I would choose the People. Individuals can choose what content to view (or not), evaluate it, and reach their own conclusions.
Do you think that most of the people writing “news” these days are actual journalists? The most popular “newspaper” in my town is a blog written by someone who is CLEARLY not in any way associated with journalism.
Anyone can start a blog. Anyone can declare themselves the arbiter of truth. Any there is no limit to the number of eyeballs they can reach.
Even if the media companies are broken up, the FCC fixes broadcast news, Twitter and Facebook squashes untrue news, YouTube and Reddit keep the baddies out, etc etc etc you can still get your wonky ideas out there without scrutiny.
Look at this QAnon shit. All of it made up from whole cloth. Completely fucking untrue and very obviously untrue. 4chan shut them down. 8chan shut them down. They persist. They exist.
The problem is people. Social media platforms aren’t the problem, it’s the people. They’re the ones making it up, believing it, arguing for it and passing it along.
Really we’re all doomed.
If you didn’t care where all the money to consolidate media came from initially I doubt you’re all that genuinely concerned with where the replacements would find funding.
Clearly that is not working.
The Conservative news outlets are fermenting armed civil unrest, and brainwashing listeners.
As long as they hew to the truth, that is one thing. But for example, lies that the Dems 'stole the election" are hurting the nation as a whole.
Maybe, but the government is not the answer.
what is?
There is no solution. If people were mandated to only publish or speak truthfully, the powerful would determine what the truth is.
Exactly.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Thread is appalling.
Not in the slightest do you understand the First Amendment.
This is how appalling this thread is, that I have to agree with THAT person.
Good god, people, stop flailing about looking for quick fixes, if a lot of you had your way you’d be doing far more damage than any current source of misinformation.
The only suggestion here I agree with, because it gets at one root of the problem, the centralization of information outlets.
Well, I do, and the FCC does certainly have the authority to regulate broadcast channels.
If we did this, it would be by means of appealable FCC fines.
And regulating a few broadcast stations is completely irrelevant.
Rush Limbaugh,Glenn Beck, a lot of Fox news, all would be out.
Thankfully, I addressed that issue in the very next sentence after the section you quoted.
Fox News would be going nowhere. It’s not broadcast. It’s over cable. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would be going nowhere as well. Fairness doctrine or w/e doesn’t mean folks can’t broadcast. Furthermore, they could publish over the internet, cable, or satellite. The government can’t stop 10’s of millions of people entering the country illegally or tens of billions of drugs. You think they can stop information.
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”
Perhaps Uncle Joe isn’t a role model for civil liberty or fundamental rights?
Altho the Fox News Channel is cable. Fox , which broadcasts nitely news, is broadcast.
They could broadcast over other channels but those arent available for free to all.
And no one is trying to stop information, just blatant harmful lies. We can penalize them for showing a nipple during halftime or saying the Seven words, we could penalize them for blatant harmful lies.
An educated citizenry can decide what the truth is. We need to work on improving education, not regulating the media.
Fox’s local news outlets, of which there is one in my market, are just that, local news, and seem to act largely independent of the opinions expressed on the cable news channel. When there is a national feed for a non-local story on the local news show, I have never noticed any particular bias or spin or opinions, just regular news reporting. So again, FCC regulation would not affect Fox cable news at all, and need not affect their local outlets if they continue as they have been.
That’s really the whole story right there.
Educated people can be duped. But it’s harder and more expensive and fewer of them will buy into it. Very much uneducated people are very much easier to dupe.
Beyond education as in “more book larnin’”, it’s mental laziness. People who hate to think are easy to dupe. People who have some facility for thinking are harder to dupe.
Ideally schooling ignites curiosity and in addition to teaching you how to read and write, teaches you to want to read and write and to think about something more than “What’s for lunch?”
No, no they cant. College educated people voted for trump.
I’ve said for years: it’s too bad we struggle so mightily with primary education vis-a-vis the 3 R’s, because … ideally … you wouldn’t graduate from high school without demonstrated competence in statistics and logic (and a second language).
It won’t cure ‘aggressive incuriosity’ [h/t to @Kron] or ‘mental laziness,’ but a true didactic grounding in a couple things makes it much easier to see behind then curtain, reducing one of the barriers to entry 