With so many media sources these days — commercial television, social media, old-fashioned newspapers — some are bound to be more reliable in terms of accuracy than others.
Researchers have found that people who believe climate change is a conspiracy get most of their news and information about current events from social and commercial media sources.
After Donald Trump was reelected president, chief executive of Meta Mark Zuckerberg fired his company’s social media fact-checkers, with the intention of replacing them with a “community notes” format like the one used by Elon Musk’s platform X. The model relies on corrections added by users to posts that are false or misleading, Mark Andrejevic, a media professor at Monash University’s School of Media, Film, and Journalism, wrote in The Conversation.
The model has been described by Musk as “citizen journalism, where you hear from the people. It’s by the people, for the people.”
However, for this to work, the “citizen journalists,” as well as their readers, must value accuracy, accountability and “good-faith deliberation,” Andrejevic […]
How many times to I have to say it or write it? There needs to be a law that when an organization, TV station, radio station or similar informational source claims to be a “news” station or presenting “news” that it must produce truthful information. Congress needs desperately to pass a law that severely punishes stations that lie about facts, provide misinformation deliberately, or disinformation that harms what people know about what is going on!!! It’s essential in a democracy that people be informed of the truth! How else can they choose a candidate for an important office if stations tell lies about candidates or what is going on in government? Truth is essential to a democratic republic and these stations who lie must be fined in huge numbers—-like millions —when they are caught presenting a deliberate lie. After a few fines like that, they learn that they must tell Americans the truth. The greatest violator of this is Fox News, but there are even some social medias that need to be included. When Trump lies on Truth Social (an ironic title, huh?), he, too must be charged millions because these lies harm democracy and Americans’ right to know the truth.
To me, misinformation is a way of dumbing down, controlling readers. It’s sad that so many don’t understand what DJT et al are doing!