Media trust hits new low

A knowledge of history, unedited video footage of actual events, common sense, scepticism (of everyone, not just the 'enemy').

I've talked to reasonably intelligent programmers who got upset at a politicians speech they'd never heard. All they did was read a paraphrase of it from their favourite media outlet (who happened to be ill-disposed towards said politician).

A lot of the `events` of 2020-2021 were captured on unedited video. Few people I've talked to bothered to watch it. They relied on journalists. Didn't stop them forming a strong opinion though.

And without a knowledge of history (and mine is admittedly basic), you have zero context.

People trust repeated liers all the time. And truth telling institutions are rarely most trusted popular ones.

If you aren't a mainstream politician, you literally have to buy ads to get coverage. Outside of politics it works this way as well. Heck, just look at games journalism.

News channels also hate absolutely anything that takes attention away from their content and their advertisers. Thus video games, dungeons & dragons, religion or anything else that holds the attention of masses of people are to be branded as societal evils.

The best thing that literally everyone can do is stop watching and focus on what's important in your life. Build the community around you.

In order to be effective news source, you need to separate truth and opinion. Reporting stories even if they're uncomfortable for their own customer base goes directly against their business interest (revenue, clickrate, etc.). So echo chambers get louder. Trust is earned by consistently confronting difficult facts.

This sort of thing seems to have, however, somewhat broken down in recently years. At a minimum I think most people would say these networks are at least smaller and more insular than they were in the past.

If it's all in good faith, this might not be so terrible. If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.

Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.

But if it's all in good faith it's possible to read this as not Orwellian at all, but rather more informing a section of the community that there is something they can do for the community, and then asking them to do it.