NB: This post was published in a previous blog and imported into this one. please forgive any formatting issues.
There have been a few articles that caught my eye lately, but these two stood out in the context of this blog.
The always outstanding Matt Taibbi had an excellent piece on the current status of the news media inlight of the US Presidential elections.
But young audiences in particular tend to be incredibly turned off by the media-as-cheerleaders model of reporting. News audiences among the young have in recent years declined rapidly, mirroring a corresponding loss of trust in major-party politics. “Garbage, lies, propaganda, repetitive and boring,” is how a University of Texas researcher described the perceptions of young people vis a vis the news. Corporate news directors, much like the leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties, seem blissfully unconcerned with the changing attitudes of their future customer base.
As I’ve written on this blog, the role of the news media in relation to a campaign is changing dramatically. The question is, will the mainstream news industry in its current form, through an orgy of partisanship, compromise itself to the point of irrelevance?
Post-truth politics and the ability of campaigns to be fast and loose with the facts is another topic that this blog covers.
This Guardian article makes the case that with social media, we are in an unprecedented age of outrageous untruths.
In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.
Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky).
Politics, Policy & Media 