Information also wants to be expensive

Imagine if it wasn’t clear to people that the Nazis invaded Poland, there is a vaccine for polio, apartheid existed in South Africa or two plus two is four. Imagine dark forces convincing half the population that facts are “fake news.” What ramparts keep idiocracy at bay? Is it education? Education affects mostly children. Politics? Politics is the problem. Culture? Culture comforts the soul but is not a source for facts. Search and social media? Their algorithms mock us. The wisdom of the crowd mutates into chaos of the mob. Our protection from idiocracy is a viable, independent and widely trusted media. The last part — trust — is becoming increasingly difficult. Instead, Statista found last year that even in most democratic countries <a href="http://but%20you%20cannot%20trust%20the%20internet%20to%20magically%20surface%20the%20best%20bloggers./" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">most people did not trust media most of the time</a>. In the United States the proportion of respondents who said they did was the lowest, at 26%. France was at 29%, the UK at 34%, Canada at 42%, and Taiwan 27%. In most places it is getting worse. Though <a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/the-fall-rise-and-fall-of-media-trust.php" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">not everyone agrees</a>, you could argue that this is happening at the worst possible time. Partisan hatreds in America are at a fever pitch as the main parties, once diverse, realign along highly combustible racial and cultural lines. The self-immolation of Twitter shows again how brittle and broken is the global town square. There are a number of factors that are undermining trust: POST-TRUTH: When acceptance of facts becomes a political opinion, this places most journalists on one side of the debate. They cannot “represent” those who think global warming is a hoax or that “guns don’t kill people” (as the US gun lobby argues). COMPLEXITY: The issues have become too complicated for most non-experts to grasp. It’s actually pretty clear that the Nazis invaded Poland. It should also be clear that Earth suffers anthropogenic warming, but there’s too much science to wade through. So it is with global trade, healthcare and even the war in Ukraine. REAL FAKE NEWS (not the Trumpian nonsense): Technology has reduced barriers to entry such that every fool with an axe can be a publisher and grind it. <a href="https://dan-perry.medium.com/information-also-wants-to-be-expensive-c991591c811b">Visit Now</a>