I don't want to give facebook a pass, but I hate seeing the issue framed as "facebook sucks at news because young engineers" vs the implied adult in the room of traditional journalism.
Facebook has failed at news, but traditional journalism is still in the dog house and is not the default credible alternative. I'll admit they don't do the whole "fake news" thing which is nice, but even without outright lying the bias in what the choose to cover and what public figures they ally with is disappointing. They can grandstand all they want about "editorial independence" and "separation of church and state" but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.
> but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.
Yes, and they have a set of checks and balances to deal with that fact. I'm completely stumped why you would discount those checks and balances. Media outlets are all biased in different ways, and I share your disdain for some of those biases. That said, if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers, so not sure what your point is.
> if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers
I don't believe this to be true. Or at least under that definition I think that there are few if any "legitimate news outlets". I'm not trying to be edgy. I just have zero faith that all of these businesses that make money by advertising have internally created a system of checks and balances such that they write whatever they want even if that will directly lead to layoffs of journalists because they've pissed off advertisers who will no longer fund them.
Maybe a simpler analogy is that newspapers are junkies shooting up heroin (advertising dollars) and telling us "don't worry, we got this under control, it won't affect our decisions".
I would go a step further. Mainstream media outright lies. You're willingly covering your eyes if you think otherwise.
We have our own false truths that we tell ourselves--you probably look at other counties or back in history and think we are somehow different from all of those people in this respect.
The problem they have is that Facebook did not control the narrative as well as mainstream media--as your examples of Bernie and Trump illustrate. However, the "Fake News" campaign will change that and get them in the club with other media outlets.
You can already see media's attitudes towards FB start to change. Today, this article in the NYT seems to tack on a high five to FB at the end--even though FB was not even really (primarily) what this activist was blogging with[1].
Facebook has failed at news, but traditional journalism is still in the dog house and is not the default credible alternative. I'll admit they don't do the whole "fake news" thing which is nice, but even without outright lying the bias in what the choose to cover and what public figures they ally with is disappointing. They can grandstand all they want about "editorial independence" and "separation of church and state" but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.