Quote of the Day -- Hannah Arendt

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. 

-- Hannah Arendt

Quote of the Day -- Carl Sagan

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

-- Carl Sagan

Quote of the Day -- Daniel Kahneman

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. 

-- Daniel Kahneman

Quote of the Day -- Gertrude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

-- Gertrude Stein

Quote of the Day -- Jeff Jarvis

Let’s begin by recognizing that the goal is not to create one shared view of reality but instead to inform discussion and deliberation among many different communities with different perspectives and needs. That’s what society needs. That’s what journalism must become.

-- Jeff Jarvis

Quote of the Day -- Marshall McLuhan

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

-- Marshall McLuhan

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.