{"id":136814,"date":"2021-01-31T06:36:21","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T14:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136814"},"modified":"2021-01-31T06:36:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-31T14:36:21","slug":"surmounting-five-riddles-of-the-information-sphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136814","title":{"rendered":"Surmounting five riddles of the information sphere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Gurri writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile,\u201d wrote Walter Lippmann back in 1922, \u201cis that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.\u201d Lippmann found truth in the analysis of causes and relations\u2014in context. I will have more to say about that.<\/p>\n

But what is news?<\/p>\n

A century of dishonesty has accumulated around that word. I\u2019m willing to give a pass to political bias\u2014the kind of reporting that makes Trump the villain of every New York Times story and the hero of Fox News. It\u2019s perfectly possible to be an honest partisan. The lack of truthfulness I want to consider runs deeper and is more corrupting.<\/p>\n

There is an implicit ideology of the news. It rests on three claims: one, that consumption of news produces the omnicompetent citizen supposedly required by democracy; two, that news is a special form of information, complete in scope and objective in tone; and three, that the mission of news is to act as the voice of the people against the predations of power and wealth. As with most ideologies, these propositions are not internally coherent\u2014but note that they enable news practitioners to feel morally superior both to the public (which must be educated) and the political class (which must be exposed).<\/p>\n

All three claims are false. As a record of human affairs, the news is a vast ocean of silence, sprinkled with arbitrary islets of content. Three million people died in the Congo out of range of the news, at a time when CNN was pursuing, relentlessly, the adventures of a runaway bride. The world is full of such forgotten humanitarian crises, ignored by Western journalists. It is taken for granted that presidents and politics rule the news\u2014while science, technology, poetry, the visual arts, philosophy, and religion receive scarcely a whisper.<\/p>\n

News is not truth. In the time of the tweet, news isn\u2019t even first in delivering \u201cnews or information,\u201d as journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently noted. News is bait for ads sold by a hard-nosed business: rather than inform citizens or protect the underdog, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, Vox, and Politico are trying desperately to make money. That fact explains many of the strange distortions of news content. The failure to cover the civil war in the Congo was a business decision. So is the obsession with Trump. The primacy of politics, on the other hand, allows journalists and media owners to feel like players in the great game\u2014with an added moralistic buzz. Jeff Bezos\u2019 purchase of the Washington Post converted an unpopular billionaire into the hero who would save democracy from dying in darkness.<\/p>\n

The riddle posed by such contradictions has a simple answer. Let\u2019s demystify the news. We can consume it or not, believe it or not, find it useful and entertaining or not, but we must never again grant it a privileged position, either in our politics or in the hierarchy of information. The public has lost all trust in the news. That can be repaired with a sensible reappraisal of its value. Freed from magical claims, the news will cease to be an agent of dishonesty and post-truth, and assume its proper place among the information sphere\u2019s near-infinity of stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Gurri writes: \u201cThe hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile,\u201d wrote Walter Lippmann back in 1922, \u201cis that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.\u201d Lippmann found truth in the analysis of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,42882],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-martin-gurri"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t