How to Beat Fake News

Table of Contents

1.
2. Media is Owned by 6 Corporations
3. Confirmation Bias
4. Conclusion: ESG: Regulate The Media

1. Intro:

5. In another study researchers examined the effect of exposure to wholly fictional, unbelievable news headlines. Rather than cultivate detached skepticism, as proponents of iterative journalism would like, it turn out that the more unbelievable headlines and articles readers are exposed to, the more it warps their compass — making the real seem fake and the fake seem real. The more extreme a headline, the longer participants spend processing it, and the more likely they are to believe it. The more times an unbelievable claim is seem, the more likely they are to believe it.

6. On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters circulated more junk news than any other political group in the sample. And a 2018 Politico analysis found that voters in so-called news deserts — places with low numbers of news subscribers — went for Trump in greater numbers than voters in places where independent media could check his assertions.

7. It’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN.

8. A 2020 study by the Colorado University found that people on the far right or left are most likely to share fake news.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/junky-tv-is-actually-making-people-dumber-and-more-likely-to-support-populist-politicians/

9. The least informed people in the US are those who get their information from partisan cable news cites.

• In one study [studies], political scientist Shanto Iyengar asked subjects to rank how important issues like pollution, inflation, and defense were to them. Lyengar found that, “Participants exposed to a steady stream of news about defense or about pollution came to believe that defense or pollution were more consequential problems.” For example, those who saw clips on pollution changed their ranking from 5 out of 6 to 2nd.
• In another study done in 1977 by Hasher and Goldstein, participants were asked to read sixty statements and mark whether they were true or false. All of the statements were plausible, but some of them — such as “French horn players get cash bonuses to stay in the Army” — were true, while others — “Divorce is only found in technically advanced societies” — weren’t.
• Two weeks later, the participants returned and rated a second batch of statements in which some of the items from the first list had been repeated. By the third batch, another two weeks later, the subjects were far more likely to believe the repeated statements. Meaning, with information, as with food, we are what we consume.
  “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.” — ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
• *Irony can become a kind of gateway drug. A troll may be more receptive to serious white supremacist claims after using ethnic slurs ‘ironically’ for two or three months.
  *The Daily Stormer provides suggestions like “Always blame the Jews for everything,” approved lists of racial slurs, and this chilling tip on using humor: “The tone of the site should be light.
  *“The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the author of the style guide advised. “There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists.

Bias

Most outlets present themselves as fair and unbiased. However, when there’s a shooting in a mostly white country or a white part of town, the whole world stops, watches and listens. But when, there’s trouble in a non-white part of town, a non-white country or concerning non-white races, hardly any media covers them. If they do get covered, it’s a small story.

When the 2015 Paris bombings happened, the day before 40 people died in Beirut — compared to 130 that died in Paris. But hardly anyone knows that. While the whole world was “Praying For Paris,” no one was praying for Beirut.

Some news outlets omit important issues. Others have a bias towards a political party, a particular foreign policy, or towards a corporation. In short, they report only things that mostly support their agenda.

Others like to take things out of context and blow them up for their own political agenda. They’ll frame stories as controversial even when there’s no controversy! They do this because controversy gets clicks. This is called the negative bias (which I’ll get to in a bit).

Are all examples of biases because of evil journalists?

No, many are caused by a lack of time or just plain sloppiness. For example, a magazine might decide to do a special report on education and find out that many more universities are interested in buying ads than had been expected. That might push the editor to run stories that aren’t really that interesting or that important.

• Do journalists really mean to give us a distorted picture? Do not demonize journalists: they have the same mega misconceptions as everyone else. Resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately.)
• I’m not saying we can’t trust the news corporations. I’m not saying the media is 100% false. I’m saying the media isn’t 100% true. I’m saying conduct your own research and use your intelligence.
• If we want education the old time-tested advice remains true, we must read books. In fact, without a foundation based on books, we’re letting people and corporations brainwash us.
• It’s us that decides as a group with millions of clicks who and what is shown. It’s us that votes for the charlatan instead of the scientist. It’s us — and the charlatans and the press — who are responsible for dumbing us down. As TV, Netflix, and news grows, reason is being pushed to the side.

Balance

• Journalists confuse balance with truth-telling.
• I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.
• I believe in being truthful, not neutral.
• “Global warming, where 99.9% of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.”
• The FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine 30 years ago, which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues.

Opinion

On top of that, not all news outlets do a great job of labeling opinion. Cable television has blurred the lines between fact and opinion. They lace their news with opinion, largely from commentators and talk show hosts, with only some of them expert on their topic. A morning show host, for instance, can shift in a heartbeat from giving the news to commenting on it.

This blurring line between reporting and opinion makes it difficult to understand the world and leads a lot of us to believe that all news is just opinion. People don’t make much of a distinction between a New York Times article and a random blogger’s article anymore.

If journalist takes sides on the issue, people won’t listen to a journalist they disagree with. Personally, I believe a good article includes both fact and opinion: Opinion to spark the consumers’ interest and thought processes and facts to validate it.
*What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing — misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren’t fact, they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren’t opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn’t information, it’s just hastily assembled symbols.
After showing subjects a fake news article, half of the participants were provided with a correction at the bottom discrediting a central claim in the article — just like one you might see at the bottom of a blog post. The subjects were then asked to rate their beliefs about the claims in the article. Those who saw the correction were, in fact, more likely to believe the initial claim than those who did not. And they held this belief more confidently than their peers. In other words, corrections not only don’t fix the error — they backfire and make misperception worse.

Are news outlets still needed?

So, if news outlets are the problems, why don’t we just read from independent bloggers and watch independent YouTube Channels?

Newspapers still play an important part. Blogs remain incredibly reliant on the big newspapers. A 2010 study by Pew Research showed that, 99% of the stories linked to in blog posts came from newspapers and broadcast networks.

Who will do big investigative projects, backed by deep pockets and the ability to pay expensive lawyers when powerful interests try to punish those who exposed them? Who would have exposed the Watergate crimes in the absence of powerful publishers, especially The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, who had the financial and moral fortitude to stand up to Richard Nixon and his henchmen. Who would have broken the Pentagon Papers or that Catholic priests were molesting children?

News outlets and the public are on the same side. A free press is supposed to function as democracy’s immune system holding politicians to account and exposing lies. Newspapers protect the public against lying corporations and lying governments. As Justice Hugo Black said

The press was protected so that it could get the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in gov. And paramount amount the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any past of the government from deceiving, the people.

Gerald Cromer (a sociologist) once noted that the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper. Oscar Wilde said it better: “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the choice of newspapers or government, he’d take the newspapers. He said, “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press. And that cannot be limited without being lost.” As much as he thought a free press was important for democracy, he also hated newspapers as can be seen here and here.

However, a lot of times, it doesn’t work that way today. Sometimes, it’s not the media and the public that’s on the same team. It’s the media and corporation.
*News is the first attempt to write history.
*Voters’ growing ignorance about issues made it easier than ever to play to voters’ fears and resentments by promoting sticky, viral narratives that served up alternate realities.
*Propaganda isn’t only dividing Americans but it’s demonizing one party against the other. Both say the other side is destroying our country. Sensationalism spreads.
*Controversy hold’s people’s attention.
*I cannot imagine a world in which I turn on the evening news, and the lead story is about somebody helping their new neighbor move into their house. That would send the message that this act of kindness happens so rarely that it is worth dispatching a camera and reporter to tell the story; so rare in fact that it takes priority over someone being killed. That is the day I give up on humanity, and just play golf the rest of my life.
*“You can’t possibly realize how limited your bubble is from inside of it.” -Mark Kingwell

How To Detect Fake News (16 Tips)

With fake news spreading since the 2008 election (Obama is a Muslim), the modern digital news consumer is forced be able to spot fake news, know what’s real and how to verify news. It’s essential for us to be critical news readers. Being more news literate saves you time and money.

We now have to read the news like fact-checkers. Today, knowing what’s real and how to verify news and information is essential. As Walter Lippman said, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

How to detect fake news:

1. Are you familiar with the website? Is it a known and legitimate website? Has it been reliable in the past? What has the site posted in the past?
2. Pay attention to the domain and URL. Fake sites often end with “.co” or even “.com.co”.
3. When was the latest article written?
4. Does the article have a date?
5. Is the title in all caps?
6. Is the story being reported by other reputable media outlets? Compare the different articles on the same topic, and search for bias by omission.
7. Are there significant misspellings?
8. Are there sources, quotes, references and evidence? Are there links? Do they work? Click the links. If they lead to raw legit information, that’s good. (Remember Carl Sagan’s quote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”) So, always ask, “Says who?” In other words, just as you don’t take candy from strangers, don’t take information from strangers.
9. Does the evidence in the article actually support the headline? Or was it click-bait? Fake news’ headlines often will be written in exaggerated language and then attached to stories that are about a completely different topic or just not true.
10. Is there a lot of pop-ups and banner ads?
11. Is there an “About” page? What does it say? You want to see who the leadership is (with contact information), the mission, the ethics statement. The language here should be straightforward. If it’s melodramatic and seems overblown, you should be skeptical. Also, you should be able to find out more information about the organization’s leaders in places other than that site.
12. We tell children not to take candy from strangers. Well, don’t take information from strangers. Who is responsible for the story? Is the writer clearly identifiable with contact information? Is it a well-known journalist or news outlet?
13. Check if fact-checking websites like Snopes.com or FactCheck.org have investigated the information, or just type the claim into a Google search and add the word ‘hoax.’
14. Google the sites name and the word “fake” and see what comes up.
15. Dismiss “according to a tipster” or “we’re hearing reports.”
16. Approach any news outlet that makes you angry or afraid with a healthy dose of critical thinking.

• You want sources who are Independent, multiple, verify, authoritative/informed, named = IMVAIN
• With an anonymous source: we need transparency, characterization and corroboration. Transparency = the reports tells the reader why the source is anonymous. Characterization = in what way the source in a position to know what they say they know. “high-ranking military official, ex-employee, eyewitness” are used. The anonymous source shouldn’t be the only one making a claim, there should be others preferably named ones. Be skeptical of claims given by a single anonymous source.
• Evaluate the sources. If anonymous, the story should give an explanation to why they aren’t named.
• Look for missing key information: hat happened, where did it happened, how did it happened? Who is involved? Why did it happened. 5 and 1 H. ( give Syria example) We should find the answers to these in the article. If it’s missing, the reporter needs to say why.

Questions to ask yourself when consuming news:

1. What’s missing?
2. What more information do I need?
3. Is this true?

Beware of stories that come from people you trust: your friends and relatives.

Solution

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Where, then, shall we get our information from if not from the media? Who can we trust? How about experts? People who devote their working lives to understanding their chosen slice of the world? Well, turns out you have to be very careful here too.
*Interactive Media Bias Chart Public — Ad Fontes Media
*So if you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran.
*Decades of research shows that most people barely follow the news, and those who do are not easily swayed.

You must inform yourself. The only way to find the truth is by performing your own due diligence: cross-checking, verifying, researching, finding out if they’re telling the whole truth or omitting facts.

We shouldn’t consume news from the most popular news channels, we should consume news from the most accurate.

*So, what’s a consumer to do? How do we become media literate and get to the facts faster? Chose the right source
*https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2/
*AP and Reuters are actually news wires.
*Most mainstream news outlets are just partisan propaganda firms.
*A really good example of this is the coverage of the James Foley beheading by ISIS. Notice the difference in these two strategies. CBS relies only on the facts of the matter at hand, and what is known about it.
*Google News
“There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people’s fears and saying to them, ‘This is what you should be scared of, and here’s whose fault it is,’ and that’s what they get — two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, ‘Damn right. It’s those liberals’ fault,” says Keith Olbermann.
*I think both left and right bias is bad

• On the other hand, Fox starts to talk about immigrants and refugees, the 20,000 fighters with foreign passports, recruiting of US terrorists, and follows this theme.
  *I wouldn’t consume news every minute. You want the quality news, you don’t want the noise too.

We have to be precise, it’s not all media that’s bad. The conservative news is bad. These outlets are keeping people enclosed in a bubble.

• https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
  *https://www.journalism.org/2020/09/28/a-closer-look-at-the-channels-producing-news-on-youtube-and-the-videos-themselves/

As the former world chess champion and Russian pro-democracy leader Garry Kasparov tweeted in December 2016, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

“In the networked public sphere,” Tufekci writes, “the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.

This can be done, she notes, in a variety of ways: inundating audiences with information; producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus; delegitimizing media that provides accurate information; deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt; creating or claiming hoaxes; and “generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate.” climbing into different interest groups and manipulating them from inside.

The Media is Owned by 6 Corporations

Most of our newspapers, magazines and publishing houses are owned by giant international corporations. In 2018, Fortune magazine published an article headlined, “These 6 Companies Control Much of U.S. Media.” They are: AT&T, Comcast, Disney, 21st Century Fox, CBS and Viacom.
In the 1930s, Elmer Morgan, director of the National Committee on Education by radio, said, “With its radio broadcasting in the hands of money-changers, no nation can be free.”

Rupert Murdoch, by the way, owns 53% of News Corp and 10% of Fox Corp (his son Lachlan owns another 20%). However, what’s good for consumers isn’t necessarily good for citizens.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/28/americans-blame-unfair-news-coverage-on-media-outlets-not-the-journalists-who-work-for-them/
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/topics/media-and-news
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/

An Example of Personalization

All of us signal to social media (via our clicks) that we’re more interested in X stories. So, the algorithm materializes more of this agreeable, affirmative content. And if it’s not the algorithms doing this, it’s our friends. If our friends are more left-leaning, we’re likely to see their left-leaning posts/shares. This leads to massive confirmation bias.

I asked three friends to google the words “Biden”, “Trump” and “Climate change” for me. I did the same. Below are pictures of the search results.

Here are the results:

[table]

As you can see the results are very different. Even the number of results was different. Eric saw 871 million. And I saw 952 million. If the results were that different for three North American men imagine how different they would be for everyone else.

How does Personalization work?

Clicking on a link tells Google that we’re interested in this type of article and that we’re more likely to read this type of article in the future. So, Google shows us more of these articles in the future, which in turn primes us to search up more on that topic. And eventually, we’re trapped.

Facebook’s algorithm ranks with 2 main factors:

1. Affinity: The friendlier we are with someone — determined by the amount of time we spend interacting and checking out people’s profile — the more likely Facebook will show us that person’s updates. (The weight of content type. Relationship statuses are weighted very highly — everybody likes to know who’s dating whom.)
2. Time: Recently posted items are weighted over older ones.

In plain English, personalization is driving us toward an Adderall society where serendipity, discovery, and creativity are replaced by hyper-focus. Stripped of the surprise of unexpected events and associations, a perfectly filtered world leads us to less learning. This creases open-mindedness which makes us less creative.

As Stanford law professor, Ryan Calo said,

When technology’s job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens. That’s a powerful position. There are lots of ways for it to skew your perception of the world.”…In other words, if there’s no steady supply of trustworthy news then incompetence, corruption and disaster will arrive…A shallow citizenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an informed one.

*some of them to be biased, share misinformation and ultimately turn a lot of us into idiots.
*As Andrew Cline, professor of Journalism at Missouri State University said:

Television is an emotional medium. It doesn’t do reason well. This is entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse. Never employ a tightly reasoned argument where a flaming sound bite will do. The argument of the academic is sort of dull, but a good pissing match is fun to watch. To admit anything more complicated is to invite the suggestion that you may be wrong, and that can never be.

5. Confirmation Bias

Our news is filtered by which sites we visit (be it Fox News, CNN, or Reuters). It’s also filtered based on what pages we’ve liked, what our friends post and what our friends/family/co-workers discuss.

This filter creates confirmation bias, closed minds, and ultimately ignorance. And with enough iteration, this filter bubble pushes us to radical ideas and ideological isolation.

When I was 23, it was a short leap from libertarian/anarchist blogs to debating whether beating kids was justified violence. At that point, I knew I went too deep in the rabbit hole and there was something wrong with my thinking methodology.

We’re all prone to confirmation bias. We seek validation.Decades of studies show that most of us prefer information that feels true to our worldview even if it’s not true at all.

Warren Buffett defined confirmation bias as, “what the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

In a study conducted in 1954 by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, psychologists from Dartmouth and Princeton. They showed footage of a football game between the two college teams. It was a rough game. One quarterback had suffered a broken leg. Hastorf and Cantril asked their students to tally up the fouls and assess their severity. The Dartmouth students tended to overlook Dartmouth fouls but were quick to pick up on the sins of the Princeton players. The Princeton students, on the other hand, had the opposite inclination. They concluded that, despite being shown the same footage, the Dartmouth and Princeton students didn’t really see the same events. Each student had their own perception, closely shaped by their tribal loyalties. The title of the research paper was “They Saw a Game.”

We reject facts that threaten our sense of who we are and our worldview. We delete a huge amount of information to align ourselves with the way we think (or want to think). And once an opinion is formed, we consciously/subconsciously work to prove it right.

This desire to prove ourselves right and maintain our current beliefs can get us trapped in a worldview. This doesn’t help to move a country forward.

Philip Tetlock

Philip Tetlock, a political scientist, asked a variety of academics and pundits their predictions about the future in their areas of expertise: Would the Soviet Union fall in the next 10 years? In what year would the U.S. economy start growing again?

For ten years, Tetlock kept asking these questions. He asked not only experts but also people brought in from the street — plumbers and school teachers with no special expertise in politics or history.

When he finally compiled the results, he was surprised. It wasn’t just that the normal folks’ predictions beat the experts’. The experts’ predictions weren’t even close.

What does this mean? This means experts are especially vulnerable to confirmation bias.

To beat confirmation bias:

1. News wires
2. Follow these accounts on Twitter
3. Use Google News instead of Facebook and Twitter — which uses a lot of personalization.
4. Ask yourself, “Do I have any bias towards this information?”
5. Erase your web history and cookies regularly.

Psychologists Charlan Nemeth and Julianne Kwan discovered that bilinguals are more creative than monolinguals — perhaps because they have to get used to the proposition that things can be viewed in several different ways.

A 45-minutes of exposure to a different culture can boost creativity. When a group of American students was shown a slideshow about China as opposed to one about the United States, their scores on several creativity tests went up! As the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill said,

It’s hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.

In other words, the experiences we have when we come across new ideas, new people, and new cultures are powerful. They make us feel…human. In fact, serendipity is a shortcut not only to open minds but to joy.

Regulate The Media

Russian News Hack

In an impassioned essay, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, argued that the Russians’ manipulation of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms to try to shift the outcomes of the 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit referendum was just the tip of a huge iceberg: unless fundamental changes were made, he warned, those platforms were going to be manipulated again, and “the level of political discourse, already in the gutter, was going to get even worse.”

U.S. intelligence agencies also concluded that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were later provided to WikiLeaks.

These plots were all part of a concerted effort by the Kremlin, stepped up since Putin’s reelection in 2012, to use asymmetrical, nonmilitary means to achieve its goals of weakening the European Union and NATO and undermining faith in globalism and Western democratic liberalism.

Toward such ends, Russia has been supporting populist parties in Europe, like Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party in France, and has interfered in the elections of at least 19 European countries in recent years. It also continues to wage disinformation campaigns through state media outlets like Sputnik and RT.

Russia still uses propaganda

In the case of the American election, Facebook told Congress that Russian operatives published some eighty thousand posts on Facebook between June 2015 and August 2017 that might have been seen by 126 million Americans; that’s more than half the number of people registered to vote in the country. Some of the Russian posts actively tried to promote Trump or damage Clinton; others were simply meant to widen existing divisions in American society over issues like race, immigration, and gun rights.

And Twitter found that more than fifty thousand Russia-linked accounts on its platform were posting material about the 2016 election.

A report from Oxford University found that in the run-up to the election the number of links on Twitter to “Russian news stories, unverified or irrelevant links to WikiLeaks pages, or junk news” exceeded the number of links to professionally researched and published news. The report also found that “average levels of misinformation were higher in swing states” — like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia — than in uncontested states.

Russia already tried to meddle in elections in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, as well as the Brexit referendum in the UK.

St. Petersburg propaganda factory called the Internet Research Agency

The head of the Cyber Division at the Department of Homeland Security revealed that the Russians attempted to break into the election systems in twenty-one states during the 2016 election and successfully penetrated a few. And a computer security firm reported that the same Russian hackers who stole DNC emails in 2016 were targeting Senate accounts in the run-up to the 2018 midterms.

Regulate

Blogs have relinquished the burden of finding the truth up to readers. We assume that’s it’s our duty to sort through the garbage to find the occasional gem, to do their fact-checking for the blogs, to correct their mistakes and then call ourselves contributors, when actually we’re cogs. We never asked the critical question: If we have to do all the work, what are we paying you guys for?

Because bloggers and Youtubers must meet the demands of their audience, this comes to determine the news. An industry that sells information (bloggers and Youtubers) raises the possibility that entrepreneurs looking to make money will make up sensational news, invent stories, angle information that confirms their biases all to entertain their audience, get views and make money. In other words, content is fed to us as news. As Ryan Holiday said, “The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important — and more profitable — than the truth.”

When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals pressure politicians to resign and scuttle election bids or knock millions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about “how the story unfolded” unreality is the only word for it. It is, as Daniel Boorstin, author of 1962’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, put it, a “thicket.. .which stands between us and the facts of life.”

The problem with zero regulation is that because bloggers and news outlet want to make the more profit possible, they publish content that get the most clicks and most page views. This way they sell the most ads and make the most money.

Skepticism will never be enough to combat this. Not even enough to be a starting point.

Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes.” -Upton Sinclair

All press are still free. It’s the marketing platforms that pose a problem.

Technology is no more benevolent than a wrench or a screwdriver. It’s only good when people make it do good things and use it in good ways. Melvin Kranzberg, a professor who studies the history of technology, put it best nearly 30 years ago, and his statement is now known as Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral.”

Either as citizens or as a government, we have look out for fake news. Either we get social media do it once and for everyone or we each do it. The 1st solution saves everyone time and it’s an advantage for society.

What we need is an agency to oversee the use of personal information. The EU and most other industrial nations have this kind of oversight, but the United States has lingered behind, scattering responsibilities for protecting personal information among the Federal Trade Commission, the Commerce Department, and other agencies.

This new journalism seems cheaper, but it’s not. The costs have just been externalized, to the readers and the subjects of the stories, who write do millions each year in falsely damaged reputations and perceptions. Iterative journalism makes the news cheap to produce but expensive to read.

All aspects of our society suffer because of these economics.

• The advantage of a free press is diminished when anyone can claim to be an objective journalist.
• The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible — it is the heartbeat of democracy.
• What social media companies are doing to combat fake news:
• https://itmunch.com/tech-companies-control-spread-fake-news/
• https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/anti-misinformation-actions/
• https://www.loc.gov/law/help/fake-news/counter-fake-news.pdf
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/technology/government-disinformation-cyber-troops.html
• https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/
• How delighted would all the kings, czars and führers of the past be to know that…
  *Hitler would wish he had this unregulated media

Conclusion

There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

You now understand 5 important facts:

Unfortunately, journalists have become commoditized. Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. Most Journalists share the same skill sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. And this is a good thing. Either way AI is coming in.

• https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jan/24/as-huffpost-and-buzzfeed-shed-staff-has-the-digital-content-bubble-burst
• The big companies that own media are public. Check their financial statements.
• https://journalism.org/2020/07/30/americans-who-mainly-get-their-news-on-social-media-are-less-engaged-less-knowledgeable/
• https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/08/five-facts-about-fox-news/
• https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/newspapers/

Reporters must provide a compelling argument for why a source is anonymous
the wires (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg)
Trust in Media 2022: Where Americans get their news and who they trust for information | YouGov