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RE: Will Bitcoin’s Lightning Network make Journalism great again?

in #bitcoin6 years ago

While this could be a great help, especially to get some good investigative journalism again like you say, it won't do anything on it's own, it's not just money issues why journalism is failing. It's activism. And I think that's responsible for way more bias (in other words: fake news) than anything due to lack of good funding. Corruption was always an issue, even at the height of print journalism, and clickbait is an even bigger issue, but it all pales in comparison to just journalist's own personal bias when it comes to fake news.

You see more and more journalists in their social media profile proudly proclaim they are activists, some even embarrassingly calling themselves "journactivist" or some variation of that. They believe they are lying for a good cause and that the ends justify the means. Not limited to any one country either. I've seen that in the US as much as I'm seeing it here in Germany.

I think if you want to make journalism good again (if it ever was good, which I'm not convinced of, with all the information of the internet at our disposal it's just a lot easier to find out when they lie), you need to come up with something completely new. Maybe crowdsourced fact checking built into the site that shows you articles from multiple sources about every news story, stuff like that. It's too easy for journalists to lie, so make it harder.

Comments were kind of like a very basic form of that, especially when you can upvote comments so the interesting ones make it to the top, but more and more news sites are turning off comments. According to them it's because of too much "harassment" but I don't buy that, comment sections were always "toxic" and nobody cared, now decades later it's suddenly a huge problem? They just don't want to get called out for lying or getting things wrong in fear of losing readers.

Time is also a big issue. News need to be fast or they aren't news anymore, but that means less time for research, so sometimes when a journalist gets it completely wrong it's not really his or her fault, just an underlying problem of the way the news business works. That could maybe be helped by journalists being more open about their ignorance. Just saying "This is a developing news story, some things might turn out to be wrong when more information is available" and then when the article is updated, clearly pointing out what was wrong before, why that misunderstanding happened and what the truth turned out to be. If you're honest about it, making a mistake is nothing to be ashamed of, journalists need to realize that.