>"The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. ... Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."
and
"Welles later embraced the story as part of his personal myth. "Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the streets and the rending of garments," he told Peter Bogdanovich years later."
"CBS, too, found reports ultimately useful in promoting the strength of its influence. radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."
https://radioambulante.org/en/translation/the-extraterrestri...
Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520262093/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_y5...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...
It's perfectly feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to run a web server, and they actually do it, so it's sad that consumers don't connect directly to those servers and instead use middlemen.
Regardless, if anyone has a response to a bunch of websites being a worse security model than one giant platform, you can reply to me instead.
The account is likely shadow-banned or similar, so their comments are dead by default.
Which people? Whose people? This is not a statement of psychological truth. It may however describe a societal truth.
But it is not true that people in all countries want above all to be entertained. People struggle in undemocratic countries. Education makes democracy strong. It also breeds rebels.
Public discourse reflects education. A society conditions its citizens to think a certain way. The typical conditioning involves protecting the society. The flag, the anthem, the history, the current power structure and its wars.
It's sad to see journalism collapse in a democracy. It's sad and perhaps fatal for democracy if people have been conditioned to be infantile and their implanted desire for gratification has overwhelmed their thinking and speech.
Then you elect them.
What people trust is generally what fits their worldview which is increasingly reinforced by the filter bubbles provided by tech companies. The increasing polarisation and tribalism is made worse by the traditional network programming and now algorithms that present what the audience is comfortable to see and hear.
I like using DDG because it doesn't filter, but at the same time I hate wading through utter crap and being the filter.
Twitter for all its flaws is pretty good at giving everyone a voice so you can read something and then the criticisms without having to aggregate that from multiple sites.
Yes, except the FCC can forcefully suspend the operations of a radio station.
Though Art Bell said the show was "pure entertainment", anyone who tuned in without that context heard what sounded like a serious news talk program about aliens, crystal healing, reptilians, etc, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Buckaroo_Ban...
We've entered a world where the lowest common denominator of information is being used as primary source for current events. That's asinine.
This is largely through their own actions. Examples are legion, but a recent one is debacle at NYT over an op-ed. The news-consuming public was able to view the shenanigans of NYT reporters and staffers, which would formerly been done being the scenes.
Many eyes were opened, and I'm certain I wasn't the only one thinking "These are the people in supposed to be trusting for my news and analysis?"
Newspapers and news outlets aren't actually "primary source". If you read a quoted tweet from Obama in the New York Times, the NYT isn't the "primary source" - Obama is. The NYT is a secondary source that is quoting from primary source.
In that sense, Twitter is actually primary source, because Obama wrote the tweet. Well, except when Twitter is hacked, which is what makes this such a significant event.
(But I agree with your general comment, especially having been interviewed a few times and seen how most reporters work. There are a handful of good ones out there though.)
Or it could be the result of a decades long effort to attack credible authoritative institutions by forces that take a dim view of transparency and accountability.
If 200 people on Twitter are angry at politician X over something trivial, we are served a news headline of Person X accused of Y - Public calls for resignation.
An anonymous person on social media recently made a claim of sexual assault against Justin Bieber with no evidence whatsoever, and the media reports it as Justin Bieber accused of sexual assault. He was fortunate to immediately whip out numerous receipts countering the claims, but what if he couldn't? We would still be reading headlines about this baseless accusation.
Is it though? According to Pew, only 20% of US adults use Twitter: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...
In comparison, Fox news is used as a source by 40% of the US population: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/08/five-facts-...
The share is bigger for Facebook, though (69%)
But the world we live in is full of "web services that let people post whatever they want at any time". News from Twitter may be weird but many people want to get their news from the BBC website, or the New York Times, or Reuters or whatever. Or their own government's websites. Just web services that people post from - presumably with levels of editing and checking but all presumably with security flaws that could bypass them.
It's not clear exactly what you're asking for. A technological solution involving careful checking of cryptographic signatures? Or some sort of super-expensive-to-spoof source of all important news?
But it is fair to say that there is no sane channel of information. The channels of public discourse in the US, once controlled by a few "loyal, patriotic" corporate owners fed by advertising revenue, are now channels controlled by unprincipled corporatism that supports a two-party system of untalented puppets.
And the un-talent pool is bigger than ever.
And then? Doing damage control on a fake post by the CEO of Supercorp saying they're faltering financially, or whatever, when it has that green badge of crypto-authenticity, and you've spun your marketing in such a way to tell people "if that's there, it is 100% authentic, just look for that badge" ... that would be a nightmare. It's an issue with "verified" already, but cryptography is essentially magic; many in tech believe they get the nuances but don't really, and most outside of tech don't even begin to get the nuances. Would that damage people's trust in cryptography in general? Maybe?
After all, most people don't know, understand and/or care that their Whatsapp E2E is effectively broken for police and similar actors when they enable backups, because most people care about the details of these things about as much as I care about the exact things my hairdresser does to make my hair look good, which is pretty much not at all unless they want to use a chainsaw or something. If that were to be abused in a major way, that'd probably make big headlines.
I don't think that, at this point, cryptography is even generally helpful with fundamentally social problems like these, because it tends to be incredibly hard to build a product and UX around it that works for everyone and fails in a way that is somewhat understandable and actionable – the amount of work that HTTPS has required and still requires to mostly get there has been and still is huge.
Not.
Company X presents the public with communications of known public figure. Company X assures the public, via a blue checkmark, that said communications are from a "verified" account.
Shouldn't company X be liable if someone other than the known figure is making public statements?
It seems logical, fair, and a societal 'good thing', that company X should either let go of the pretense of "verified" communications, or get its act together, or pay the legal price.