“They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible.”
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.
> All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.
Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
> That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting.
This certainly a popular narrative, but... C'mon, there isn't a single publication in existence that is inherently trustworthy because of "institutional vetting". The journalist is the entity that can actually build trust, and that "institutional vetting" can only detract from it.
> An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
This is also another easy way of saying "capital regularly determines what headlines are considered credible". That is not the same thing as actual credibility. Have you never read Manufacturing Consent?
Granted, I don't know why capital would care in this case. But the idea that "institutional integrity" is anything but a liability is ridiculous.
I've read Manufacturing Consent more than once - it's one of my favorite books and Chomsky one of my favorite thinkers (really dismayed that he associated with Epstein but I digress). Anyway, you've got it backwards.
The propaganda model is explicitly not "capital determines what headlines are credible." Chomsky and Herman go out of their way to distinguish their structural critique from the crude conspiracy-theory version where owners call up editors and dictate coverage. That's the strawman critics use to dismiss them.
The five filters work through hiring practices, sourcing norms, resource allocation, advertising pressure, and ideological assumptions - not direct commands from capital. The bias is emergent and structural, not dictated. Chomsky makes this point repeatedly because he knows the "rich people control the news" framing is both wrong and easy to dismiss.
It's also not a general theory that institutional journalism can't accurately report facts. Chomsky cites mainstream sources constantly in his own work - he's not arguing the New York Times can't report that a building burned down.
Applying the propaganda model to whether People magazine can accurately report on a celebrity homicide is a stretch, to put it mildly. You've taken a sophisticated structural critique and flattened it into "all institutional journalism is fake, trust nothing."
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.