We're drowning in `news', much of it unreliable
Who do you trust to tell you about the world? For most of human history this hasn't been a difficult question to answer.
For one, there weren't many options. If it wasn't your parents when you were a kid, it was your teachers. And if you were older, it was the news media, or other reputable publishers, such as those who cranked out the encyclopedias of yesteryear. Outside of that there were friends, some of whom might have even known what they were talking about.
Chances are, your education didn't come from a ranty man at the end of the bar. Or crazy Uncle Bill at the family barbecue. But now those ranty men and crazy uncles are everywhere, colonizing platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, mainlining their half-cocked takes to unsuspecting audiences.
Suddenly, it's become more difficult to figure out who you're trusting to tell you about the world.
One group that is certainly less trusted these days, if not actively mistrusted, is the formerly powerful mainstream news media. Not only have the tech companies holed the news media below the waterline on finances, they've also Swiss-cheesed the media's ownership over the first draft of history by giving every punter's pen distribution and reach, along with a search-engine-powered veneer of expertise.
That someone like Joe Rogan can command the ears of millions doesn't necessarily make him an expert, but it does make him a force in the new information economy where he who shouts loudest most often wins. It's more schoolyard than schoolroom. And we're all the dumber for it.
More than that, it's exhausting to have to triage all of the “content” that now flows across our screens in a never-ending stream, trying to suss out who these people are and just where their expertise might lie (for there is expertise to be found). That's if we
Reported news now bobs along in an ocean of opinion, fact, half-truth and fiction.
even bother to be on social media platforms that are designed to tell us what we want to hear, not what we might need to know.
Contrast this to the heyday of the news media, the world in which we outsourced our knowledge curation to professionals trained and employed to do the hard work of verifying and qualifying information. We left newsrooms to sample the world and serve us the required morsels, because us ordinary folk didn't presume to have the time, talent or ability to do the work ourselves.
We were fed via a narrower information funnel, but given a more reliable end product. Now we're drowning in end product, much of it unreliable. Reported news now bobs along in an ocean of opinion, fact, half-truth and fiction. Like it or not, the raw output of social media is now our collective first draft of history.
And what the news media has failed to grasp is that they now take the second pass at that history. Moreover, they now do their drafting in a crowded and competitive room, in real time and in full view of everyone, a reality that too often makes their function look like active opposition. It is an unforgiving environment, one that demands perfection.
The challenge now before us as a society is how to make social media function more like a newsroom of old, not how to make the newsroom of old more like the internet. Filing more, more quickly, and having reporters joust on social media are only going to lose the media more trust. The money might be in being more clickable, but it's also an opiate drip-feed in this period of the media's palliative care. It's a dead end.
Until we can figure out the business of news again, the best we can do is make citizens into better consumers of information in this fast-paced and more unreliable environment. We must educate, then trust them to seek out quality.