Okay, you hear me talking "trust is the new black" and that power and influence will shift dramatically to the people and groups with the best reputations and largest networks. The power and influence landscape in 2020 will look very different from now.
I feel this applies to media, and that the media landscape at that point will reflect those flows of power and influence. Among news organizations, the successful survivors will be the ones that build a culture of trust, largely by checking facts, and not tolerating disinformation.
The good news is that we already see the first signs.
You might already know that Jon Stewart is probably the most trusted newsman in the US. His team does a lot of investigative work and a lot of fact checking, trying to keep reporting honest. (Check out this great piece and this one.)
Recently Jay Rosen suggested a dramatic step forward toward restoring trust in news. He suggested that guests, particularly political types, get fact-checked, in My Simple Fix for the Messed Up Sunday Shows. Check out good reaction in 'This Week' Is Adding Online Fact Checks
Jake Tapper from ABC "This Week" gets a lot of credit for getting this started. Politifact is doing the fact checking, though I suspect they take statements too literally. (As a nerd, that's my problem and my turf.) Let's not forget that FactCheck.org does great work along these lines.
Anyway, pretty good start, would like to see more of that.
What seems odd to me is that one newsman feels no need to fact check, and I know the guy is smart and well-connected, and knows when he's being lied to. If so, is he complicit?
I've wondered about this also, particularly when I see something like a TV news guest that sure seems to be, say, bearing false witness. I've spoken with a lot of reporters, they tell me they know when a guest isn't quite honest, but aren't allowed to challenge that kind of thing.
Arianna Huffington made a similar suggestion, a tougher version. When it comes to live events, let's do real-time fact checking.
Turns out, Sunlight Foundation, which is a really big deal regarding government accountability, did real-time fact checking for the health care summit, very successfully.
How do we create the expectation for fact checking?
Thinking ...
Follow Craig Newmark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/craignewmark
Mark yesterday, April 22, 2010, in the history book. It was the day American Democracy discovered the DVR. The Senate Democratic leadership found the cajones, via a video montage, to say to the Republicans: "You Lie!"
The way forward is to take part of what you advocate, and part of sustainable culture, and start to actually remove power from the combine. Smaller, rural communities that can stand up for their geography, not just their idealogy. Lifestyles that don't perpetuate the concentration of power, but rather aggregate in our own, honest-to-goodness daily lives.
You can't have an eye on your retirement fund and not finally go along with whatever keeps that wealth/power near. Personal moral decisions will steer the debate, yes, just not only those of the consituent media powers. That's trickle-down morality.
Where have all the real journalists gone to?....the ones who ask real questions and do not accept bull....they challenge, they investigate, they do their homework...
Now were left with TV personalities who allow the corporate mantra to be spewed all over the airwaves and they are like bobble heads, nodding away......
And if journalists held sway on TV news shows, fact checking would get done, believe it.
Tragically, journalists do not hold sway on American TV news shows.
Journalists -- both behind the camera and in front of it -- were let go years ago in favor of script writers behind the scenes and actors and actresses in front of the camera. And scriptwriters and entertainers just are not up to the task of fact checking. For them, it's not at all about FACTS; it's all about THE SHOW.
Now, if the actors and actresses playing the role of journalists on our TV news shows were backed up by staffs of seasoned journalists gathering and writing the news, that would be something else again. Will that happen? Don't hold your breath.
There's no business like show business. Especially in the Good Ol' U.S. of A.
Dave Beck anyone?
Get it?
In a nation where FOX "News" has the big ratings, you think Truth is going to turn enough of a profit to become dominant in the marketplace?
Dream on.
FactCheck goes with President Obama on this one. Good try Luntz and McConnell.
http://factcheck.org/2010/04/the-bailout-bill/
Not only should facts be checked, but more of what we read should contain them.
Really, it's so easy to hyperlink. In the meatime, I'll trust Stewart to do all that hard work of factchecking the public tv record.
We exchanged emails on the trust issue a couple of weeks ago. Below is a link to my lengthy blog post on the topic and specific references to facebook and google buzz policy changes. In regard to my description of Craigslist.com as "a hotbed for anti-social behavior" it was not meant to be a commentary on you or your product as much as how we as a society choose to use the media platforms made available to us.
It would appear that the latest government regulations are heading towards holding Internet Service Provider industry as the responsible parties for issues such as copyright, etc. I guess that will mean that ISP's will be the next oligopoly because who else would be able to afford the legal requirements. It should play nicely into Google's municipal broadband play. Guess we'll be living in a Google/Verizon/AT&T world.
Here's a link to the blog on trust titled "Trust and the Trillion Dollar Brain."
http://tradewithdave.com/?p=261
Kind Regards,
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
I formerly subscribed to "The Economist" to get an impartial European view of our political discourse. But along the way, even that publication has seemed to bend towards commercialization of its U.S. editions. probably like many others. We do watch the BBC News often to try to get more impartial coverage.
The irony is that, despite what we see as a difficult media climate, we're better off than a large share of the population of the rest of the globe. And that's far more discouraging.
I was living in Asia in the run-up to the Iraq attack by bush&co ... the papers there were right on about debunking Colin Powell's speech to the UN within 2 or 3 days. They didn't use 'quotes' as 'news' but rather, comments by politicians are fact checked and then shown to be correct, or false. NOBODY there that I ever spoke with believed the WMD story, because it had been debunked early on.
The British Press was not afraid to challenge Blair either ..... they published the DOwning Street memos ..... Most of Europe didn't join the 'coalition of the willing' because most of Europe didn't buy into the bush/cheney lies.
Some parts of the world are not well served by their media, no doubt about that ... and that is the part of the world that the USA belongs in.
Right now there are plenty of fact checkers, but they too in-fight.. Take 'Accuracy in Media' that checks the liberal biased news and 'Media Matters' that goes after the conservatives, for example.
At the end of the day aren't we all biased to what we believe is the truth?
objectism is something else.
Day care is expensive. Constant care more so. A large part of that is telling people what they want to hear. You keep clicking your heels and repeat "there's no place like home".
I am convinced that the only way to counter the outrageous lies that spew forth today is to refute them. Not, necessarily by screaming back, 'You lie!", but by calm and persistent rebuttal.
I have begun to see a little of this from the White House. I hope it continues.
One thing that bugs me, though. If you want to rub your opponents' noses in their lies, then you should take extra care not to propagate your own...
..as in, "He who lives in a glass house, should not throw stones."
One of the very most self-destructive features of right wing lying is their wildly over the top self-righteousness. When the truth finally emerges, all credibility dissipates.
So, the same thing apples to all of us. If we want to call out others' lies, then we had better fact-check ourselves first!
If we will do that, everyone will be better off.
In the long term, I see two branches of news media.
One, which will be fragmented, for 'True Believers'. This branch will contain many competing outlets, all screaming their own distorted versions of reality.
Two, there will emerge a consensus press, which strives to get information right. The former will do everything it can to destroy this, but as long as there is a free press, there will always be a market for truth.
Right now, it is difficult to tell where the boundary is. Time (and consistent reporting) will help sort this out.
"...You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. "
"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. "
There might be a market for a truth network some day so people really know what is going on.
The only things between you and a totally fascistic corporate world are: (a) the government and (b) unions (whatever is left of them), although, I think, neither has served us very well.
I loved the comment I saw some weeks ago on a post, that "I wake up in a democracy, and go to work in a fascist state." We all do.
How many of us can fire our boss?
How many of us can vote out our Representative, if we round up enough votes? Think you can do that at GE? Wal-Mart? Pfizer? Your mom and pop boss?
Your only protection against total tyranny from your employer is the ability to walk away to another job, your union, or your government. Guess who is fomenting all the anger at government. Who has a vested interest in separating the voter from belief in their government?
Government ain't so bad, as long as we own it.
I hope and pray that, some day soon, someone will bring indictments against the seditious entities who are making every attempt to tear this country apart.
For those who want to do the research, the facts have always been there.
I wish I had the answers on how to make viewers crave truth and facts from the media the way they seem to crave trivia and arguments.
How do you know anything? The primary thing that leads you to believe a 'fact' is that it fits your framework of reality. But this is merely confirmation bias. The next thing that leads you to believe a 'fact' is that it is from a reliable source. But that source is usually one that reliably confirms your bias.
So then what?
Science tries to eliminate the confirmation bias, and is based on repeatable experiments. That's about as good as we can do.
Each of us builds a framework of reality that is false. Some are closer to reality than others. In any case, we all take in information and try to make sense of it. We come to believe those things that 'work' for us, and that usually is what fits our framework of reality.
The really dangerous thing is that some of us aren't so good at critical thinking, and tend to look to others to interpret things for us. That's where the trouble starts, I think, because, then we start to trust our favored oracles, and shut out anyone who disagrees with them. But we HAVE to trust someone, because we all can't get (and check) every fact of our existence.
I think the news outlets try to satisfy everyone by trying to make each story fit each persons interpretation of the facts and unless you go searching (and making an honest effort to think critically) to determine what is fact and what is opinion, you can become locked in to a set of beliefs that are supported by opinion without being supported by fact. (I've become guilty of that myself)