I know this isn't simple. However, there are things that are simple. Things like taking statements out of context or editing videos/audio to distort what was said to fit a narrative.
What I would like to see are articles with a full list of references and sources for the reader to dig into. In other words, if you can't provide backup for your claims, don't publish it. The TV equivalent for that would be a process through which viewers could access sources via an easy to use link to the TV network's website.
In other words, we ought to demand more from the press. We have the technology to deliver more. Lies and distortion should not be tolerated. The rule should be something like: If you can't confirm your claims and back them up with evidence, don't say or print them.
The other side of that would be that it would be OK to print and broadcast opinion (which can be unverified, even lies) with a clearly visible disclaimer. This could be like the equivalent of the disclaimers in cigarette packs, something like "THIS INFORMATION IS NOT VERIFIED AND COULD BE 100% INACCURATE" at the start and end of every article and prominently displayed on video.
Probably a bunch of silly ideas. I'll admit that having been the subject of libel has made me sensitive to just how destructive this can be. People without this experience tend to discount the lies the press/media float every minute of every day as unimportant. It isn't, but convincing the masses they should demand and somehow require better is a nearly impossible task.
The problem is the first word: "we". Who is "we"? Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
> Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
Agreed. Absolutely correct.
Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?
> Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?
Why do you think education is the solution to this problem? Education by whom? Trying to answer that question just creates the same problem we have now. (In fact, if you look at how public education works, and what the explicitly stated objectives were of the people who created that system, education is the same problem we have now. The media is just another branch of the education system.)
When I went to high school --in a third world country-- I studied logic, philosophy, read the Greeks, learned and practiced how to take apart and understand arguments and, generally speaking, learned about things that have escaped US-based educations for decades (I also attended elementary and high school in the US...it's a long complicated story of a family moving around too much). A simple example of this was that I could draw and name all of the capitals of every nation in the world on a blank map of the world (literally, the perimeters of each continent and nothing else on the map. The same for major mountain ranges, peaks and rivers.
The point isn't that finding Aconcagua and Everest on a blank map of the world prepares you for life. The point is to say that our 18 year old leave school without any real marketable skills, unable to think and analyze arguments, engage in real critical thinking and are utterly ignorant about almost everything outside their home town, not to mention the world.
It should come as no surprise that professional manipulators are able to do as they please with an audience steeped in ignorance and unable to exercise critical thinking. The simplest example I have of this is the unimaginable, unthinkable reality to anyone who has lived in any one of, say, two dozen countries, that you have US universities and US college students and graduates actually believing that Marxism, Socialism and Communism are good things. I mean, I can't think of anything more ignorant than that very, very real condition in US education.
It is laughable beyond description to anyone who has lived in almost any country south of the US border, a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe and a bunch of other countries in Africa and Asia.
And yet the young in the US are graduating from high school without skills in logic and critical thinking and then enter college to be pumped with precisely what millions of people who emigrate to the US or aspire to emigrate to the US are escaping.
If that's not the foundation for disastrous results I don't know what is. And it is all centered around a horrible derailment of our system of education.
I know this isn't simple. However, there are things that are simple. Things like taking statements out of context or editing videos/audio to distort what was said to fit a narrative.
What I would like to see are articles with a full list of references and sources for the reader to dig into. In other words, if you can't provide backup for your claims, don't publish it. The TV equivalent for that would be a process through which viewers could access sources via an easy to use link to the TV network's website.
In other words, we ought to demand more from the press. We have the technology to deliver more. Lies and distortion should not be tolerated. The rule should be something like: If you can't confirm your claims and back them up with evidence, don't say or print them.
The other side of that would be that it would be OK to print and broadcast opinion (which can be unverified, even lies) with a clearly visible disclaimer. This could be like the equivalent of the disclaimers in cigarette packs, something like "THIS INFORMATION IS NOT VERIFIED AND COULD BE 100% INACCURATE" at the start and end of every article and prominently displayed on video.
Probably a bunch of silly ideas. I'll admit that having been the subject of libel has made me sensitive to just how destructive this can be. People without this experience tend to discount the lies the press/media float every minute of every day as unimportant. It isn't, but convincing the masses they should demand and somehow require better is a nearly impossible task.