How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It clearly has. Had it not been for Wikileaks, and various online news organizations we would never have known the sheer amount of corruption afoot in this election, as well as the extent of the death grip political elites have on the entire system. I suppose old media has just become too entrenched and cozy with those in power to speak truth to power.
"a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time."
In a recent analysis by the ultra-leftist junk news site Buzzfeed, they've found that right wing sites are worst than left wing sites. Wow, that's some great journalism right there. That kind of reporting is why we should ignore new media and stick with the old.
"Stick with the old?" Would you really cite CNN, Fox, NBC and pals as unbiased reporting? From where I'm standing the playing field and the game is almost unchanged, the players are just often different.
(You even seem to somewhat contradict yourself, acknowledging that the old news is very establishment-cozy, which to me would beg the sort of skewing you cite for new-news)
Also, ownership has become ultra-concentrated among the "old media". There'd be more of a case in its favor if old media actually competed with each-other in a diverse marketplace anymore.
Definitely agreed. People just need to learn to only visit news sites that carefully align with their own personal biases. That's what makes the Internet nowadays so great. It's much easier to ignore people ignorant enough to disagree with you.
And corporate owned newspapers never did any distorting right NYT? Perhaps if the media had a shred of integrity, people wouldn't be going off to the onion to get their news.
How am I supposed to sympathize with this author when we just had a presidential campaign openly discusses their social media astro turfing whilst leaks reveal dizzying amounts of media collusion, but is there any official cry to end that practice? Of course not. So go ahead and pretend that it's all because the internet allows people to go get their conspiracies from so many different sources, and pretend that the public's distrust in MSM is unfounded and undeserved.
Not only did you ignore the point of the post you replied to ("lets talk about the article and criticize those ideas in context"), you segued to exactly the kind of narratives that the author of the article was talking about and used them to declaim anyone who disagrees with you.
It would be one thing if you bothered to critique the author on any of his actual points, but you decided to ramp it up by somehow claiming if he got his way, we would be censoring Noam Chomsky. ctrl-f, censorship isn't even mentioned in the article.
The crux of your argument seems to be something along the lines that that the ideas in this article are being put forwards "for the benefit of the elites", which is the kind of thinking that I (and I think the author of the article would agree with me) that makes as much sense as saying "you are being punished for your hubris by Zeus". As in, you ascribe actions to beings that are fundamentally invisible to others, that secretly control the world around and that you can divine the existence of, but are unable to explain to others in any but in the most vaguest of terms.
The point that upsets me about this kind of behavior, is that in viewing it, often people are turned off and are less likely to take part in conversations where they see others treated that same way. The shrinking minority of people who post vs just lurk, already a tiny approximate 10%, in the end becomes the even smaller fraction of people who can put up with and dish out the exact same vitriol. Or, simply agree with vitriol directed elsewhere.
Like you, I lurked for a long time (a couple of years) before a comment got me emotionally charged up enough to finally create an account. I'm certainly glad I did, though.
Yeah, every once in a while somebody "pees in the pool" but (as I'm sure you already know) normally the conversation and dialogue here is better than what you'll get at most other venues on the Internet.
Now that you've got an account, just stay logged in, continue contributing, and help even out the signal-to-noise ratio a little bit more.
That's my point! Terrorism isn't a reason to run mass surveillance on everyone, yet here we are. I'm saying that by going after the crackpots, the establishment gets to contain critical adversaries.
Alex Jones is now part of the movement powering the Republican Presidential campaign, which stands a 30% chance of winning. Chomsky is still on the margins. Alex Jones is a conspiracy nutjob almost all of the time. Chomsky is sometimes a conspiracy nutjob because he has a shot-in-the-dark at guessing which wars and coups are actually American plots and which ones just happened on their own.
Really? And was that true when there were hundreds of local newspapers with independent journalists on staff?
His whole premise is built on the amount of conspiracy theories we know of, rather than actual conspiracies, to show the internet is distorting the truth!
But maybe, ironically, he's proving that traditional media is what's broken, if trash like this is given a mouthpiece.
What your hear is the whining for power decentralized away. And those calling for censorship, demand to reinstate it, so they can have it. Those not debunking fake news, but declaring unproofable conspirarcys at work, want to shirk the work or have something to win, when the truth is not found out.
"At this point, Raiden is contacted by AIs of the Colonel and Rosemary, introducing themselves as representatives of the Patriots, who reveal that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how they could simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths."