Believe It or Don’t 0
At the Des Moines Register, Michael Bugeja considers how “social” media has changed the news. A snippet (emphasis added):
The audience no longer seeks information; it wants affirmation. That’s the cover-up.
What about coverage?
Two factors play into the media culture of lies. In the past decade, newsroom employment plummeted by some 23%. Increasingly, people rely on social media for news. According to the Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of American adults (68%) get their news from applications like Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat and the biggie, Facebook. An estimated 67 percent of Facebook users — and that’s a humongous amount of people (about 1.5 billion worldwide) — rely on the platform for affirmation.
