Trust

Frederick Turner writes in TCS about falling media credibility and both it's causes and it's consequences.

But for a while most of us felt that we had an established press whose canons, techniques, competition, and honorable tradition gave us news that was fairly reliable and when in error, honestly so, or at least the result of the coarsening and immediacy implicit in the medium. That trust is gone -- not just among Republicans and conservatives, but as the polls show, among Democrats, Independents, and liberals as well. It was bad luck for the Gray Ladies that their minions chose to break the tradition of trust just at the moment that powerful new media emerged from the boiling ferment of electronic technology, and that alternatives now exist. It may be that the old media are now self-destructing, and that like the medieval Vatican, the Ching Dynasty, the Holy Roman Empire, the French Academy, the Victorian Church of England, and the Communist Party, they are losing their hard-won authority because of wanton abuse.

I have been thinking a lot on this subject recently. It is discouraging, when even news junkies like me, have a difficult time determining what is true. Major media seldom investigates anything any more, reporting by press release is far more common than reporting by investigation. And spin is ubiquitous. With the internet it is possible to fact check a lot of these things, to find out more details, other points of view, and conflicting data, but this requires a lot of effort and sometimes doesn't yield clear results. We are too often left with just guesses and gut feelings.