> how awful and terrible and threatening to democracy it is when Google and Facebook suddenly made it easy to be exposed to lots of alternative points of view on the same story
You are being sarcastic here but (imho) gossip, fake news, and echo chambers are really threatening democracy.
> I haven't seen much self reflection amongst journalists
The problem is that journalists are getting caught in a vicious circle. Either they present true news and have little viewers, or present gossip or echo what people want to hear and have lots of viewers.
Echo chambers? Would you lump existing media outlets into that bucket? I think if there's one thing that 2016 revealed very clearly it's the extent to which journalists tend to line up behind whatever the political elite groupthink is, regardless of how well it matches what the overall population thinks. The Guardian has become something of a joke paper - on the rare occasions these days that they open the comments the top rated comments are mostly giving them flak over the wildly extreme positions their journalists take.
How would we resolve this dispute? I don't think my views are extreme, nor does opinion polling indicate that they are.
I regularly read papers across the political spectrum: The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Daily Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, and often stories from the New York Times and the Washington Post (I like news). That seems like a pretty broad reach. I don't think it's an echo chamber.
I also use Google News a lot. That throws up a pretty random selection of sources on whatever the topics of the day are.
The Guardian regularly runs articles by authors like these:
In Brexit Britain, being a foreigner marks me out as evil
Why the mediocre male's days may be numbered
After Brexit, a game plan for the EU: unleash Project Pain: Nobody wants to be vindictive, but maximum political and economic damage would stop other arsonists.
Hey, misogynist killjoys: stop denying that Hillary has made history
Why we need to lose biased words like 'mistress' for good
and from others there:
The far right tell us kindness is weakness. We can’t give in to that: Urging people to be something as squishy as ‘kind’ may seem childish. But compassion is a revolutionary tool that can steer people away from bigotry
The US will no longer feel like a haven for Jews under Trump
A win for Trump was a win for bigotry. Here’s how we resist him
I have no hesitation at all in describing these as extreme views, but these were just a random selection of headlines I pulled from their website in 90 seconds.
That's why we should avoid labels such as "extremist", "radical", "fringe" - they are deeply subjective.
Fun fact: Austria' Freedom Party's (invariably labeled as "fringe") presidential candidate came close to winning the election a few months ago. If you get close to 50% of all votes, you are not exactly fringe, are you?
> The problem is that journalists are getting caught in a vicious circle. Either they present true news and have little viewers, or present gossip or echo what people want to hear and have lots of viewers.
I think the problem lies in that the assumption that investigative journalism, of the kind that is vital to democracy, must be profitable. But why would that be the case? And if it cannot be profitable, should we not institute good journalism as a matter of public policy?
In other words, let's return PBS and NPR to their former funding levels, when they could afford to have actual journalists and newsrooms and operate somewhat independently of the market.
How to make people care about the truth is a matter for another discussion (and certainly not a problem in Facebook's charter).
You are being sarcastic here but (imho) gossip, fake news, and echo chambers are really threatening democracy.
> I haven't seen much self reflection amongst journalists
The problem is that journalists are getting caught in a vicious circle. Either they present true news and have little viewers, or present gossip or echo what people want to hear and have lots of viewers.