In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he still was an idiot- a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.
– Alain de Botton, The News: A User’s Manual
Over the last few years through the whole covid situation, I have found growing in me a stronger and stronger hostility towards all media outlets. I pretty much uninstalled all news app from my phone, and and stopped reading the guardian and the economist, which is my two main source of news before.
If you believe that the news media is the gateway toward our understanding of the world around us. You have to understand the old phrase:
dog bites a man is not news, man bites a dog is news.
By definition, journalism has a tendency to pay much more attention to unusual, infrequent/rare event. Here comes the catch: If your whole worldview is based on those biased portrait of the world, naturally you will develop a distorted view of the world.
The missing part of any debates about “fake news” is that news is fake by definition. it is fake not in the sense that the journalist is trying to fabricate news to manipulate the society, rather it is fake because it constructs a distorted reality which resembles little of reality.
But there is another side of the equation I have to remind myself of, everytime I found myself being too dangerously extreme about news media: Sometimes things can be rare and infrequent and not mainstream, but of vital importance to the society as a whole, which justify the distorted coverage in some sense. the coverage of “Me too” movement can be one obvious example. I will leave a _______ here for you to fill in what you can think of.
Maybe the real solution to develop a healthy attitude toward media content consumption is to start to treat news as sugar, which is harmless with infrequent usage, but can be deadly with heavy daily dose.