I agree with most of the criticisms of current media in this article but do not think I agree with the claim that things were better in 2015/2010/pre-Trump/in the Before Time. I’m not entirely sure how to go about testing this claim, but my strong impression is that e.g. media treatment of science has been roughly this quality for approximately ever. I don’t think e.g. the recent media narrative around vaccines is meaningfully worse than e.g. the media narrative around nuclear power has been for a long time.
direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy.
The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren’t available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don’t face the pressure to propagandize—either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.
Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.
I agree with most of the criticisms of current media in this article but do not think I agree with the claim that things were better in 2015/2010/pre-Trump/in the Before Time. I’m not entirely sure how to go about testing this claim, but my strong impression is that e.g. media treatment of science has been roughly this quality for approximately ever. I don’t think e.g. the recent media narrative around vaccines is meaningfully worse than e.g. the media narrative around nuclear power has been for a long time.
The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren’t available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don’t face the pressure to propagandize—either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.
Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.