|
|
|
|
|
|
by Asooka
3381 days ago
|
|
|
And how the hell do you "hold accountable" a traditional old media? They are big powerful conglomerates that are only really accountable to the politicians that pay their salaries, the few cents you give them by buying the paper is a drop in the ocean. At least with FaceBook you're on a level playing field with everyone else that's posting shit, and there are a LOT of people posting, so you have more freedom to pick your sources based on their objective truth or any other metric you care about. And if you don't want to hear the truth, you won't be reading the Washington Whatsit, you'll be reading the Daily Mail in the first place. |
|
|
If you think the Washington Post is publishing bad, pointless nonsense news, you stop reading it. Cancel your subscription. Don't buy a copy at a newsstand. Don't buy ads for your local business. Don't place classified ads (remember those?). Tune it out.
Subscriber count will drop. The rate card will list a lower readership and ad rates will go down. The newspaper will lose revenue. It will lay off staff and implode.
"Traditional old news" was all published together in a big bundle of paper and if it was bad quality stuff you would stop reading the whole thing. That was how you held it accountable -- you stopped paying attention to junk.
This has certainly happened -- remember News of the World? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World) Certainly everyone in Liverpool remembers The Sun. Traditionally, newspapers which did bad journalism and just printed crap shaped up or they closed down.
With the advent of Facebook News Feed driven news it's harder to punish a bad source. A typical News Feed post shows me, in order, (1) the name of the friend who shared it (2) some text they wrote about it (3) a photo (4) the headline (5) some text from the article and finally (6) the actual source of the news. I have to deliberately choose to ignore or distrust stuff based on the source -- and that's after I have read the material. I had no choice in terms of, not even picking up a newspaper in the first place.
In the 2000s it was easy for me not to read the Epoch Times (the Falun Gong newspaper printed in the New York area and distributed throughout the US) and when I did read articles in it I knew that I was reading something printed by a Falun Gong mouthpiece organization. In the 2010s it is hard for me not to see videos made by Russia Today (a fascinating, viral news organization with a heavy Web presence); it's pretty common for me to see rt.com content in my various social news feeds and I incur a bunch of extra cognitive load to remember the biases that that newsgathering organization brings to the table.