As an information addict I am especially saddened by the current state of the Internet and electronic communication in general, where the truth often really isn’t the truth.
The more I hop from site to site, the clearer it becomes to me that a fundamental problem, if not the fundamental problem, for anyone seeking reliable information - truth - is knowing who and what to trust. As I read recently, there’s a reason the New York Times is booming.
(Cybersecurity concerns may also have an effect, possibly accelerating, in the future. The mere possibility of contamination or subversion of a source would give an irrefutable plausibility to anyone who might repudiate that source.)
Are already-established trustworthy sources going to be the only credible sources? If not, how will a person or organization establish such trust? NewsGuard (see below) is a way to do this for traditional media. It will be critical that it also establishes itself as trustworthy (and that’s being addressed).
Is this likely to succeed, and succeed globally? Regardless, what will the ‘average’ person do to find trusted sources for stuff beyond his immediate ken? After all, family and trusted friends can only know so much. Where’s Cronkite?
Way too late to edit, but let me emphasize that the problem of ‘truth’ extends way beyond the political. How do you trust a new product or service? Even, I dare say, ‘science’, e.g. cannabis claims (who is sponsoring the claims about the ostensible properties of certain strains?)
Nightline became a trusted program that got its start covering the hostage crisis in Iran. CNN skyrocketed in popularity for its coverage of the first Gulf War.
So no, I don’t think that already-established sources need to be the go-to for trusted journalism.
What I think is that we’ll have a succession of smaller, more specialized sources that rise and fall with specific incidents.
I don’t know what that means for the longstanding workhorses like NYT and ABC.
The only thing to do is to read - or watch - widely. And, when you read something, to ask yourself two questions: “Who is telling me this?” and “Why are they telling me this?”
Everyone is biased. Even the act of choosing which stories to tell involves bias.
Mainly biased news sites and the military. I know public confidence in the military is high, and people are pursuing news outlets that cater to their biases.
That won’t end well, when people trust biased news sites and the military more than legitimate press or civilian democracy.
I’d like to trust science, but even that is suspect. A lot of papers can’t be replicated and there are professional and financial incentives to fudge the data.
This is very true, though there is nothing new to it. What IS new is that it is exponentially easier now for people to ignore this practice, and for many to exploit that.
If the old, established print papers were smart, they’d be beating their trustworthiness like a cheap gong in all their promotional material about why they’re still relevant.
Sort of a “You can’t trust those Russian trolls on Facebook, or random ignorant clowns on Reddit, but you can trust the Podunk Globe-Intelligencer- we’ve been at the business of real news since 1889” type thing.
Except, of course, they all have reputations for being biased one way or the other. That said, you can better trust them to tell the truth - from their perspectives.
I think we a predisposed to read or watch things with which we already agree. This is much easier to do now with the variety of platforms and accessibility of information and will only get easier.
Take The Daily Show. It’s very well researched, but it’s packaged to entertain a specific audience. Even with the caveats and background information Trevor throws into a piece, the end punchline will make conservatives look ridiculous. Everyone watching is expecting it and has tuned in to see it. That doesn’t produce a reasoned and informed electorate as much as stokes a groups assumptions that conservatives are the enemy and wrong about everything.
Variety of sources it probably the only answer, but most won’t care enough to bother.
The problem with this is time. Anyone with a job, kids and a mortgage won’t have time to read three different news sites or watch three different new broadcasts every day.
Bias is one thing, but outright falsehoods are another. The established media generally has a reputation for not being complete liars and for vetting sources, etc…
A lot of the social media “news” and garbage people quote on other forums and sites like Reddit is just straight up wrong, or so misleading as to practically be lies.
That’s my point- if I was say… the Dallas Morning News (to use my local newspaper which seems to be struggling), I’d be concentrating my ad money less on their local coverage and more on the fact that they’ve been journalistically sound for a century and do investigative and other journalism that most social media sites and YouTube channels can’t dream of.
The end of truth is already here. We haven’t quite digested it, but it’s here. When the internet began booming in the early 2000s, it was awesome. I was able to access papers from around the world and I developed the habit of reading at least 5 a day (Sometimes more, but I still keep the 5 sources going - People’s Daily, Jordan Times, BBC News, USNews and cnn.com ( I also read huffpo, The Atlantic and occasionally I pop over to breitbart just to see what the opposite side is saying.) ) The bottom line though is that they are all skewed and not by a small amount. Getting any two to match up in their accounts exactly is sometimes a serious chore. Occasionally, exact opposite narratives emerge where only the barest of details show any similarity. I have seen incorrect reporting in every single one of those sources. Some are worse (peoples daily can be really off the rails sometimes, but there are rare times when it’s the only one that seems to closely align with reality, although as I said, who knows what is real?) In the US, we’re finally starting to realize this, but in world news, it has been happening for ages. The narratives that people encounter are diametrically opposed. Fox News will tell its viewers about how absolutely successful the Trump Presidency is and how much he has accomplished and if this was your only news source, you’d likely believe it. CNN though paints a completely different picture. ‘The truth is in the middle’ is a great maxim, but rarely true and certainly doesn’t help us in this case since both sides accuse the other of simply making up news to fit their agenda. If Bob tells you that he’s 6 feet tall and Joe tells you that Bob is a figment of your imagination, that doesn’t mean Bob is 0 feet plus 6 feet divided by 2 feet tall.
What is happening and what I expect to continue to happen and even accelerate is that sources that confirm our presuppositions will become ‘truth.’ We’ll simply decide at an individual level that ‘newssite.com’ is reliable and that will be what we rely on. I do it myself despite knowing that it’s a flawed system. I typically will read all of the other reports and then assume that bbc.com is the truth and the others are spinning things. Of course, this isn’t true because bbc is not some transcendent entity that is incapable of wrong-doing, but I’m too lazy and really incapable of sussing out the truth, so I just roll with it as I will assume that everyone else does as well and because our ‘truths’ are different from other ‘truths’ we’ll continue talking past one another.
So, yeah, The Daily Mail can be said that they are getting better so the green check mark about “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors” and the “Avoids deceptive headlines” can be argued to be a valid one, but to me it looks a bit like an American politician who had made a career of being against health care reform and now to be in favor of it in his reelection propaganda after a law was passed over his objections and had become more popular.
Having said that, I do think this is an idea that has promise, at least it is another check against the chicanery observed on a lot of the internet tabloids and other new media.
Missed the edit: I also would recommend Newsguard to have a half red - half green shield for sources that need to be taken with several grains of salt but do not reach “red shield” status. I think there is a need to alert readers to check the full “nutrition label”, because just putting a green shield ends up with casual users of the service to be unaware about the “strikes” a source still has.