter.
They go straight to social media, and we can just watch the videos in real time.
There is less and less benefit for us to actually go to these websites to find out what's happening.
We can just continue the conversation through our social circles, which does have negative effects.
We then need to look at what the outcome of this is going to be.
If news organizations can't afford good journalism, they're going to hire bad journalists.
If news organizations can't hire journalists at all, they're going to have overworked and underpaid staff members who are angry, who are tired, and sick.
Last year, Business Insider ran this story.
Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study.
The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analyzed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcasts, and online platforms over seven months.
The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behavior.
It was launched in association with the London Press Club, and the objective was to determine how journalists can thrive under stress.
It is not yet peer-reviewed, and the sample size is small, so the results should not be taken necessarily as fact.
The results showed that journalists' brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.
I want to stress what it says, that this is not yet peer-reviewed, and the sample size is small.
You should not take the results necessarily as fact.
That is an absolutely fair statement.
But there is a reason I bring this up.
The idea of a mental health epidemic in the newsroom is not a new idea.
While this article does talk about conflict reporters and newsroom editors who have to go through battlefield footage, it says, let's face it, like most of us toiling in the newsroom, those young editors were probably happy just to have jobs.
Which is to say, it's not only the stories that journalists cover that weigh on them.
The whole profession is a pressure cooker.
Everybody is doing way more with way less.
The person who can't hold up to that test loses their job or is ostracized.
A recent analysis and ranking of 200 common jobs from the job listing site CareerCast put newspaper reporter dead last, photojournalists at 195, and editors at 137.
Didn't fare much better.
Given the precarious economics of industry, there's little job security, particularly for those working at print publications.
Newspaper jobs have declined 40% in the last decade.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that jobs for reporters, correspondents, and broadcast news analysts will fall another 13% by 2022.
And journalists aren't popular either.
In a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, journalists ranked just above lawyers in public perceptions of the profession's contributions to society.
And there's even another story, this one from Vice.
when being a journalist is terrible for your mental health.
It felt like the parts of my brain that contain motivation, energy, and the ability to arrange
ideas had been injected with Novocain.
And again, this is not about people who are facing war and actual trauma.
The article says I'm not a war correspondent or full-time crime reporter.
I didn't cover the 2016 presidential race, which means I wasn't choked or grabbed or bombarded with death threats or anti-Semitism.
I'm not a woman reporter who has to wade through unimaginable online abuse as a routine part of her job.
I'm simply a journalist who, after about a decade in the business, recently took an honest look at the mental toll of the job.
So let's do a quick recap.
Journalists are underpaid.
They're overworked.
They drink too much.
They self-medicate with high sugar foods, caffeine, and alcohol.
News organizations have been collapsing for the past several years.
College students are choosing to go to grad school because they can't find jobs.
And when they graduate, they're only going to find harder competition and lower salaries.
As a result of the failing news media, we have seen a rise in what's called mission-driven storytelling.
And I talked about this earlier in the video.
Mission-driven storytelling is essentially activism reporting.
It is the idea that journalists should be telling people what to do and why they should do it.
A really great example of the ideology behind this comes from Solution Journalism Network.
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Each day we turn to the news to help us navigate the world so we can make informed decisions about our lives and contribute to society.
But there's a problem.
Rather than helping us chart a path forward, the news leaves many of us feeling powerless, even hopeless.
Confronted with non-stop headlines about crises, corruption, and violence, many of us just tune out.
This isn't just bad for the news business.
It actually harms society, sapping people's energy, and making it harder for us to imagine a better world.
The news doesn't have to be like this.
Journalists can also show how people are working to improve the world.
Of course, we'll always need great reporters to act as watchdogs, to provide the sunlight that disinfects society.
But we also need reporters to help us see how people are responding to problems.
What are their ideas?
What's working?
And what's not?
And why?
The big story is that this shift is happening now.
More and more reporters are telling stories about how problems get solved.
We are a community of journalists working together to advance a vision of the news that depicts the world in all its richness and complexity, changing what people know, and moving us to action.
Think of it as the whole story.
Imagine if everyday reporting was like this.
The news alerting us to what's wrong, as it should, but also helping us to see ways to make things better.
What if the news moved each of us to discover the unique ways we could contribute?
Conversations would change.
People would talk about how to fix the world.
Problems would get solved faster.
Help us create a news system that tells the whole story.
We're looking for journalists, social innovators, and anyone concerned about the world.
If you paid attention to that video, you would see that a lot of the imagery they used was partisan.
They want to use journalism to drive people to action.
To take action.
And this is activism.
And the failing state of journalism has opened the door for activists to enter this space.
This is not what news should be.
News should be simply telling you what's happening, Why it's happening, and then let you decide what you think should be done about it.
Not crafting the news in such a way that it drives you to do what the journalist thinks you should do.
The idea of mission-driven storytelling is not unique to this one company.
It is affecting many of the new digital publishers.
And this is a result of the evolution of print media and online media.
As newspapers were no longer becoming necessary because hard facts are easy to come by.
They were replaced by those that were willing to support the opinions of their audience.
This is called siding with the audience, or it's called mission-driven storytelling, as I've stated already.
And while some of this might actually seem great, that video was framed very well, and it made you kind of think, maybe journalists should be showing us how things can be solved.
But then we need to go back to some of the information we saw already.
These journalists are stressed, self-medicated, and many of them are not in a healthy state of mind.
And this is not just from one study, keeping in mind it wasn't peer-reviewed, but from several anecdotes.
And the three examples I showed you are only a few examples of the copious amounts of stories where journalists talk about how they were overworked, underpaid, and stressed about losing their jobs.
When you take into consideration that these people are angry, scared, debt-ridden, and not well, You have to realize these are not the people you want to be telling you how to solve the world's problems.
Calls to action should be reserved for those who are experts or are activists.
And perhaps this is just the way that news is going to go.
But this means that we as audience members have to become extremely active in how we consume and disseminate news.
It means that we have to put our shields up.
It means that we have to realize that those who are serving us these stories are probably not the right people to be telling us what is going on.
Which leads me to my final point about the current state of journalism.
We're in dire straits.
News isn't doing well.
And if we don't understand what's happening, then we're not going to be able to solve our problems.
If people continually push to silence those who say things they don't like, we will never hear what needs to be heard.
We will never hear cold, hard truths.
And this is what journalism was supposed to do.
In the graph I showed earlier, we know that the majority of news jobs are appearing in blue counties.
And these tend to be people who disagree with the idea of what we call hate speech.
And that means our news stories will not be cold hard truths.
They will be softened, and they will be intended to drive us to vote a certain way, to take a certain action, that might not be the best thing for us to do.
And if you think I'm wrong, stupid, or unqualified, comment below and tell me that much, and we'll keep the conversation going as I do on most of my videos.
Thank you all so much for watching and hanging out and listening to this video.
If you want to follow me, I'm on Twitter at TimCast.
And if you want to get more videos and news commentary every day, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.
I can't predict the future, and I don't know what's going to happen.
But when we look at the trends, I can say that we are headed to a dangerous place.
