Could the Internet bring truth back to journalism?
Paul Mason seems to think that bullshit cannot live online:
Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable.
The conventional wisdom is that crapfests like the birther movement indicate the ‘net is a horseshit hot house. But Mason makes a really interesting point—it goes both ways, for all misguided, soft-headed drivel that cheap publishing enables, it also provides a new mechanism for checking same. Especially when the flapdoodle is coming from the highly-watched sources: officialdom and the media.
Could Fox News be a casualty? Is the best way for media to survive the internet era by actually reporting the truth? It could probably go either way, it depends on whether the good guys or the bad guys are more motivated to create the future.
