Читать книгу Trusting the News in a Digital Age - Jeffrey Dvorkin - Страница 8

As we have seen in recent elections in the US and the UK, information with questionable sources doesn't always work in the best interests of the voting public.

Misinformation (which is content that is inadvertently mistaken and just plain wrong) and disinformation (which is a deliberate attempt to convey wrong information) are able to penetrate the public marketplace of ideas. Reliable journalism is needed to help identify what can be trusted. The consequences of information that is “unmediated” – without a journalistic check – have proven to be damaging to society. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a lie could be repeated as often as required in order for the public to accept it as true.

As you work through the chapters, we will explore various themes regarding the essential nature of the news and its various expressions. We will see how the news is the basic building block of interpersonal communication at every level of society. We will examine how news and the media are central to our functioning as citizens because they allow us to experience the world in all of its complexities, whether it is through traditional media, mass media, or, perhaps most significantly, social media. The revolution brought on by digital culture and its impact on the news is being felt now more than ever.

Why is this important? Why is reliable and literate news essential? Because of one basic human quality: people like to talk in order to communicate.

We like to exchange everything from ideas, to culture, to arguments. We especially love stories, humor, and jokes. It is who we are as a species, and it has been that way for as long as people have lived in communities. It's what makes us human, and if we are deprived of that connection for too long, like every other living creature deprived of an essential need, we weaken and lose our capacity for being part of something larger than ourselves. It is unnatural to live without that human‐to‐human contact. It is the news, in the broadest sense of the word, which binds us together.