Fake News, Post-Truth, and the Media

The November election was a wake-up call in so many ways and leaves many of us with burning questions. How, for example, do we have any prayer of a more reasonable election result in a world where the two sides consume information from completely different sources and have different criteria for judging its veracity?

We're hearing lots of discussion about how our education system needs to change. We need to teach our youth to evaluate what they read and to distinguish fact from opinion or from deliberate mendacity. The problem, of course, is that we will create these curricula in the "blue states" for the children of educated parents. I highly doubt that we'll see much critical analysis of content in rural schools.

I've read quite a few postmortems on the role of journalism in the election results -- how they shirked their responsibilities for too long, gave Trump a free pass and, even worse, tons of free publicity. We'll never really know what role the media played in the outcome any more than we will know how many votes were swayed by the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.

In the midst of all this angst and unanswered questions, this Brookings article by a Tom Rosenstiel, a governance expert, provides several constructive, actionable suggestions for the media going forward. I particularly like his idea of accompanying news articles with a box that identifies where it falls on the fact versus opinion spectrum, what the main idea or issue is, what the sources are, and what is as yet unknown. In this age of reading online and scanning (and yes, I'm as guilty as anyone else), long-form journalism is often overlooked. But perhaps with this kind of "caption," we might at least get the gist quickly and easily, and even be tempted to read the entire article.