This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
> However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
I just want to point out that the problem is fake news, not biased news. And I also want to point out that people are generally not seeking out these sources, they come to their "News" feeds and are targeted at them because they generate an emotional response.
> we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives.
I'd argue there's so many narratives online and easy discovery of fake, or down-right misleading, narratives that are intended to deceive which has become far easier to come across. Sometimes, I'd rather hear the Fox News spin than about the newest conspiracy theory floating around Facebook when I go to dinner with my folks.
Really? You have clocks you know to be right and clocks you know aren't. Sadly the same can't be said of news sources. The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the world. And sometimes they do fake news. Do it regularly. And they bitch about the internet being the problem. It isn't. The problem for them is they get caught out in ways that we find out about now. We used not to.
When a big story breaks, set up a twitter a/c. Follow people who are involved in the story and the reporting of it. Read the links that come up. Use your intelligence and education to assess sources, look for corroborating evidence etc and see how far your opinion strays from what you thought of the quality of the nyt reports.
No time? Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, The Donald (may fleas infest his toupee) being an actual russian agent. You can't make this stuff up. But it was made up. And not in supermarket tabloids and faked facebrick screenshots. Anonymous government sources, insiders, reputable news sources.
Fox is entirely fake news. MSNBC is entirely fake news. They should be prosecuted for fraudulently having the word "news" in their advertising. Uncle George's Racist Blog on facebrick is no better or worse but nobody with half a dozen firing neurones takes the latter at all seriously the way some seem to with the excrement that is MSNBC, Fox and their high-school cheerleaders impersonating tv journalists.
It's like complaining you found out someone lies to you when it suits them and you preferred life when you didn't know that. Nixon was a war criminal, J. Edgar Hoover was psychotic criminal at best, JFK tried to set records for the number of women he bedded and had the FBI and secret service cruise chicks for him. People knew who weren't beholden to a political side (eg NYT, Wash Post, WSJ etc) and didn't publish, instead they published fake news. All Zuckerberg's fault of course.
The stuff that [we're aware that] New York Times gets wrong in the modern era barely even holds a candle to what they got wrong in the past.
Particularly the case where the NYT was publishing Soviet genocide denying propaganda as though it were fact. The responsible "journalist", Walter Duranty, even won a Pulitzer Prize for his service as Stalin's uncritical mouthpiece. The NYT didn't denounce him publicly until 1990. For decades, Holodomor denial in the west was defended and perpetuate by people citing the New York Times.
Actually its the continued extreme pressure to commercialize this.
Technology can enable a diversity of content or it can reinforce you staying on the website by serving up continuously sensationalized or aligned content. It chooses the latter to provide more advertising.
This is a serious case for the release of advertising and generation of new revenue models for internet products and presences.
