This article ends on a couple of pretty bizarre points. >Politico founding editor and editorial chairman John Harris reminded Smith on stage that "in the old d

This article ends on a couple of pretty bizarre points. >Politico founding editor and editorial chairman John Harris reminded Smith on stage that "in the old days," a handful of people at a small number of outlets had all the agenda-setting power and they "would’ve all been white men." Diversity in the newsroom eroded trust!? >"All of us have biases and that maybe true objectivity is, what does your newsroom look like? How diverse is it?" said Al Jazeera English host Femi Oke at the event. Al Jazeera is Qatar's state-funded news agency. It's not the diversity of their newsroom, which probably isn't any higher than average, that matters but the topic that determines how much you can trust them. The language of coverage also apparently matters, since their Arabic coverage often has a significantly different slant than their English language coverage. ------------- I probably put more trust in traditional media than average, but that trust has definitely declined. This is for a few reasons not really covered in the article. Practically all but one or two newspapers in my country are owned by the same corporation. They target different demographics with different papers, but show a remarkable unity on topics that the owners have an interest in. Consolidation of media into a smaller number of wealthy, corporate hands has undeniably introduced significant bias, but it's gotten harder to identify that bias as the diversity of news publications has decreased. We are no longer presented with multiple independent viewpoints on a given event. Rather, we get multiple columnists from the same media conglomerate under the same editorial pressure. The internet has also played a role by making the monetization of news more difficult, and the typical corporate response when revenue drops is to cut costs. Why fund a bunch of war-zone reporters to get different views of a conflict when you can fill the same amount of air-time for a fraction of the cost with a bunch of pundits arguing with each other? This is cheaper, but also produces far less reliable information about the conflict. Bottom line, we need to find a way increase the diversity of ownership of news sources and also find a way to fund quality journalism. I still do appreciate traditional media because, if you're aware of their ownership biases, you at least know what you're dealing with. Alternative and social media are often much harder to vet.