LogFAQs > #979201111

Media in general is barely reliable, because the 24-hour news cycle and pandering/sensationalism for engagement means there's no real motivation to be accurate and factual - there is far more motivation to rush stories to get the scoop or turn them into clickbait to draw eyes. Combined with the fact that most major media sources are owned by massive corporations now, and "corporate synergy" is always going to be a risk (ie, can you trust a site like Rotten Tomatoes to be totally unbiased when it's owned by Warner Bros and Universal? Can you trust major game review sites to be unbiased when negative reviews can easily result in them being blacklisted for pre-release codes and perks in the future?).

And that's not counting the various sources who've decided that ideology is more important than factuality (or who simply pander to the ideological extremes for engagement), on both sides of the political spectrum, who treat "news" as a rhetoric pulpit to push their own agendas.

If you read between the lines of multiple conflicting news sources, or do your best to go back to primary sources, you can get a rough idea of what's going on, but you can never really be sure if you're getting anything close to the truth.


There have been three times in my life when I knew the details of a story in advance that later went on to be national/international news. In every single one of those cases the news got the story completely wrong. Not in a "got some of the details wrong" sort of way, but in a "got the entirety of the story wrong". And I'm not talking about minor or random news sources, I'm talking most major news sources (who were all mainly pulling their info from AP or Reuters anyway). If you only knew about what happened in those cases from the news alone, your perception of what actually happened would be entirely wrong.

So from my perspective, in the only cases where I was actually capable of corroborating or fact-checking the news, they have been completely wrong 100% of the time. That's not really going to inspire confidence in the news in general - if they were that bad at the stories I could verify, how terrible are they are the ones I can't?