Wesley Pruden at the
Washington Times offers his take on print newspapers.
Fake news is everywhere,
cluttering desktops, iPads, laptops, iPhones and all the other manifestations
of the post-literate era when it’s just too much trouble to find a reliable
read.
Who needs to read when
there’s such an abundance of twits clogging up Twitterworld with the trivia,
the trifling and the picayune — misinformation, usually the work of innocents,
and disinformation, always the work of rogues spreading deliberate lies, exaggerations
and confusion.
Farhad Manjoo, a technology
correspondent for The New York Times, was tired of it all. Six months ago, he
turned off all his digital news notifications, unplugged social networks, said
goodbye to the cacophony and other noise of the news feed and took the radical
step of subscribing to, of all things, three ink-on-paper newspapers and a
weekly magazine.
He wanted to “slow-jam the
news” but still wanted to know what was going on in the world. He was
determined to find sources that furnished depth and prized accuracy over speed.
It was an experiment, relying on print for news and not on “social media.” He
learned several interesting things.
What he learned first was
that the traditional formula taught to generations of cub reporters — the
opening paragraph must answer the five W’s, who, what, why, when and where, and
sometimes the how — is no longer in the curriculum. It’s now, he discovered,
“more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort
your understanding of the world than illuminate it.”
Commentary precedes and
overpowers facts. The point of the story is often submerged in the 12th
paragraph, sometimes deliberately so, where a reader may never see it because
he gave up after the third paragraph. Relying on social media for the news, Mr.
Manjoo learned, “is what other people are saying about the news rather than the
news [itself] and that makes us susceptible to misinformation.”
Perhaps the most important
thing he learned is that it takes time, and experience and willingness, to sort
fact from fiction and a lot of “news” on the Internet has never been sorted
out. “Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much
faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation
fill the gap.” He might have included disinformation, too, because
disinformation, the deliberate fuzzing and invention of facts, is worst of all.
The sorting of fiction from
facts, he discovered, “was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was
getting the news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and
when it showed up on my front door hundreds of professionals had done the hard
work for me.”
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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