The New News
Newspapers are fighting an uphill battle. Readership has been steadily declining for the past few years, with no end in sight. It's no big secret that social media is one of the biggest reasons. Today, somewhere around 62% of American adults get their news on one social media platform or another. Whether or not you're a fan of this change, it's clear that this shift is a double-edged sword. Some changes have been positive, some negative.
Let's talk about the bad parts first. We've all heard about the emergence of fake news. I mean, this guy practically runs the country now ... (Steve Bannon, Chief adviser to the Donald and ex-executive chair of Breitbart "news")
Fake news is bad. There's no getting around it. My mom told me the other day that the Queen of England had died. I asked her where she heard that. "Facebook". A quick check on BBC confirmed my suspicions. Queen Elizabeth is doing just fine.
It is troubling though, that people are so willing to misinform their readers. False claims can be far more consequential that Queen Elizabeth's "death". Breitbart, for example, has perpetuated climate change denial on social media among other terribly false claims. If the number of Americans getting their news on social media is going to keep increasing, its pretty scary that a certain percentage of that growing number will be reading news that has a basis in alternative facts.
At least newspapers are held to rigorous journalistic standards. You can be fairly sure that what you read in most newspapers has been fact-checked. But fake news isn't the only problem with the shift to social media. Social media allows you to customize your news. You don't have to eat your "news vegetables" if you don't want to. If you don't particularly like politics, you don't need to see it on your Facebook feed or whatever social media platform you like to get your news on. You can hardly read a newspaper without at least glancing at the front page headlines. On social media though, you can spemd your time exclusively looking at food recipes and celebrity gossip if that's what floats your boat.
Ultimately though, the shift from traditional print news to social media is a beneficial one. To be sure, fake news as well as customizable news are serious problems. However, the benefits of news from social media outweigh its downfalls. For starters, our sources of information are no longer so limited. To be fair, TV news offers a variety of sources, but as it pertains to social media vs. print media, there is much more to be found on the internet. When print media dominated, most people got their news from their local paper. Social media, on the other hand, gives users the chance to look at several different sources right next to each other.
As consumers of news, it's important for us to get our information from diverse sources. There are several reasons for this. One, it helps us weed out fake news. If we see a seemingly important story reported by only one source, it becomes less likely that that story is true. Two, we can get different perspectives on the same story. As an example, we can look at differences between how two different sources cover the same story. When Trump announced his immigration ban for seven countries, I saw CNN reporting protests at airports across the country on my Facebook feed. Al Jazeera, instead, focused their reporting more on how Trump excluded countries he had business in from the ban (even though many of these countries have produced more jihadists than the countries included in the ban). A diversity of sources and information allows us to have a more comprehensive understanding of the news than if we only got it from one place.
We're not just getting our news from more places. We're getting it way faster too. News is updated by the second now, rather than daily. Not only is our news faster, its more democratic. The relative importance of a given story is no longer determined by institutions, its determined by people. Its determined by a groundswell. Trending news shows us what people are talking about most, and because our news is so much faster now, what is trending is normally subject to rapid change (although this becomes a problem in terms of how much attention we pay to one given story). Despite some flaws, the news groundswell is very good for democracy. It helps keep the power in the hands of people rather than institutions. In this case, it ensures the free flow of information. We will have a lot of growing pains as we find our way through the shift from print media to social media, but these initial missteps will eventually, and already are, paying off, in the form of freer and more informed societies.
As consumers of news, it's important for us to get our information from diverse sources. There are several reasons for this. One, it helps us weed out fake news. If we see a seemingly important story reported by only one source, it becomes less likely that that story is true. Two, we can get different perspectives on the same story. As an example, we can look at differences between how two different sources cover the same story. When Trump announced his immigration ban for seven countries, I saw CNN reporting protests at airports across the country on my Facebook feed. Al Jazeera, instead, focused their reporting more on how Trump excluded countries he had business in from the ban (even though many of these countries have produced more jihadists than the countries included in the ban). A diversity of sources and information allows us to have a more comprehensive understanding of the news than if we only got it from one place.
We're not just getting our news from more places. We're getting it way faster too. News is updated by the second now, rather than daily. Not only is our news faster, its more democratic. The relative importance of a given story is no longer determined by institutions, its determined by people. Its determined by a groundswell. Trending news shows us what people are talking about most, and because our news is so much faster now, what is trending is normally subject to rapid change (although this becomes a problem in terms of how much attention we pay to one given story). Despite some flaws, the news groundswell is very good for democracy. It helps keep the power in the hands of people rather than institutions. In this case, it ensures the free flow of information. We will have a lot of growing pains as we find our way through the shift from print media to social media, but these initial missteps will eventually, and already are, paying off, in the form of freer and more informed societies.
