[tnones]

Despite their protestations, I get the feeling that journalists are some of the most prolific consumers of social media, using it more and more as a source for their scoops and discussion topics. If so, it seems pretty disingenuous for them to blame the readership for what they click on, when they themselves seem unable to turn away and go find some real material.

The griping about the overuse of "fake news" displays a lack of self-awareness too. It isn't just Alex Jones adherents who call the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC fake news. All these major outlets have been caught with their pants down posting untruths, often with an obvious political agenda masked with under the thinnest veneer of objectivity. Corrections and retractions are lost in the maelstrom of the attention economy, and opinion pieces compete on equal footing with 'real' reporting, as the front page is no longer the main source of traffic. The response to the obvious and baited ire from the readership is to double down, censor any comments that contradict the story as being uncivil and harassing, and get ever more offended the plebs aren't eating up what you're serving, seeking out alternate sources in their 'ignorance'.

Respect and credibility are earned, not given. If contemporary journalists want to raise the bar and bring their audience back to them, the solution isn't a war on information, it's a war on their own delusions of grandeur and their inability to step aside to let real domain experts speak. Those who are in it for the job rather than the agenda and attention left the scene long ago, and Gell Mann amnesia remains as true as ever.