The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I'm the last person you will find defending Zuck or Facebook (which I do not use and have deleted other apps as facebook buys them). But this Atlantic article felt like a desperate plea for charity of some sort, and preferably cash since the Chan-Zuckerberg Empire has so much. This is yet another editorial complaining about themselves but the author does not offer an alternative idea for journalism to avoid its own demise. Why and how would she? Journalists don't seem to understand business at all and are scared to try.
In just 3 months since the election, journalists and many people in this country seem to have forgotten how biased, incompetent, clueless, fake and corrupt even the "real" news organizations are today. There was no mea culpa in the article for these issues, just a misguided complaint. The pre-internet old days were not so perfect either if anyone reads history...can anyone explain why newspapers, these supposed bastions of objectivity for communities, even endorse political candidates? Is that a newspapers job?
This whole situation reminds me of another time there was a Harvard guy's looong manifesto that no one had the patience to read in full and it was on a very similar topic...the news industry was running around like a chicken with its head cut off back then too [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
Most agents that are skirting the rules have some notion that they shouldn't be overtly recording their misdeeds. In other words, where there's smoke, there's often fire.
The 'one incident' wasn't just smoke, though. It was a full blown conflict-of-interest fire in and of itself.
What does that have to do with a corporate media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton over the obvious victor Bernie Sanders?
A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment.
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidentia...
I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election.
More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews.
There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.
Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders.
This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi...
The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary.
Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders.
Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
"The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years."
The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status.
The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out.
Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office?
Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.
Your hypothesis has been debunked in the provided sources, as well as elsewhere.
Even when viewer intent is controlled for in models, Sanders was consistently substantially underrepresented in coverage, while Hillary was substantially over-represented. Additionally, pole results correlated poorly with coverage volume.
If you read the leaks, you will note that contrary to your statement that "There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert", there is substantial evidence that key, impactful information was provided to the Clinton campaign and that Clinton's campaign desires aligned with reporting in fact.
Clinton wanted Trump to be a frontrunner because she thought she could eviscerate him. This is contained in the leak.
That she did not, in fact, do so, doesn't indicate that there was no conformity between her campaign strategy and the media coverage in fact. Most media narratives leading up to the election indicated that Hillary was substantially ahead.
Your argument that 'the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals' doesn't indicate that there wasn't an improper collusion. If you and I own companies, and we agree in service of our own goals to raise prices and reduce competition, in most jurisdictions we would be thrown in jail. Which is why the conversations in which these agreements happen (and they do) are not. written. down.
Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.
The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth.
Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.
I was clearly wrong on the relative electability of Hillary & Bernie, but I'm voted in the primary for the candidate that better represented my views. I didn't vote for Hillary because the DNC made me do it or the media lied to me. I watched their speeches, I read their websites, I watched the debates, and I decided I'd rather have Hillary than Bernie. That's it.
It's not a giant conspiracy, there's just a lot of rank and file Democratic voters that aren't all in on Bernie's worldview. If you want to make an argument for why I should be more in on the Bernie plan than Hillary's plan I'd hear it (I guess not on HN), but stop pretending like the majority of Democratic primary voters were duped.
However, I'm surprised that you aren't offended by the DNC's corruption and dishonesty. Say what you want about Bernie -- you can't deny he attracted much new blood to the party; he was the last hope of reclaiming the lost passion of the 2008 Obama campaign. The DNC's open hostility to his candidacy was shameful. If you're trying to imply that somehow it had no effect on the primary outcome, you should share whatever you're smoking with the group.
There are a number of people advancing the 'we have no evidence' banner in this thread, which is strange because studies of electibility were commonly discussed here during the primaries.
What it comes down to is that I don't think electability polls taken before the conventions can really tell us much about how people would feel about Sanders after he started getting hammered in a general election.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...
In the large Midwestern cities in which I have lived, local newspapers generally choose to align themselves on the side of local governments and chambers-of-commerce on virtually every new development subsidy or tax deal regardless of the costs to be incurred by local residents and businesses and/or the sketchiness of the scheme.
Readers look to the fourth estate for a voice when elected representatives collude with special interests. If they are merely mouthpieces and cheerleaders for those in power, readers will look elsewhere or disengage.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
Small-town papers are beholden to small-town interests. Stone notes that the large-city and national dailies (NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, possibly the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal at the itme) were freed of dependence on any one advertiser (or political interest). That may have been a peculiar circumstance of the 1960s and 1970s.
> The president, irrespective of who he is, today, is so powerful that the temptations of the office for good or evil are too great for any one man. I think we ought to begin to dismantle the office. I think we ought to have a head of state symbolizing the country around whom the natural feeling of patriotism and reverence accrue and separate him from the head of the government.
If you want journalism, sponsor endowments for journalists to report in certain areas, like foreign policy or local government. At the same time, and critically, sponsor endowments for editors to put a tight reign on these journalists.
Completely decouple good journalism for hunting-for-eyeballs. Then let the content curators and aggregators make some kind of business out of it, if they can.
In the past, whenever we consumed quality content, it was always there because some commercial interest paid for it to be there. Somehow we've forgotten about that. There has always been a difference between what the commercial interests wanted and what quality content demanded, but in the past the feedback loop was so slow and diffuse that good content happened anyway. This is no longer the case.
So if you want good content, you're going to have to completely decouple it from commercial interests -- and apply rigorous quality standards as well. Good editors are sorely missing in modern content creation, and everybody seems to want to take the old models, including ad-sponsored material, and make them work. They will not work.
Additionally, how do you make people actually want the news? A sound bite or tweet or headline is super easy to digest and doesn't take a lot of time and makes people feel like they are in the know. Just regurgitate any article title and you're an expert. On top of that is the click baiting for eyeballs (driven by ad money) removing at least the journalistic integrity of putting out information with some basis of fact.
True news will always have some bias but we have to find a way for it to not be ad supported. The only way I see that happening is some kind of subscription or independently wealthy patron.
Sure, find something 5000 people with a dollar go crazy for and then pay one person full time to investigate that stuff.
Buy newspapers. Ads, paywalls and the death of journalism are instrinsically linked. If you reject the first two then you promote the last.
Endowment, patronage, and advertising share the problem of the person paying the bills not being the user.
You're just moving the eyeball-hunting to the aggregators. Clickbait works. The human brain is just plain vulnerable to certain stimuli, and a business which exploits this has an advantage over one which does not.
In the short term, at least. If people will recognize this and choose to willfully select businesses which make a point to not do it, perhaps we can change things. There's just not enough public intent in this direction yet.
Newspapers would use attention-grabbing headlines and cover photographs, but ultimately subscription would require people to make a decision about whether or not they gained recurring value from receiving the publication.
Technological fatalism in this area undervalues history. This exact battle between sensationalism and quality is not a historical novelty. Tabloids were not out-competing the NYT. A more nuanced view shows that current trends aren't predestined, or even distribution medium specific.
The cynics and trolls will attack the idea that it's impossible. Ignore them of course, it is possible but it will not be perfect, and it must be open about it not being perfect. The pragmatists have the more valid pushback: implementing such a solution is still too difficult, too expensive, it will take too long and it may crowd-out remaining journalists who are still in business while discouraging other solutions coming forward.
I think it can start small. It has to. But the seeds how this could work can be seen in organizations like C-SPAN, National Public Radio and Wikipedia (Yes, Wikipedia is also not perfect but it's pretty damn good and arguably better than for-profit journalism right now in terms accuracy and staying close to the center on stories). Expanding on those models has potential if support for doing so can be rallied and the idea can be paid for.
Who knows, this could turn into a US version of Pravda, if it even gets off the ground. Maybe. But when current journalism is already a biased disaster still going out of business, what's the harm in trying a little experiment and giving other options like this a try?
But there are a ton of folks playing baseball for a small salary -- the minor leagues. There's also scads of folks playing baseball recreationally.
I don't see any reason professional news journalism couldn't be done in a similar way: more secure, rewarding jobs for those at the top of their fields paid for by a permanent endowment. A "middle league" that may only get internet like points or small payments for worth contributions. And tons of folks yukking it up on the sidelines doing the best they can and hoping one day to make it to the major leagues.
Other industries have similar development programs like pro baseball's farm and minor leagues. But all these are getting difficult to maintain. Pro baseball teams supporting minor leagues isn't what it used to be and they have become harder to afford. Still I agree there are many lessons to take from what baseball does well and not so well.
I do agree a lesson from baseball is that the best in journalism should be highly paid for their work. Journalism needs to continue to attract and retain talented professionals who are compensated competitively. This is harder than it might sound though. Professional baseball players don't really have their salaries paid for by wealthy folks; rather players make a lot of money because of MLB television and media rights in the billions of dollars. Players play 162 games on television every season so TV commercials and expensive TV cable packages is what pays for baseball.
One big advantage if the endowment model can be pulled off and funded as a source for journalists income is it could in theory help minimize the corruption and pandering to advertisers at the higher levels of journalism too.
In the sphere of journalism, it's very hard to say what is cause and effect. Facebook aside, and even money aside, some journalists will say that good journalism isn't widely read, and that readers have driven the shift to shallow, celebrity-driven coverage. Facebook can make the same argument—this is what people want, who are we to question them?
I agree with the others that point to Journalism's business model as the problem. It's a public good to bring hidden facts related to the public interest into the light. We as a society should subsidize these efforts the way we do other sources of public good that aren't viable as profitable businesses: let them become non-profit organizations and support them with donations and tax incentives. This protects their independence and also removes the regressive paywalls that signal to poor people that knowledge of the day's events is not for them.
Facebook, in general, needs to ask much more fundamental questions than how it affects the news. What is the product for? What does it actually do? Is its responsibility to earn profit in conflict with the interests of its users? Is it being candid with the public about how its product affects its users? Or is it just reacting to PR crises as they happen without actually taking responsibility for its place in the world?
>>respect to the addictiveness of its product
You forgot to mention that this addictiveness is not even a natural thing - it has been refined and A/B tested with 1% improvement week over week until the user base has been turned into the 21st century version of Pavlov's dogs - that image is exactly what I see when I look at people who get anxiety over a lack of instant messages for a WHOLE 15 MINUTES.
I've been seeing Gresham's Law dynamics in a tremendous number of places. Ethical races to the bottom are one instance of this.
A curious thought is that as facebook controls more and more information content it could become a kind of monopoly on the 'marketplace of ideas'. If the dreams of this manifesto were to come to pass, the marketplace of ideas would lack its own market forces and instead facts and ideas would be doled out by a single (corporate) directive force. Many of the principles of our democracy rely on that open marketplace of ideas, and would no longer function as we intend if that marketplace is not open. Can an object/company be too large/controlling within the marketplace of ideas that it becomes a governmental/societal obligation to break it up, as it does when a single player becomes a monopoly in an economic market?
Anything showing "recommended" is creating a filter bubble.
Yes.
I'm amazed honestly that people even read/watch this loser's output. Zuck is the classic example of somebody who got lucky once and now all of us have to put up with his towering mediocrity, forever. No wonder he's looking at national politics, always a last refuge for over-successful lightweights.
Smoking went big because of second hand smoking and because of family members in hospitals on ventilators. There's no equivalent for Facebook or Casinos. No acute trauma to stir the public indignation. Just quiet mental deaths stretched out over years.
Distributing information in its written form used to be the domain of the Church. Printing press has democratized that, for a while. Eventually the diversity of information was roped in to serve the agenda of the new, capitalist elites. While individual journalists often thrive to deliver the best work, the editors inevitably arrange things to serve the interests of particular business groups, and those who don't toe the line fall into obscurity for lack of funds.
Now, the Internet has produced a new information diversity, which is bubbling and foaming as we speak. That too will get roped in. The viral effect will become the domain of well-funded teams, not of lone geniuses. As the art is perfected it will become more capital-intensive, we will see consolidation in the business. Eventually the bulk of it will be divided between few large players, well-aligned with other businesses, and the whole thing will become orderly and predictable once again. Maybe.
The printing press needed a newsroom with typists and ad salesmen and a team of people wrestling with an ink belching mechanical beast. The minimum corporate interest required to feed such a beast is substantially more than the Internet business, the physical plant of which costs pennies a day in overhead to maintain (i.e. your cell phone and a few gigs of bandwidth.)
The amateur hour will come to an end. Especially now that the presidential election campaign has shown us how it's done.
It seems you are afraid, but you shouldn't be. The professionals are funded by big businesses, they aren't looking to take your life, they want you buy their products, and they want you to be happy while doing it.
It's really the same picture we've had for the last few decades, only the technology is a bit different. If you weren't upset back then, there is no reason to be upset now.
It's comforting if you believe you can keep yourself and your friends out of that second category.
I keep making new friends in low places so that's not the case for me.
That line is pretty much all you need to know about the article, despite what the title is claiming.
In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction. [0]
If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
The author is misplacing the blame.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...
Why is this a problem that needs to be solved though? A big part of being free is being able to choose what you get to care about, being able to choose what you get to read, and being able to have your own opinions.
Remove that, and you're no longer free. Would it be better to not be a free people? I can see the benefits of both sides, but I think freedom is a better long term solution for a multitude of historical reasons.
Constraining your freedom doesn't mean you cease to be free, but it allows others to flourish just as you do. A free society ("a free people", as you say) should allow everyone to flourish as much as they care to (but no less). Collective freedom is not just the sum of individual freedoms. It is the result of cooperation.
What kind of nonsense is that? My OPINION is that Snowden is a hero, and NOT a traitor, and I absolutely choose to consider that opinion is correct. What are the FACTS about that? He broke the law. But he broke an immoral law? What about the actions he divulged? Were they not unconstitutional? Of course, there are "laws" on the books that make what the CIA/NSA did "legal." So where does all this leave us?
Forums like this keep discussion fake news in the light of "fact," as though fact were enough. It's not. You can go back and forth and back and forth with arguments about Snowden, and get nowhere. It all depends on your bias about how the Constitution should regard your personal liberty and privacy versus the concern for national safety. Lots of people fall on both sides. I use this example because it's a good, clear one, but the same thing is going on in most other stories. There's at least 2 ways of looking at everything. A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Now that the country is well and truly removed from the halcyon post-war era, we have to figure out how to live with each other, and differences of opinion. That's the real issue here. The same way that social norms had to react and catch up with the emergence of Facebook itself, we have to settle into new norms about living with people who don't think like we do, and that goes for both sides.
It's not going to stop me from thinking that someone is "wrong" when they call Snowden a traitor, but it doesn't mean I need to get in their face about it, or put signs in their yard, or tear down their signs, or picket their business. You see what I'm saying.
> A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Somebody's moral compass is not just an irreducibly subjective element, but it is also normatively sensitive to facts. Our weighting of the data might have biases, but those biases are surely appropriate or not as well? (I don't mean to imply that we can resolve in principle the issue of whether our biases are correct or not, which we might not; see the problem of Deep Disagreement [1])
So yes, I agree with you when you say that the problem is how to live with each other given our limitations to resolve disagreements. However, I think underplaying the role of facts in this needlessly perpetuates them. The sort of disagreements we face is not just of the kind you just gave an example of: people disagree in ways in which they don't even agree on the same set of data. See the case of climate change denial, for example. Those are not simply having a "difference of opinion".
[1]: https://www.academia.edu/2592706/What_is_the_Problem_of_Deep...
I'm confused, isn't that exactly what the parent's argument is though? You said that's not what you're saying, and then repeat the exact same thing, contradicting yourself.
Personally I disagree with you, if I'm understanding correctly. To me, a huge chunk of the population, you included it would seem, believes that some things are no longer a matter of opinion, that 10 and 20 years ago everyone would have happily agreed are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact.
If I understood him correctly, he's saying that I was claiming that if we agreed on facts (if facts were settled, as it were), we would agree in opinions, which is clearly false as a matter of fact. My claim is that we should agree in opinions, if facts were settled. I think difference between would/should is significant here. I am saying: if facts were settled, and we had a disagreement, at least one of the parties in the disagreement should not hold their opinions (would be wrong). I am not saying: if facts were settled, we could not be in disagreement.
If it was possible in principle to settle the facts, our apparent entitlement to hold certain opinions would be, in a sense, illusory. We can act on the assumption that it is not, for sure, but that doesn't make our entitlement right.
I am not even claiming that facts are settled (that is, that we know what is true as a matter of fact). Since they are not settled, we should be more cautious in our taking of opinions, and of course that goes both ways.
At least for me, I am coming from the angle that some things are a matter of fact, and some are a matter of opinion. For example, everyone can be fully informed on economics, but on the matter of "how much should a waiter be paid in New York City", there is no "right" answer.
That might very well be not what the disagreement was about from your perspective though. :/
Along the same lines (maybe), I've always thought an improved way to approach disagreement (breaking down "matters of opinion) is to break things down into components to better discover discrete points of contention. When you have a unsolvable dispute, you've either reached a matter of opinion, or, the disputed topic has to be broken down further. I wonder if that's the approach the book takes?
I think this approach could be quite successful, assuming two reasonable people involved (a tall order nowadays perhaps).
People look to their ideological pedagogues to TELL them what to think about the NEWS COVERAGE of the ARTICLES about the PAPERS about the DATA, regardless of what it says, and it's happening on BOTH sides, with both the Rush Limbaugh's and the Jon Stewart's of the world. Facts may matter to you and me, but they certainly don't to most of the population. By the time it reaches the average person, an 18-month study, with all it's glorious data, assumptions, conditions, and results, is washed out in a single sound byte, because no one has the patience to understa...
Oh, look! A funny cat video! That's hilarious. Let me just send that on to 1,000 of my followers...
Does that extend to facts?
Trump constantly spouted blatant fiction. He still does. This isn't one set of facts vs another.
Trump lies, then vilifies those who call out his lies, and somehow he's the hero.
This happens because it's not as simple as facts vs. fiction. Yes, he does get some facts wrong. But the media does pick what facts to report on to always paint him in a bad light. This is why I said it's not so simple.
No, it isn't. With complete sincerity I think you should make a serious effort to appreciate this possibility.
I'm saddened by the current state of affairs where increasingly polarized factions feel that taking nuanced (rather than absolutist) positions threatens their positions and gives up ground to the opposition.
At least from my observation, the general stance of most people is 100% complete belief in any partisan theory, and complete rejection of any opposing ideas, regardless of the amount of evidence supporting each.
Look, we're talking about the difference between opinion and fact here. By its very nature, "fact" implies that you have enough evidence already that questioning that fact requires evidence of its own. If I hold some weaker opinion, then sure, it's entirely reasonable to hold an opinion contrary to that without the burden of proof immediately being on you.
That's where I (personally) draw the line on everything: do literally whatever the hell you want, as long as you aren't harming anyone else in the process. Obviously there are nuances, and sometimes causing some harm in the pursuit of the greater good is acceptable, but I think this principle is a sound starting point.
And that's the thing. You can be a climate-change denier all you want, but once that starts affecting public policy, that's a problem, because, for example, eviscerating the EPA will have far-reaching, long-term, negative effects on life on our planet.
This goes both ways though. I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I've read very compelling arguments from people whose livelihood are significantly affected by EPA regulations that have missed the mark, or are enforced unfairly.
A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem, because then both sides are not in a compromising mood, and that is what we need to accomplish anything.
Terminating the EPA entirely (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/861) is not a "reasonable position".
> So here’s to the freedom to be led astray, which it would be folly to restrict, lest it foster complacency and tempt the devil. Because that’s what attracts him: foolproof safeguards. Like the one the Clinton campaign erected when, per WikiLeaks, it encouraged the nomination of a laughable, beatable “Pied Piper candidate” named Donald Trump. Or CNN’s belief in its ability to not only report the news but tell us which sources to ignore.
> Assume you’re an imbecile, but, more important, consider that the imbecile across from you may be a genius in disguise. As we go forward, so many of us still secure in our contempt for the vulgar pretender and his sorry partisans, it’s a lesson worth remembering. It might prove helpful, even protective. Plus, it’s true.
It's good that people are free to choose what to read and what to believe, and yet the current state of affairs is cause for concern nonetheless. A coin is "free to choose" whether to come up heads or tails, but if it comes up heads ninety times of a hundred tosses, it's reasonable to assume that the coin has a problem.
Of course, you could always make the argument that nothing is a problem and that this is just the way the world is -- a growing number of people don't care about facts -- and this is what we are now. But all judgements of good vs. bad are ultimately based on a choice of values. Freedom is a value, as is respect for the truth. Believing that while everyone is free, stability requires that only a small portion would choose fiction over fact is a reasonable position.
[1]: http://harpers.org/archive/2017/02/a-grim-fairy-tale/?single...
I.e. It becomes about controlling mind-share. Calling something out as "unfair", "biased", "propaganda", or "fake news" is one way of controlling the amount of mind-share it has with people that identify with it. So you can't just "let someone" have their "wrong" opinion, you have to "correct them". That is precisely what political correctness is, it's to "put down" unacceptable opinions with public witch hunts and legal pressure. I have no idea when it went from "leave people alone" with their probably "wrong" opinions, into "omg, you're not allowed to think/say that, you must be sexist/racist/homophobic and we'll make life a living hell for you, and we'll get you fired".
I don't disagree with your broader point, but I've never ever seen anyone tout democracy as "the perfect system in terms of fairness". Even back when it was the new hotness, writers on it (de Tocqueville et al) were very well aware of its flaws and failure modes.
What they cannot choose, however, is what is truth, and what is reality.
Reality has a way of imposing itself. And a disregard for reality on the part of some has a profound way of imposing itself on the many.
If you take a closer look, the established media is not so innocent about that. Most of them find it perfectly ok to lie for money every few minutes (TV ads)...
Agreed, but if advertising first purpose was to tell verifiable facts it would have been called information. The problem here is people believing everything is thrown at them, especially if done by some popular figure.
Sometimes is not that simple. A lot of this is related to personal biases and just the way the brain works. Ofcourse people can try to train theirselves into being more skeptic but in a world in which every day you are bombarded with information is pretty hard to find the time and motivation to do so.
Even if it were the case that Mark Zuckerburg was exploiting those flaws for personal benefit, I find it hard to blame him - we live in and support a society that encourages that behavior. If exploiting human flaws for profit is an undesired outcome for human organizations, we should work to stop encouraging that behavior.
I will however provide a counter point to my own argument, which is that we should name and shame those who abuse human nature at society's expense for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with a society full of people who are actively harming society.
Honestly I don't know what to think. I just wanted to provide both of these views. I'm curious what the response to either views is.
What's destroying journalism is people like you calling out media as propaganda, fake news, etc...
I do think the buzzwords need to die. Everyone calls everything they don't agree with fake news these days.
Also negative "news" sells better. Humans just respond to fear and hatred. It is just so much easier to fear and to hate. I'll admit to it. I feel suspicious when I see something positive in the news: is this a sponsored post?
Making occasional errors isn't a sign of bias. Correcting those errors is a key part (and running the correction prominantly) of not being biased.
It's been observed that the principle bias of many major commercial media is inherently pro-establishment.
I know Facebook is a US-based product and everything, but I'm really getting sick and tired of products that are used all over the world getting adjusted just because they are a problem now in the US.
First we had "fake news" (which used to be called just propaganda), which we have dealt with long before Internet was even a big thing in our region[0]. Now this.
Media survives just fine here. Most people still don't use adblockers and most people are ready to donate for good quality journalism (in fact, there's a Serbian-based investigative reporting center that's currently making an excellent progress in moving away from grants to one-time donations by their readers, and there are other digital-only media sources across Europe which are even breaking records living off of subscriptions by being transparent and talkative to their audience[1]). But nope, instead of doing their own thing, they're going to have to adjust because Facebook wants to promote more "local" things to encourage "civil engagement" because a "research suggests it" (keep in mind there's not a single mention of what that research might actually be, neither in the article itself, nor in the manifesto).
You have separate sections in every newspaper what so ever, and unlike in Facebook's very specific, and very tailored to every individual bubbles, at least you skim through the headlines from other sections while you're trying to locate something you will actually read. That alone makes you more informed about what is going on more than Facebook's bubbles ever will.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav...
Have no fear, citizen, that bug will be solved soon.
1. Fake news makers are exclusively after money. 2. Propagandists are exclusively after a political end. 3. Journalists are mostly after the truth, even if they are very biased and far from immune from the corrupting influence of money and political ends.
I read a lot of what most would consider "alt-right" news. They've repossessed that term and now use it to refer to really biased reporting on the part of the "mainstream media". The accusation is usually very biased reporting, blatantly favoring left-leaning ideas and politicians, as well as not reporting on issues that contradict the mainstream narrative.
Sometimes they go too-far with conspiracy-theory-level stuff, I'll give them that. But for the most part, they're spot on when it comes to reporting on the mainstream media's blatant left-leaning bias and selective reporting. When I read them, it sounds like a "normal" person, one that doesn't jump through hoops to justify their points. The points are just there.
The mainstream media's privileged position of controlling the narrative is under threat, both from within the media (e.g. Breitbart) and without (random guys on the internet creating narratives).
The idea of "fake news" is propaganda, created in order to push Facebook/Twitter/etc into shutting down the media and random guys that are threatening the mainstream media. It'll probably work too.
Incidentally, insofar as "fake news" is real, it is highly unlikely to have any major effect. ...for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads. https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
What do you call information that is produced to resemble reputable news sources but contains very little true information?
Is there any support for the claim that it was reported, and a term was coined for it, in order to limit competition?
Why should we think it's that vs genuine reporting on a trend where people profit from producing this material AND a complimentary trend for Americans (trending toward conservative views) to believe anything that fits their preferred narrative without question?
I think this is absolutely different from propaganda because it's done first and foremost from a profit motive. It did not generally (as far as we actually know) come from powerful groups who want to control a political narrative. [0] I'm sure that has already started to change- Russia and other countries will certainly use this attack vector. The material they produce would be fake news used as propaganda.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...
The status quo.
That's why I can't watch any of the national news stations. Foreign broadcasters are less likely to pump things up, and some local news stations are passable, but the big boys have been transparently biased and driven by clickbait, since before clickbait was a thing.
I think this study is too limited. The problem is not that a single article changes minds. It's a well-poisoning problem. Stories about the Clintons assassinating their opponents have been floating around right-wing media for decades.
When I was growing up, I heard an adult talk about the time their friend went to see the Clintons land at an airport. When the friend asked Hillary to end abortion because it was killing babies, Hillary supposedly replied "We will kill your babies."
Nonsense circulated for decades has a toxic effect on political discussion. "Fake news" is just the latest nonsense fad to join Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and their kind.
This archive of a disreputable website has an article that claims Clinton bribed prominent Republicans (which were at that time Trumps opponents in the primary). It even links Wikileaks and gives an id for the email. Only ... the ID simply doesn't exist. It even made it into an Interview of Hannity with Assange:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereIsAssange/comments/5ion2c/full...
> Hannity: Let me ask you about Wikileaks. I think this could shake up the political world. Is it true that an email sent in July of this year that you have, that describes how funds could be diverted from the Clinton campaign to the super PACs of Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasick. Specifically document number 1078645. Assange: I don't have that in front of me. We have published nearly 100,000 documents so. I mean I have seen references to things like that. I don't recall seeing an 'eyes only' phrase.
Assange didn't recall it because there is no email. The whole story was made up as clickbait for conservatives. But even Assange guards his statement, because it is normal that one doesn't recall everything, right?
Another example was a story about Supreme Court justice Ginsberg. Another clickbait website made up a quote of her and linked as proof an interview of Ginsburg in the NYTimes. And the NYT is reputable, right? Only the quote is fictional it never was in the NYT article. In a time were many people just read the headline and skim the rest (if at all) and sharing via social media is one click away, this is disappointingly effective.
(This is almost certainly due to selection bias - Trump hatred is a socially required belief in my circles, while Trump support is a very unusual position adopted only after careful thought and kept carefully hidden.)
There are many silly beliefs that Trump opponents have picked up from the mainstream media. For instance, compare beliefs about Trump-inspired crime to reality - most are hoaxes perpetrated by Trump opponents, and the most serious incidents (e.g. the kidnapping/torture of a mental retard) were committed by Trump opponents.
Or beliefs that Bannon and Trump are somehow antisemitic Nazis. Never mind that Trump was mentored by (((Roy Cohn))) and that the key people in his organization are (((Allen Weisenberg))), (((Michael Cohen))) and (((Jason Greenblatt))). Somehow (((Jared Kushner))) and (((Ivanka Trump))) are also involved. Not to mention that Bannon's rise to power came from working with (((Andrew Breitbart))), and he's secretly communicating with (((Curtis Yarvin))). [1]
Strangely, these crazy beliefs are never cited when discussing fake news. They just aren't part of the narrative. That's why I characterize this "fake news" push as propaganda - it's only about keeping non-mainstream sources out of the narrative.
[1] I'm only using the alt-right ((())) to emphasize what actual anti-semitic people would think of Trump.
Chiefly that owners have the cattle's best interests in mind and will tell them the truth.
(Actually, they mostly do. The advertisers are mainly very selective about the facts they publish. And the way they wrap them up for delivery. "Never give a sucker an even break" as one famous advertiser candidly put it.)
Propaganda: The NYT, at the behest of the government, publishing reports of Iraq possessing WMD's in order to lay the groundwork for an illegal invasion and occupation.
Fake News: A fabricated story about a made up individual finding boxes of ballots marked for Clinton, complete with a photo pulled from Google. The story then is pushed on social media sites by sockpuppets.
In other words there's a difference between Judith Miller and Stephen Glass.
Of all the significant distinctions, the most important one is that fake news is driven by the current state of the internet: ad revenue based click grabbing, pushing of content on social media (sometimes through sockpuppets), an elevated level of anonymity, etc.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news
With the rise of weaponised viral clickbait and advertising-driven Internet competition over attention, we've seen an increase in algorithmic content created solely for the purpose of driving up advertising revenues.
Even that isn't an entirely new phenomenon. The rise of "penny presses" -- daily common-circulation newspapers based on advertising, and selling for a penny, as opposed to the "professional" six-cent press, gave rise to the New York Sun's Great Moon Hoax of 1835, with the goal of driving up circulation numbers:
In the beginning there were articles and there was fact-checking. Specific articles that failed checks (failed QA) were fake. A rush of those in 2016 were found to be for-clicks and for-profit.
One might have really hoped that more checking (better QA) would come out of that, but perversely the opposite happened. "Fake news" became a blanket condemnation not just for unchecked stories, but often unread ones. "The headline says that? Fake news!"
This is kind of a critical juncture, but I worry that it is becoming a wrong turn.
How many of the people who hold up the NYT as some ideal actually subscribe? I'll be surprised if it's anything but a tiny number. Journalism is dying because journalists think they should write about what they want to be true. And the NYT is leading that charge.
I'll tell you something, though. They had a couple of very good articles that really stood out. And those also had exceptional prose.
I think what's even more troubling is that this isn't just changing fashions, but that some are actively trying to shake people's faith in the truth.
I believe it's less to do with not caring to not understanding the system. Coming from a world where newspapers ensured to report only correct info and corrected incase of error. People expect that the internet is also the same. Many are surprised to know that Wikipedia articles are peer submitted and reviewed. Many assumed its from a company like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Just an online version, instead of the heavy books.
This world never existed, sorry.
Too bad we don't know which half and which news is fiction.
> If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
The NYTimes can have all the awards in the world if they publish articles that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be bullshit or dishonesty.
> If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
You should always look at what the other side has to offer, I talk to people who have polar opposite beliefs to mine on a regular basis, keeps me informed and makes me re-evaluate my own position.
What articles did you have in mind? The NYT's reporting on WMDs in Iraq is often raised as an example of 'fake news,' but I think the failure of the fact-checking process and subsequent investigation and apology [1] is to the NYT's credit. Investigative journalists have to make judgment calls about their sources and sometimes they get it wrong, but I've never seen an NYT article 'that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be dishonesty.' Factual errors and misleading language do slip in regularly, resulting in frank corrections or the publication of dissenting views. That's more than you can say for most 'alternative' news sources.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the...
I posit that this number is close to 95% worldwide.
People are all the same - impulsive and vulnerable. I've spoken to some perfectly normal immigrants from various parts of the world and have heard some properly batshit insane stuff - any other time we would have assigned them a round-the-clock nurse.
And guess what - it makes zero difference to their life what they believe.
Beliefs need to collide with reality (through decisions, actions etc).
If you simply consider your world to be the other half of the country (that does care about correct news), then there is not much of a problem. If, however, you need to please shareholders, then, yes, you have a problem.
(You sure stirred it up with this one.)
But it's not really true, is it? The better way to describe the situation would be to say that the ~35% at BOTH ends of the political spectrum only wants to hear and read "news" that confirms their biases. And "journalism," as a business, has given them that.
What I'm saying is that we don't have a "facts" OR a "news" problem. We have an ideological division/superiority problem, and I don't know if anything can fix that.
Well, short of splitting the country into 3 parts: the 2 coasts, and flyover country, and letting them all go hard towards their biases, and checking back in on the results in about 50 years, and see which experiment worked better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_multiculturalism
I look at the pros & cons of a place like Japan and wonder.
A frustrating part of political discourse is that most people don't bother to put in the time and energy to understand the things they talk about, largely because it does matter enough to them to actually be right.
Out of curiosity, which "side" are you on predominantly?
More of the population is turning to alternative news sources because their trust of source like the NYTimes, WAPO and CNN has been violated. I'm pretty sure you weren't holding the Times up as some bastion of truth but to deny their blatant bias in reporting is folly. Withholding facts, failing to pursue facts or making the decision only to pursue facts you agree with politically is as bad as just making shit up.
The blueprint that's destroying journalism is the chase of profits over the chase of ALL truth.
Now, I do agree that large segments of the electorate are becoming less able to parse information effectively but I think there's still enough folks left that would gladly pay straight up subscription fees if they thought they could trust the information they were paying for.
News will get reinvented, and the optimist in me hopes it will be a much better product than it is today. But that process will be hard to predict and the winners will be among the folks who take risks and try new approaches.
Then again the decline of journalism is not a matter of internet as much than a matter of selling out to advertisers and being bought by rich individuals or corporations. With internet access becoming popular it provided an alternative to the traditional media to get news and information.
Can you expand on that? I see the decline in circulation and eroding of their ad and classified income as the principal culprit. I haven't seen any prominent examples of newspapers where the rich individuals or corporations have caused a decline. The Washington Post was thriving during the 40 years that Buffett had an ownership stake.
Actually it was Craigslist. Back before the internet, the single biggest pot of newspaper revenue was classified ads.
Any manifestation of the Internet makes that obsolete - but the specific method of obsoletion may be different by country.
Yes, Facebook is how many people use the Internet - but it's a mistake to therefore conclude Facebook is responsible for journalism's decline.
Google News is suffering from this. I noted on Wikipedia today, in a discussion of reliable sources, that I had searched for info about a Wikipedia topic with Google news search, with terrible results. The top three results were Algemeiner (Jewish), Breitbart News (alt-right), and Mondoweiss ("progressive and anti-Zionist"). This is pathetic.
Breitbart is now the third most read news source in America, so things are looking up.
How else can Google News rank them? Follow some news media objectivity ranking on imgur? Hire tons of unbiased people to verify the integrity of all news before adding them into the index?
I'm not playing devil's advocate here but given an uninformed electorate, some form of authoritative truth by either a independent watchdog or government agency is probably a better idea than letting private companies run the media.
This is not exactly true. At my site, newslines, we crowdsource news by collecting and summarizing only the factual parts of each story. While Google News aggregates articles, we select the factual information from them. In effect we put the factual data from long-form news articles into a database. Even if you have highly partisan sources you can still extract factual information. A good example of this is our newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress girl" [1]. In her case, the news sources are extremely partisan, but even so we can still extract factual information to create an unbiased view of the news. We belive our solution is far better than Wikipedia for both handling of news events, and the elimination of bias.
We are currently looking for contributors for other lines, particularity Donald Trump.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's the nature of reality itself.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/amusing-ourselves-to-death/oc...
Once FB gets a monopoly on news, it'll be able to control everyone.
>It out to be nationalized entirely.
You don't think those two things are at odds with each other? Why do you think the federal government will be any more trustyworthy than Mark Zuckerberg? Not to mention that then it will have no incentive to improve or make a profit.
The idea that a few wealthy FB shareholders can profit from using other people's data to manipulate those people's behaviour illustrates the problem very clearly.
What's worse is that even if you are not susceptible to FB's targeted advertising directly, FB will trick your friends and family into a particular behaviour pattern and then force you to follow suite.
It's just like when FB was in its early growth stages; even people who resisted joining FB initially gave in once all their friends had joined up... People would get offended if you didn't add them as friends on Facebook. It's the same principle at play here except it's around lifestyle and consumerism.
I actually think that this "don't trust the government" propaganda was masterminded by tech companies (on the back of the Edward Snowden drama) to help their own corporate agendas.
50 years ago, it would never have even occurred to anyone that a profit-making entity could be more trustworthy than the government because it makes absolutely no sense.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-severs-ties-with-youtube...
The sooner traditional sensationalist journalism dies the better.
In the future I suspect Facebook and Google will have the exact same problem.
Is this true? Have there been times when news was funded by other means than advertising?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/startin...
We have hit a paradox in news publication. If we let everyone disseminate the news, we end up with Lord of the Flies esque cults surrounding every rumor. If we only allowed figures of authority to disseminate the news, we'll never know if a story was intentionally buried or misrepresented. There's no easy answer here. This is human nature.
[1] https://www.scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-pro...
There needs to be a single store, or repository of it all. Until that happens, news is just a "peek" at something, which will inevitably include bias.
1.) Is what's reported actually true? 2.) Is what's reported only half the truth so as to advance a prescribed narrative?
As for pushing a narrative, that is a form of bias that can be eliminated in the main by extracting the facts from articles. Consider two articles, one in the New York Times ("Trump's Florida rally shows he is unfit to lead" and in Breitbart ("Trump's Florida rally show's he is the best person to lead our country"). While both of these are highly partisan, the fact remains the same: Trump has a rally in Florida.
That said, our tools aren't perfect, but we can build on them.
I wonder if there's some way to come up with content quality metrics for news based on pure reporting of as many of the facts available. Maybe something similar to the stack exchange type system.
I stopped reading here since the author obviously doesn't know what he/she is talking about and didn't bother looking it up.
> Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.
I don't know if it's accurate, but New York Times citing an analyst at a major financial services firm seems more credible than user "cerved" on Hacker News. Do you have better information?
One proclaims that two companies take 85% of all online ad revenue, the other 85% of the growth in one quarter. So the first problem is the reference to the source is incorrect.
The other is the assumption that only news orgs and Google and Facebook are the ones taking a part of the pie. Disregarding the other hundreds of companies that are a part of the online advertising ecosystem as well as other types of publishers.
I would assert that the Atlantic misquoting a quote from the New York Times, which is a quote from a note a Morgan Stanley analyst wrote to clients the 7th of April 2016 is in and of itself not credible.
I don't know the real figures but one could calculate this by estimating global ad spend in 2016, take Google and Facebooks ad revenue minus the cost of revenue, ie money spend on buying ads from publishers (ie. news organisations etc), and compare that to other actors.
Bottom line, I refer to my previous point that the author doesn't know what he/she is talking about.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-an...
Now advertisers can track the last red cent. Thank you, W3C. Well done, even if that wasn't the intention.
(Beware answered prayers, etc., etc.)
The Register had some recent bits on this ("what part of advertising is wasted? All of it" is my recollection of the headline), and I've been kicking around this topic for a while.
Without understanding the real problem, any proposed solution will be lacking.
The term "journalism" itself dates from 1821. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=journalism
The US mass newspaper industry dates from the mid-1800s. Yes, there were earlier instances of things called "newspapers", and some advertisements, and some magazines, and other means of distributing news. But none of these really jive with our current use of the terms.
Specific advances in economics and technology in particular drove the change. From the absolutely fascinating (and, warning: massive time-sink) History of Information:
Economic & Technological Advances Spur the Development of Newspapers in the U.S. (Circa 1800 – 1840)
http://historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4792
Dates and qualifications are numerous and various, and there's plenty of room for argument. But if the discussion is of a daily publication distributed on the events of the day, widely read through the general population, and supported through commercial means, then you require 1) high-speed communications (telegraph, phone, or better), 2) high-speed presses (steam, diesel, or electric drive), 3) iron or steel framed presses (for speed and durability), 4) distribution (intra- or inter-city, meaning posts or better), 5) manufacturing and distribution capable of supporting advertising-promoted wares, and the real biggie, 6) general literacy within the population.
None of these existed prior to 1800. Generally, full flourishing didn't occur until roughly 1880, though the pieces were falling in place before then.
For much of the 19th century, newspapers were largely party-run, not-for-profit. Prior to 1800, newspapers as we know them really didn't exist. Pamphlets were the typical mechanism through about 1500. Before that, "mass media" usually meant "the Church", in Europe.
Hamilton Holt, a magazine publisher himself, gave a view of the commercial periodicals business in a 1909 lecture at the University of California, "Commercialism and Journalism". He leads with a statistical account of the growth of the publishing industry from 1850 to 1905, in revenues, circulation, publications, and more. Much of the piece looks at the influence of advertising-driven interests on what is covered in publications.
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
From Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, an interesting statistic: the fall in newspaper subscriptions, measured in terms of subscriptions per household, has fallen at a nearly constant rate since the 1950s. The decline in newspaper journalism is a very long-term secular trend.
I'd also strongly recommend David Simon's "The Audacity of Despair", a 70 minute lecture at UC Berkeley. Warning: Simon is not a great speaker, and yes, this is long, but he makes some exceptionally good and cogent points. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw
Another useful resource is "Introduction to Communication Science" by MOOC ICS, a fast-paced but solid introduction to the field of communication science. The segments are brief but well-produced and relevant.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is very strongly recommended on this topic. http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...
Her paper, "Some Conjectures about the Impace of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report" (1968) covers much of the ground though in far less detail, it's a good overview to her subsequent life's work. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/240164?jour... (Full text available via http://sci-hub.cc)
The History of Information has a topic covering journalism including to earlier dates. The premise Lauren makes of a commercial practice of journalism prior to 1800 is very poorly supported. There's some argument which can be tenuously made to claims of "newspapers" in the 1700s or 1600s, but they're a long cry from what we see today, and were not generally read.
http://historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?category=News+M...
How do "we," as a society, function and thrive when there are people like those leading the BLM movement, who are willing to seize on fake news, and create entire polemical fictions, well aware of their specious basis, trying to extract what personal benefit they can from the situation until the truth comes to light?