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The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need, and they often get drowned out by entertainme

The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need, and they often get drowned out by entertainment news, which is really just seeking engagement for advertising - the reader is not the customer, they are the product being sold. In this sense, the lost faith is both warranted and correct. --- As an aside - I think this is going to get much, much worse. We had a brief golden age where "seeing is believing" was a real thing, and a photograph or video carried substantial weight as evidence. That window seems to be closing. As image manipulation becomes easier and easier, I think media will become much more bitterly divided. "Truth" will once again become a subjective take based on the sources you trust - you will likely end up reading and trusting the same news sources your family/friends/acquaintances do. It will be harder to challenge your trust in those sources because the challenge will boil down to "he said/she said" fights between proclaimed experts with different motives and incentives, with no easy way for a layman to find believable evidence themselves (ex: A clear + trusted photo or video). We're gonna go back to "who can shout the loudest" with the fun kink that this time money can literally buy robotic voices that shout all the time while pretending to be people from your community.

skedaddle 4y ago
> The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already. So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news. The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).

skedaddle 4y ago

> The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already. So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news. The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).