I agree absolutely. I'm saying that "I didn't see it" and "the media didn't cover it" are two very different claims. What we have isn't a failure of the media -- there are plenty of reliable outlets seeing stories to the end and publishing sober assessments -- but a failure of consumption habits. The mere existence of Fox News or conservative talk radio aren't a problem, the problem is that we have a large segment of people who aren't engaging a sufficiently broad media appetite.
If you watch O'Reilly every week for several years eventually you'll just start to trust him implicitly. If you watch O'Reilly and Maddow and John Stewart and listen to On The Media and read the Wall Street Journal then I think you'll naturally develop a more skeptical view on all of them and won't form as an emotional connection to any one outlet. This doesn't necessarily require people spend more time reading news, just that they spend that news-reading time "better", that they cycle around a bit.
I don't know how we fix this. The optimistic solution is "educate kids about media literacy at school", I suppose. But if people won't actively choose to have better media consumption habits, then what? We have to require outlets themselves to do a better job? That's a lovely sentiment in the abstract but I'm not sure how you could possibly go about implementing it.
Anyway, this is going off-topic and I'm going to drop this line. Happy to discuss over PM if anyone wants to carry on.
Wait, are you serious? There's
no way to fix the reporting of blatantly false information on news media? It's solely the fault of the viewers? Hang on here. Yes, viewers need to be better educated, sure -- but only because so many people believe that when they are watching the news, it will be fact-based, and that when incorrect things are reported, for whatever reason, they will be corrected. Why do they believe that? Because it still happens; newspapers correct errors, and so do the 24-hour news channels, but selectively. That's been twisted so far now into careful wording and selective use of "experts" that the average viewer of middling education may not always realize when they're being fed a line because those lines are blurred. Can we put some responsibility on them? Sure. But should we also hold the news media accountable for reporting, in this case, on blatantly faked videos as though they were true, and on reporting just what assholes like Fiorina said, as though that's some kind of fact and not propaganda? Yes, I think that should be actionable.
This "there's nothing we can do! That's just the world!" attitude is the single most frustrating thing to me, because it crops up so often.
"Class disparity just keeps getting worse, oh well! There's nothing we can do, though; some people are just always gonna be on bottom."
"Welp, guns are everywhere, nothing we can do now about that in America."
"Yeah, American education is in a terrible state, but there's just no fixing it."
"Sure, the news media sometimes spreads blatant lies, but how can we possibly make them not do that?"
All of these issues can be fixed. It's just that they require more than simple band-aid solutions that can be promoted by politicians only looking to get votes on the re-election cycle. It takes work (more than partisan squabbling), money (taxes), and long-term thinking (instead of quick fixes that make great soundbites).
