If “News” could be licensed, Trump would be really stingy about handing out those licenses.
Our best bet is an electorate able to use critical thinking. Alas.
I agree. The question is how to achieve that.
I was thinking may there could be a video game that taught this on the sly.
Well, like Daniel Patick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.”
The party stating something as a fact should provide supporting information. If something cannot be independently confirmed as a true, it, by definition, does not qualify as a fact.
I know in Malaysia, the government issues annual printing press licences (ie licences to run a print newspaper or print books), with pretty much the same stated goals as the OP.
It’s not unknown for the Malaysian government to suspend printing licences for newspapers which print… problematic things. Admittedly that example was from nearly 30 years ago, but the threat of having a printing licence suspended or cancelled is still hanging over the heads of the country’s newspapers and magazines.
It’s also a crime in Malaysia to publish “false news”; and the country (of which I’m actually rather fond) is ranked 146/180 in the World Press Freedom Index.
The short version is issuing “News Licences” is considerably more problematic than it sounds and may have a lot of unintended consequences, some of them rather negative.
And I say that as someone who finds “fake news” (as opposed to parody or satire news) quite abhorrent.
To my mind and I think to others that are old enough to remember, the turning point in broadcast journalism from being real news to hybrid entertainment/news is the selling of commercial time, and its attendant ratings wars, during the nightly 6:00 news shows. News went from something the reviled media elite (Murrow, Severied, etc) thought we should know about, as responsible and informed citizens, to news that WE wanted to know about. This is how we got endless months and thousands of hours of Anna Nicole Smith and more than a year of OJ Simpson. Nothing that these people did or was done to them mattered in the least to the rest of us. This is how we get rescued cats and winners of the annual pumpkin toss at the American Legion on the local news.
I’m as guilty as anyone else. Who doesn’t want to be entertained? The cable news channels are little more than headline hawkers occasionally going as far as the 1st paragraph or 2 into the whole story. Some print journalism and a handful of web only sites do in depth, responsible investigative reporting but I would guess that the combined readership is small compared to twitter & facebook.
Given this perspective it is hard not to sympathize with the OPs objective. One can only wish there were some way to label news with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval but I fear the negatives are insurmountable.
One of the great things about the USA is that we can get uncensored (by the USA) foreign news, all the way from reading BBC, RT, and Al Jazeera to mail-ordering local newspapers from remote Amazon villages. I even used to listen to Radio Havana Cuba on shortwave radio and no one ever busted down my door for that. In high school I was encouraged to read North Korean propaganda, compare it to everything else I had heard, and come to my own conclusion about what was going on there.
So if I report that “Oswald killed JFK and he acted alone” will that reporting get the stamp of approval? What if the bureaucrat in charge of approving the stories is a conspiracy theorist who just knows that Castro had JFK killed? Or, more realistically, what if this bureaucrat believes that who killed JFK is an open question and therefore my statement is mere opinion and not fact?
I can provide the Warren Commission report as “supporting information.” What supporting information is good enough? Does someone fact check the supporting information?
You said earlier that Rush Limbaugh and Brietbart would not qualify. What about NPR or CNN? I’ll bet that you say CNN qualifies. What if I disagree? Do the voters choose between you and I as to who is the final arbiter?
This article by the founder of change.org , in the section titled Trusted Information, has in interesting suggestion for addressing the problem of identifying “trusted” news sources.
The idea is to develop a “trust graph” using an approach similar to what Google uses to calculate PageRank.
This gets my vote for The Most Terrible Idea (so far) of 2017.
So who decides what is trusted, Trump or Obama? (or pick your opposing political group or body)
You obviously haven’t read the article. It has nothing do with individuals deciding anything.
No I did, and it still applies.
Trump has 20.4 million followers and most believe that he is trustworthy and that people whom espouse his ideas will fit in that same web of trust.
Obama has 13.7M followers and most believe that he is trustworthy and that people whom espouse his ideas will fit in that same web of trust.
If you look at who has the most followers the list is full of celebrities which individuals inherently trust.
http://twittercounter.com/pages/100
Often these associations are subject to cognitive biases and attribution errors and result in the exact risk of factions that were addressed in Federalist paper 10
By giving power to national “factions” under the description of:
What the article is offering is yet another form of popularity contests, and ignores how small social networks really are. A few popular viewpoints would overrule minority interests.
Misinformation has always existed, and this web of trust will break down the explicit protections intended to protect against the issues surrounding factions.
Your statement “It has nothing do with individuals deciding anything.” ignores the fact that it would be a popularity contest resulting from the bandwagon effect.
It would give power to causes and people who champion causes through fear uncertainty and doubt.
The process would be driven by the 66 percent of Americans favor requiring food manufacturers to put labels on products that contain genetically modified ingredients or the 52 percent of Americans supported a ban on immigration based on religion. Both of these viewpoints are totally irrational.
And when people add people as trusted due to irrational fears those individuals will have the power to influence other decisions with little chance of being vetted.
Thus giving close to unfettered power to (chose your political advisory here)