>How our current news/media copes, and what replaces it are still unknown...
You should be more worried about how the current government copes with it. I think fake news might have helped Trump gain power in part, but it's DEFINITELY contributing to Trump losing power. Which illustrates that it's much easier to tear down with fake news than it is to build up.
That doesn't bode at all well for anyone who wants to be a mayor, or president, or senator, or police chief or whatever in the future.
>The marketplace for ideas will ensure that true news trumps fake news.
Why would I believe this? It hasn't worked so far and I think there is some misplaced faith here. Perhaps the media is facing a backlash because of their basic hypocrisy in the modern era. CNN, Washington Post, NYTimes and more are quick to criticize Trump which I'm fine with, he's in a position of power and he's not handling it well, checking his power and public perception is literally the purpose of media. The problem is that the media has abdicated this same duty everywhere else where it has been convenient for them. An example is why is this criticism of Facebook so linked to Trump's election? We deserved this level of coverage years ago. Blaming this all on obviously fake news on social media sidesteps why people believe those things in the first place - conventional media has repeatedly betrayed the trust of people.
There is a lot of good criticism of the author in those comments, how she pre-formulated a story, repeatedly encountered suspicious roadblocks in her investigation and then because she couldn't write the perspective she wanted, dropped the story entirely. What am I supposed to call this uncritical coverage of Theranos other than Fake News?
And even there I can't exactly pin it on that journalist, it wasn't just her that encountered these things and didn't write about them, it was lots of journalists which points to a systemic issue.
All of which is a really longwinded way to say this piece made me sad because it is the 'marketplace of ideas' that led us to an era of actually fake news. Journalists like Jenny Gold are simply responding to the incentives of that marketplace. And that other journalists inside this system, like Sandeep, have no creative solutions for how to bring back real investigative journalism which questions and speaks truth to power in all it's forms and simply rely on old clichés does not bode well for the future.
> But I think an equal and opposite problem is that these days people don't believe "real" news as much as they believe "fake" news.
This is the endgame, and the reason fake news exists. There's no better way to destabilize a democracy than to cast doubt upon all journalism. Democracy depends on a well-informed populace, and if all information becomes subjective it cannot continue to function.
> Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing contex
Who decides what’s fake news. Trump said there was problems in Sweden. NYTimes called him out on it. Not even a year later they are writing about the problems in Sweden.
So was the fake news trumps comment? Or the denile and lying by the media?
Maybe we should just censor everything. Censor trump, the media, advertising, everything. Not like the media is worth a grain of salt these days.
>Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat
It's too late to start treating fake news as a real problem after such an ugly an biased coverage of the election on their part. No one trusts them anymore
> The media will report on who has the power, simple as that.
Sounds like they are the problem then to me. They could just be giving airtime to local representatives instead. Even your local mayor. Fortunately local news isn’t god awful about this, but the media decides what it wants to report on. If they want to report every Tweet that comes out of Trump’s account that is a decision they are making. They could just as easily report on numerous other topics.
> The whole narrative that the media are the enemy of the people needs to die and soon or we will all regret it.
It’s not clear to me that the press as an institution is still necessary in the age of the internet. It’s also not clear to me that the media, as it exists, deserves the protections that have developed over the years. The notion of writing articles that not only don’t cite sources, but keep them secret, is obsolete.
> The top five were the military, Amazon, Google, local police, and colleges and universities. The bottom five were the press, the executive branch, Facebook, political parties, and Congress.
The fact that a press is necessary to a free society does not mean that this press is what should serve that function. In this day and age of universal literacy and universal access to information via the Internet, we need reporting of facts, not self-appointed guardians of the “narrative.”
Go back and look at CNN tapes from the late 1980s or early 1990s. They’re unrecognizable compared to news broadcasts today. Neutral, unemotional, reporting of facts. No attempt to construct larger narratives or push them down viewers’ throats.
> The news has become so bad today so every news source is basically fake news. In my country for example, the national television is so obviously biased it's ridicolous.
"It's all fake news" is cover for propaganda outlets, and while mainstream news gets things wrong occasionally, they get a lot right, and also they course correct and offer corrections when they get things wrong.
> What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
I'm genuinely curious to know where it's talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are the pinnacle of reporting?
Honestly I never hear/read anything but hate for them?
> The Internet is currently the best way to get access to honest, quality journalism
Honest, quality journalism is a fantasy. It never existed. Even Benjamin Franklin used his newspaper to influence elections by slandering his political rivals. Not to mention fake news[0].
> I think we learned that fake news (used to pump up fake issues) is now a legitimate campaign strategy that works even on people who should know better.
This, I think was the real genius of Trump's campaign. One role a journalist has in an open society to objectively seek the truth. I feel that Trump effectively defeated journalism through an utter disregard for it. Putin does the same.
Obviously NY Times has a stake in this, so no need to go further into that angle.
The problem "regular" media is facing today is increased scrutiny w.r.t. neutrality. They're simply not reporting neutrally.
I'm by no means a Trump-supporter (not even American), but when I consistently see traditional media re-reporting internet rumours as truth every time they have the possibility to add a "Look at how bad Trump and his supporters are"-angle... And then often later shown to be wrong, even traditional media is portrayed as spreading fake news. Because they are!
Need an example? How about this very recent incident with MAGA teens and the intervening Indian? This was worldwide reported by "traditional" media as an anti-Trump story. No checks. No verification.
And it was all fake.
So tell me again. Why should I trust them more than, for instance Info wars? Both sides are clearly partisan.
> If you have a way to prevent things like this prior to their happening, I'm sure these newspapers (and many other industries) would love to hear it.
Don't run with a story until you can verify it? I know that would have stopped them from running 90% of their anti trump stories because there isn't a lot of evidence for them but if they actually did that as a whole, I don't think trump would be president.
People still underestimate how well trump is able to play the game of calling out the media for crying wolf.
> Until then, things like this will happen. Assuming all media is bad because of these incidents is silly.
I'm really not dismissing all media, I'm just applying different standards to different outlets based on their biases. If i see a story on WaPo about something bad trump did, it better be well sourced and founded otherwise it goes in the trash.
Same with breitbart or any other right wing outlet, If they are making a claim that fits their narrative then you should look purely at the underlying facts and cut out the speculation.
>And really, the idea that news media need to herd their audience into thinking the right things is ridiculous.
No, but they need to determine which story is based on the best possible information at the time, and which isn't. Which is a massive service for everyone else that doesn't have time do research everything they read.
A massive service not only gone unthanked, but actively attacked in the days of Trump.
> Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment.
I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored.
A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote.
News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.
> The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles.
Why should they care? The purpose of a news business is to make money. If it works, then it works.
I think the real problem here is the incentive structure for a modern news business, as well as the network effects of sharing, links, etc.
> Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server.
Do you have an actual link to that?
Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.
> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.
>One lesson from this election is how big an influence the media has on politics, and I see this as a huge problem.
Oh that's been a lesson for a while. I'm old enough to dimly remember the run-up to the first Gulf War and the level of discourse was generally much more thoughtful. You had your partisan hacks like Bob Novak and other Heritage Foundation tools, but they were embedded within a media-world that still took itself somewhat seriously and had resigned itself to being staid and boring. At one point I remember someone quoted Thucydides and discussed various ideas about Just War theory from Aristotle to Michael Walzer and applied it to the present situation. And this was on a major news network!
People make a big deal about "fake news on the internet" but the truth is, the reason the fake news had impact is because the "real news' long ago gave up any claims to credibility to be calling out the fake news. They've been acting as platforms for partisan hacks like Sean Hannity and Bob Novak for too long for anyone to put trust in them.
You should be more worried about how the current government copes with it. I think fake news might have helped Trump gain power in part, but it's DEFINITELY contributing to Trump losing power. Which illustrates that it's much easier to tear down with fake news than it is to build up.
That doesn't bode at all well for anyone who wants to be a mayor, or president, or senator, or police chief or whatever in the future.
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