Essay talk:In Defense of Independent Journalism

Standards

I don't doubt that their are excellent independent journalists. I have however seen some people label themselves as independent journalists who seem to have a strongly partisan agenda. We had a sysop here who used to tout some of them, and I didn't find their reportage particularly convincing. Good independent journalists should be able to follow the basic standards of modern journalism: "truthfulness, accuracy and fact-based communications, independence, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, respect for others and public accountability" (Journalism ethics and standards). Bongolian (talk) 07:49, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Good point. Personally I view independent journalism as complementary to mainstream journalism. If they don't abide by standards of journalistic ethics they're not journalists, they're propagandists and pundits. Given that independent journalism by its nature is not mainstream, there is gonna be an enshittification factor at play. However, as I pointed out in my essay, the same is true for mainstream media. Although unlike mainstream media, you have to actively search for reliable independent journalists. A good benchmark is where they have published their work, although that too has flaws. Carthage (talk) 07:55, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Definitions. Independent and impartial.

I think you need to define "independent". Independent from what?

If you mean organizations independent of explicit government control then both Fox News and CNN are "independent". On the other hand I don't think the either of them are impartial (though Fox is the bigger culprit). Equally neither of them are independent of a system which requires them to run at a profit.

The BBC, the other hand, is government-funded and is often thought to be one of the most impartial sources of news.

But, from what I read, you are sometimes using "independent" to refer to individual journalists who do not work for any bigger organization; and at others you refer to small media organizations - but you then need to define them.

There is also the fact that while "independent" may mean the person/group is "impartial" - it's by no means inevitable. And they probably still need to make a profit.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 09:49, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

On the coverage of Ukraine vs. Yemen

I agree that Yemen has been less than well covered by the global media which remain, by and large, “western”, and thus mainly based in and focused on Europe and the US. But this also explains why Ukraine gets a lot more coverage: It’s a massive, conventional war very close to the headquarters of said media in Europe and it’s quite a lot easier to report on than Yemen as dispatching reporters and receiving their stories is easy (and encouraged) in the case of Ukraine (less so in Russia).

Even “better” (from a journalistic standpoint) is the easy “big bad Russian invaders vs. plucky Ukrainian underdog defenders” narrative, which makes the conflict easy and simple to portray, whereas Yemen conflict is a lot less easy to narrate. Then add the fact that critical scrutiny of the war in Yemen also risks offending the Saudis, and not least their US backers, and you have several other reasons for why Yemen gets moved down on the priority list of western, global news outlets.

This is why I don’t think it’s necessary to resort to knee jerk assertions about racism to explain why Ukraine is so massively covered and Yemen is neglected. Had most global media been based in the Arabian Gulf (and had the regimes not been repressive and averse to media coverage, of course), Yemen would likely be the big story and Ukraine the neglected backwater. Indeed, the one major global news outlet in the region, Al Jazeera, seems to be fairly diligent in its coverage of Yemen.

Hence, I don’t think that a Ukraine/Yemen comparison is very useful as an argument for independent media, unless it’s a comparison about the state of the media in each region and their comparative places in terms of global news reach. ScepticWombat (talk) 14:29, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback, and you raise a good point. I do want to respond that the racism assertion wasn't kneejerk, but was a proposed cause in the source cited. Carthage (talk) 14:35, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Second degree knee jerk then… ;-)

Leaving aside that secondary topic, I have a suggestion for what might be a better case for independent media:

The death and/or consolidation of local media into the big media corporations as seen in both the US and Europe. This has led to a dearth of original, local news reporting and a “streamlining” of coverage centred on national/state capitols and large financial centres, leaving a lot of “news deserts” served only by the equivalents of talk radio or by the SoMe rumour mill.

Sure, local media were not always the paragon of independent journalism, but they tend to depend on keeping their local audience engaged and interested and thus usually can’t entirely ignore important, local topics. By contrast, the “localised” branches of big corporate media are more likely to simply “beam out the message from the mothership”, as they ultimately don’t need to rely on a local audience.

In some European countries, this has led to an odd situation where coverage of both local/regional and EU news shrinks while news coverage of the national parliamentary/governmental levels intensifies. ScepticWombat (talk) 14:43, 31 December 2023 (UTC)