>an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly. Disagreed. News never changed. It was always exactly like this. The Pulitzer award was created because journalists lied and caused an assassination and the spanish war. The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of profess…
> News never changed. It was always exactly like this. That's not true. Bias and agenda have always existed, but there was a time when news sources clearly distinguished facts from opinions. In the US the shift arguably happened in 1987 when the fairness doctrine was abolished, and for-profit media companies were given freedom to publish anything they wanted. The 24/7 news cycle was established, and news sources oper…
It's plausible that pre-1987 that journalism was better but I very much doubt it. There's tons of Vietnam war era journalism that was terribly bad.
>That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism?
Depends on your point of view. From government point of view it's terrible. If it's journalists being held accountable for their lies and agendas, way worse. These journalists will obviously hold anti-social media positions due to this.
But from the consumer of news point of view it's a fantastic improvement. Today i read an article about a 'prohibited night-vision' in Canada but there's literally no such thing in Canada. All night vision is legal in Canada.
>If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations.
That's how freedom of the press works correct. If you dont have moral and integrity, good luck getting an audience.
>There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive.
The government regulating the news is literally the opposite of freedom of the press.
>I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power.
So the government will revoke freedom of the press and license journalists? Just dont do that in my country, thanks.
>[1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?",
You want the government to license journalists. You want to make the government the arbiter of truth.