It's funny how much flak Facebook (and almost no one else) got for "fake news" when the vast majority of today's journalism is so saccharine.
Is there a way contemporary journalism can be fixed?
Is there a way contemporary journalism can be fixed?
Furthermore, decreasing ad revenue and increasing competition means that newsrooms are financially strapped compared with earlier days. Back then, even big newspapers published just a few print editions a day. But now there's a constant 24-hour news cycle. It's impossible to check every story 100%; nothing would ever get published. So the editor has to settle for a sub-certain level of confirmation, with fewer fact checkers on staff to boot.
To a certain extent, it's better to issue the retraction later. You get eyeballs on your page for the initial story, then more attention for the fallout and retraction. I've now clicked on that WaPo article thrice instead of just once -- cha-ching. Obviously too much of that damages the reputation, but there are a number of tremendously successful organizations that unapologetically and routinely dispense fake news and still prosper as a result. People have been successfully conditioned to care less about accuracy and more about "tell me good stuff about my team and bad stuff about the other team."
The Post is being called out by The Intercept, a publication launched in 2014 [1]. That looks an awful lot like a system reacting to itself.
Edit - should add, journalism is being fixed. The MSM is becoming increasingly irrelevant, social media and independent journalists who are on Twitter and various blogs are becoming more relevant.
I would hardly call this a fix. The MSM is certainly unreliable, but "twitter and various blogs" are even less so.
And even though Pizzagate is firmly in conspiracy theory territory, you've got to admit - some of Podesta's emails were fucking weird.
I don't think that necessarily qualifies as newsworthy. A "real journalist" would have read those e-mails, found them to be pretty weird, then did an investigation to determine if anything of merit could be uncovered before printing a story. If there were any journalists involved, the pizzagate story would have been a perfect example of "irresponsible journalism", i.e. projecting unfounded claims based on rabid speculation and "gut instincts", yet being unable to prove anything definitively.
Sure, but a live video stream of newsworthy events represents a minuscule fraction of social media "reporting" and isn't even really representative of journalism in general since it's usually just an ad-hoc video from a citizen who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Even then, the conclusions drawn from citizen videos are often extremely contentious either because they are incomplete or just poorly shot (perhaps with the videographer leaving their own hysterical or biased commentary as a narration of events)