Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News
As we’ve seen in this campaign, disinformation disguised as real news is a very serious threat to democracy and our systems of governance. The best way to combat that is to really support the outlets that you trust. The first step in that is turning off ad blocker for the major outlets you frequent, and the second is to open a digital subscription, third share their content ahead of the screaming clickbait. If we don’t support the news organizations that get it mostly right, then we will have to live with the ones who get it mostly wrong on purpose.
Another way to support our press is to go after our social media engines, demand better filtering for factual content, demand exclusion of fake news clickbait sites; because no matter how much you want that crap to be true to confirm your bias, it hurts our civil discourse, it damages our society, and it harms the institutions that we count on to make our way through life in this America.
Please demand more from Google, Facebook, twitter - call them out when they are leading with craziness, lies, and bigotry. When you see your friends passing the trash, let them know what they are doing. When you see someone running down the “mainstream media” call them out too — it’s the fringe players who do that from both ends of the spectrum because by tearing down our institutions they make their tenuous agitprop weigh more. Lastly, help those paranoid friends who still can’t trust media to get over their fears because even though there are frequent media mis-steps, over time our mainstream media still gets the record mostly right, and that’s all that you can expect in this crazy world.
One last note: the post election crazy train is already loaded and leaving the station.
The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday.
Papers including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganize, shed staff, kill off whole sections, or all of the above.
Taken together, it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for voters.
It couldn’t be happening at a worse moment in American public life. The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.
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