A majority of Americans say this is the biggest threat to democracy

[Dill]

(10-25-2022, 03:38 AM)treee Wrote: Anything that might disrupt a corporate entities ability to generate profit, you can expect that corporate news will be incentivized to report on it in a certain fashion.

I'd say a lack of media literacy is the biggest danger and not legacy media itself. You can find useful analysis anywhere if you know what information can be useful and what to discard.

Another thing I've noticed is that the general population seems to not deal well with what you might call "live information environments". In environments when there is incomplete information, people have trouble operating in the probability space where you have make educated guesses for the time being. Then you have to factor in malicious actors deliberately putting out bad information or discrediting true/useful information.

We've had multiple models of information sharing through our history. Broadly you can think of it in stages: Person to person -> Print -> Radio/TV -> Internet. The first stage being the longest that we used to hundreds of thousands of years, Print being used for thousands of years (and it really got a boost with the printing press), and Radio/TV for about a hundred years now. The internet is very fundamentally different than Print & Radio/TV. The internet is really unprecedented in how much is has upended the dominant Radio/TV model we've been under for so long up until the start of this century.

Excellent points down the line.  In reverse order: 

Nicholas Carr wrote a wonderful article for the Atlantic in 2008, "Is Google Making Us Stupid," which argues that people raised on the internet do not experience "deep reading" and "deep learning" of the type prevalent since Gutenberg. The tendency has been increasingly toward sound bites without context. I suspect that is one reason why false equivalences come so easy now. Sound bit info lends itself more readily to equal weighting.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

On the "live info environment"--I think this also speaks to a general lack of understanding how science works, which may be increasing. There may be a religious component as well--you have "faith" in sources until they prove contradictory and erroneous. Science is constantly invalidating previous knowledge, never finally authoritative the way the Bible is for believers. What happens when Believers evaluate science-based policy during a pandemic? First Fauci said "no masks" and "close schools" and then he said "never mind"--so was he LYING the first time around? He and the government must not know anything if they change their minds. Hannity was right all along. How can I trust them on the vaccine? 

I've read a lot of good reporting over the last 20 years. But so many people come at the news with an attitude, situating reporters/news on the political spectrum first as a criterion of credibility/accuracy, then deciding whether to read or whether what they are reading is "true." There is a social aspect to this as well, as like minded friends agree and share confirmation bias news. If all that stopped, some of the needed CRITICAL media literacy might take care of itself.