RE: Welcome to the Disinformation Age!
Hiya
This was a really well-written, comprehensive article. Well done!
Be mindful not to fall into the trap of quickly accepting things that validate your previously held beliefs.
Perfect. I totally subscribe to that way of life.
If a fact is supported in most write-ups, great! It's probably accurate.
What if all those various sources are owned by the same Rupert Murdoch (for example)?
I don't agree about centralising news outlets. The media has been known to be complicit in many cover-ups and to bury important news that may damage its sponsors. I'd rather take my chances in a decentralised platform and appraise the information critically. I don't subscribe to the appeal to authority argument. Journalists are trained to do what they do, then they're employed to do that to help make their bosses (and their owners) profit. It just depends upon who's holding the steering wheel.
That was a really interesting read. Keep it coming.
Cheers
Anj :)
Thanks for the feedback!
I guess I should have stressed more there that you need to have a diversity of sources that includes different angles. I also think we need to treat opinion and facts different when we're reading the news and recognize when people are stating opions as facts. Media congolerates are a problem, it's often hard to know when sources are actually different and the business of media does play a role in reporting. I think however people see these flaws and decide to throw it all out rather than just understand it's another layer you have to read through. Having a profit motive and a journalistic motive are not mutally exclusive. Independent journalism couldn't exist if there wasn't a business to be created doing it. What decentralization lacks is accountability. Being independent allows you to report on whatever you want, sure. But it is far from a gaurantee that the infromation is accurate or unbaised. In fact, smaller outfits are probably more likely to be baised because they literally exist because someone doesn't think that the right story is beign told and now have to justify their own existance.
This isn't an appeal to authority, it's a recognition that in general experts and professionals do actually know more than the average citizen about a topic. 88% of economists polled said Brexit was a bad idea. Yet somehow 52% of the UK voted for Brexit. Sure, experts are sometimes wrong, but they are more likely to be right with their 20 years of study on an issue than Joe Schmoe with 2 hours of furious googling.
To put things another way, Game Theory says that choices do not lead directly to an outcome but a probabity of outcomes. A choice leading to a negative outcome was not necessarily the wrong choice. If I have to chose to take the word of the Wall Street Journal (conservative but journalistically rigorous) or DailyKOS (Liberal but not early as reputable), I'm going with WSJ and I can more or less gaurantee they'll be right more often.