DrZoidberg
Contributor
I have a question. To me it's obvious that the rise of the Internet and the explosion of independent news sources, verifiers and social media has led to a more accurate, but more messy picture of how the world actually looks like. In the pre-Internet days the media narratives were controlled by a couple of media houses. So the possible versions of a story was small and nobody watches the watchmen. So narratives were neat, but horrendously flawed.
My evidence is science reporting. Mainstream journalists reporting on scientific discoveries have always been a disaster. Barely a sliver of truth, in any mainstream article. While technically not lies, so much context left out, that the information in the article is useless and at best incredibly misleading. Which is odd in a world where we most often have direct access to the words of the researchers themselves. Mainstream news, still can't get it right. They clearly care more about getting a punchy story out of it, than they are about informing anyone. I think this has always been true for all news reporting.
Fake news isn't a new thing. The reason the French Revolution went so badly is arguably because people like Jean-Paul Marat would print any and all inflammatory rumour that would help him sell more newspapers. I saw an estimate of that nineteen out of twenty news articles during the revolution was completely made up.
So while mainstream news still is shit, we have plenty of alternative routes to get informed, which means that overall we are better informed now.
A counter argument could be that the amount of information, true and bullshit, is so vast, that it leads to information bubbles making us isolated from any information we already don't believe in. While true, I think this was always the case.
What do you think? Do you agree with me that we're living as close as we ever will get to a utopian paradise of news reporting?
My evidence is science reporting. Mainstream journalists reporting on scientific discoveries have always been a disaster. Barely a sliver of truth, in any mainstream article. While technically not lies, so much context left out, that the information in the article is useless and at best incredibly misleading. Which is odd in a world where we most often have direct access to the words of the researchers themselves. Mainstream news, still can't get it right. They clearly care more about getting a punchy story out of it, than they are about informing anyone. I think this has always been true for all news reporting.
Fake news isn't a new thing. The reason the French Revolution went so badly is arguably because people like Jean-Paul Marat would print any and all inflammatory rumour that would help him sell more newspapers. I saw an estimate of that nineteen out of twenty news articles during the revolution was completely made up.
So while mainstream news still is shit, we have plenty of alternative routes to get informed, which means that overall we are better informed now.
A counter argument could be that the amount of information, true and bullshit, is so vast, that it leads to information bubbles making us isolated from any information we already don't believe in. While true, I think this was always the case.
What do you think? Do you agree with me that we're living as close as we ever will get to a utopian paradise of news reporting?