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After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. I want to take issue with that
by quanticle 14y ago
After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers.
I want to take issue with that statement. I see it repeated in many places, but usually it has either anecdotal evidence, or, in this case, no evidence to back it up. Was the population better informed when traditional newspapers were at their peak (let's say from 1900 to 1960)? How would you measure such an ambiguous term like "informed"? I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about the "informedness" of the average person, and it's not at all clear that the average person was more informed, in any sense, during the height of newspaper dominance than they are today.
Let's also not forget that newspapers were often just as "bad" (in terms of publishing trivial stories or publishing biased stories) as the Huffington Post is today. You just need to look at the history of "yellow journalism" to see it.
- laconian 14y agoEmpirical evidence aside, do you think a publishing model like HuffPo's can possibly produce an informed populace? There's very little fact checking, no followup if they get their facts wrong, and most of it's probably just reworded press releases from PR lackeys anyhow.
- quanticle 14y agoAnd how is that different from the "yellow journalism" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? If anything, the situation is a lot better now since the barriers around publishing are much much lower than they were back then. I fail to see how Ariana Huffington is any worse at journalism than Pulitzer, Hearst, or, say, Murdoch.