Ironic that all journalists got the Iraq war wrong without the need for fake news.
We don't need real journalists, we need a way to pay for news that makes accurate reporting profitable.
We don't need real journalists, we need a way to pay for news that makes accurate reporting profitable.
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.
I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.
Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.
Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.
Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?