… there has been a huge shift in the past century in how and whom people trust. Prior to the 1900s, a person was likely to trust a reputed member of their local community.
Only then will the news industry have any hope of rebuilding reader trust by thoughtfully experimenting with the ways it covers and distributes news.
Doesn’t the first quote partially undermine the premise of the second? Why is it a given that a centrally owned and controlled “industry” is the best way to disseminate accurate information? Has the internet not demonstrated a return to the earlier circle-of-trust based method of sharing information? I think about mainstream media credulously parroting administration disinformation about Saddam’s “WMDs”, to say nothing of the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” and a long list of similar events before, in between and since. Have these not demonstrated that “fake news” is a moniker at least as applicably attributed to CNN, NYT, WaPo, et al as it is to Breitbart?
Tribalism is hard to overcome because it has been an effective survival mechanism for humans living in groups, and, yes, that’s a problem now that tribes are defined in more complex ways and have become easy tools for would-be autocrats to build on. But leaping from there to the position that tinkering with the now-discredited system of corporate-owned media as the gatekeepers of information leaves me staring at a logic gap I’m unwilling to jump across.
Going back to your example of Megan Phelps-Roper, what stood out for me in her TED talk was the manner in which she was able to break free from the extremely powerful tribal bond she had inherited from birth with the Westboro Baptist Church. Her break came not from persuasion through facts, it came from exposure to a person outside her tribe who, by sharing his humanity, shattered her belief in the dichotomy between Us and Them.
Instead of tinkering with the legacy media filter, maybe attention needs to be directed at the webs of trust, since that seems to be the direction to which things are returning. Maybe people in Eastern Europe flooding us with disinformation in return for cash is not even central to the problem. In fact, it may be a step in a positive direction because it sensitizes us to the need for skepticism. As a friend replied when I reposted something by Caitlin Johnstone on my Facebook timeline, it’s hard to know who to believe anymore!
Yes, exactly! We all need to recognize our true tribe — humanity. Let’s start spreading the following message around in our circles of trust: things that divide, things that inspire hate, things that justify killing and aggression (like bombing people in far-off countries), things that glorify one faction at the expense of another (like racism and nationalism), these things are fake news, regardless of where we see them. As our webs of trust grow, people will begin ignoring the fake news, it will no longer have any effect and it will shrivel and die.
