The fifth Democratic primary debate showed that a cull is overdue
Thinning out the field of Democrats could focus minds on the way to Iowa’s caucuses
Missing Florida dog rings owner’s doorbell to announce its return home
Athena, a four-year old German shepherd, pulled off a Christmas Eve miracle when she rang home after 2am
A Florida dog missing for more than a week came home on Christmas Eve and rang its owner’s doorbell to announce its return.
“It was about 2.30am. She came pawing at the door, ringing the doorbell,” Brooke Comer told local television station KSBW, “which was Christmas Eve. And then that morning I woke up to – she had made it on everybody’s [doorbell] camera.”
The End of News
Americans have record-low trust in the media. They’re reading traditional news less. Platforms, too, have broken up with news organizations, making it harder for them to attract readers to their stories. Many 20th-century media companies are outmoded in a landscape where independent sites, influencers, and podcasters are finding large, passionate audiences, especially among adults under 30. Surveying this landscape recently, my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, unsparingly , “The ‘Mainstream Media’ has already lost.”
I feel the same way. We are living through a period of deep distrust in institutions, which many Americans feel no longer serve their interests. There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets. Those who reject traditional news sources feel that something needs to change and that legacy media organizations must find ways to reconnect with audiences, listen to them, and win back their trust. The question is where to begin.
Last week, I came across a paper by Julia Angwin. Angwin is an award-winning investigative reporter and the founder of the news organizations the Markup and Proof News. She’s known for her data-driven reporting on privacy, surveillance, and algorithmic bias. As a recent Harvard Shorenstein fellow, Angwin spent a year studying journalism’s trust crisis and how the media might reverse the trend. She argues that the industry can learn a lot from the creators and YouTubers who not only have found big audiences online, but have managed to foster the very trust that the mainstream media has lost. Because of this work, Angwin is in a unique position to diagnose some of the problems in the traditional media ecosystem while, crucially, understanding the work necessary to produce great journalism. I wanted to talk with her to get a sense of what the media can learn from the creator class.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Charlie Warzel: The paper establishes that there are three pillars to trust: People need to convince others of their ability, their benevolence (or that they’re acting in good faith), and their integrity. And you argue that creators, who have to build audiences from scratch, are doing so with an eye toward these trust-building principles, whereas traditional media takes their trust for granted.
Julia Angwin: There’s also the issue of how, in our current media environment, audiences confront our work—these pieces of content—in ways that are completely isolated from the brand. You can have reporter bios and ethics policies, but most readers are not going to visit your pages to read them. So often the experience is just “I saw it on Facebook,” or some version of “I saw it online.”
Warzel: Right, the experience is information sporadically populated in a feed and not a relationship between a journalist and an audience.
Angwin: That’s what led me to really get interested in creators. Any little bit of credibility they have, they tell you up front. Even if it’s a makeup artist on TikTok who’s huge, she’ll tell you her bona fides, like that she’s worked at Ulta or some beauty store. They like to lead with credentials, and then they demonstrate their expertise: I’ve tried seven different eyeshadows so you can figure out which one is the best one. This is a key distinction from journalism. What journalism often does is, it tells you in the beginning which eyeshadow is the best. The headline will be like X Is the Best Eyeshadow, and the lead spells out the conclusion and what the piece will argue—you don’t get to the evidence until closer to the bottom.
Creators flip it. They start with the question: Which one’s the best? And then they show people, trotting out the evidence. They don’t always draw a conclusion, and sometimes that is more engaging for an audience. It builds credibility. And so it is just an entirely flipped model that I think journalism really has to start thinking about.
Warzel: The creator presentation you’re describing sounds much more prosecutorial to me. It feels like how lawyers do opening arguments—We are going to show you this, we are going to show you this, we are going to show you this. And by the end, you will believe this about my client. Right? This is actually pretty time-tested; it’s how lawyers build trust with an audience of 12 strangers.
Angwin: It’s also similar to the scientific method. You start with a hypothesis, and you say, I’m going to try to prove this. You have a hypothesis, and then you’re going to test that. And it’s not a neutral hypothesis, right? A hypothesis comes from experience and having an opinion on something, just like the prosecutor has a point of view.
Warzel: In your paper there’s a quote that spoke to me from Sam Denby, a YouTuber. He said, “We walk through the evidence to get to the point. Sometimes we don’t even give a full point, but let people come to it themselves.” One of the fundamental things that I’ve noticed from creators versus traditional news organizations is that there’s not always this rush to be so declarative. Podcasts, for example, are quite discursive. Journalists are supposed to provide answers, but there’s something audiences respect when they hear creators and news influencers analyzing and discussing an issue, even when it’s not conclusive. My guess is that audiences appreciate when they feel like they’re being trusted to listen without being lectured. I feel like it has become harder for traditional journalists to frame their work without sounding overly certain when describing a world that’s often surprising and contradictory.
Angwin: It’s worth looking at YouTube-video titles, because YouTube is really the most well-developed creator space. It’s the ecosystem that allows creators to make the most money. Look at YouTube titles, and you’ll see that a lot of their headlines have question marks. They ask a question; they don’t answer a question. And that is exactly the opposite of most newsroom headlines. News organizations tend to have a very maximalist approach—What is our most incredible finding? How can we just make the sexiest headline? And audiences have learned to mistrust that, because it’s been abused by places that put up clickbait. But even when it’s not abused, the truth is almost always more nuanced than a headline can capture. I think asking questions and framing work that way actually opens up a space for more engagement with the audience. It allows them to participate in the discovery. And the discovery—of new things, of new facts, of new ideas—as you know, is actually the most fun part of journalism.
Warzel: I think that participation is such a key part of this. You can see the more malevolent version of this on the far right and in the conspiracy industrial complex. QAnon is participatory media. Audiences play a role in the MAGA cinematic universe of grievance over “wokeness.” But what does this participatory stuff look like on the traditional-media side?
Angwin: In the creator community, there’s this incredible policing, which is not always good. But all the creators I talked to say that, basically, as soon as you put up a video on YouTube or TikTok, there are comments immediately, and if you have something wrong, they’re telling you. If you don’t respond and say, “I’m fixing it” or address it, you lose trust.
[Read: The flattening machine ]
Essentially, creators have established mechanisms for having accountability interactions with their audiences and with other creators. And it can go awry, and there is certainly creator drama that is sometimes created just to juice views. But I think largely they feel responsible to respond to their community in a way that journalists are not required to, and, in fact, are discouraged from doing. A lot of newsrooms have gotten rid of comment sections, because it’s actually really expensive to moderate them, and time-consuming. On social media, journalists don’t always have the freedom to respond when people critique them, or their editors tell them not to get involved. One reason that people feel so alienated from journalism is that they see these overly declarative headlines, and then when they try to engage, they get stonewalled.
Warzel: This speaks to a broader concern I have, which you address in the paper. You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t.
Angwin: It’s a terrible irony. I think it’s worth noting how audiences are now deeply attuned—rightly so—to profit motives. The reality is that most creators are their own stand-alone small businesses. And this reads as inherently more trustworthy than a large brand or a huge media conglomerate. Audiences aren’t wrong to see this. Plenty of media organizations are owned by billionaires, and those people have their own politics. And that is potentially a detriment to authenticity that journalists then have to overcome. I’m not naive: Creators are performing authenticity too, but there is less to overcome in this sense.
Warzel: What’s ironic to me is that you have this audience that is rightly suspicious of profit motive and billionaire owners, and that sits alongside the creator model and influencer culture, which is very nakedly enthusiastic about getting the bag. In creator land, fans of influencers seem genuinely delighted to hear that their favorites are making big money. I guess maybe this is a type of transparency.
Angwin: That transparency is so important. The one thing that creators get called out the most about is trying to hide a sponsorship. So there is a bit of policing on transparency going on.
Warzel: I want to ask you more about how creators engage with their audiences. I see this with the influencers I follow. It’s a performance in some sense, of course, but it also feels like there’s some genuine work of rolling up one’s sleeves that signals to the audience that they have a real respect for them and their opinions. And that contrasts with the “voice of God” feeling that authoritative journalism sometimes projects.
Angwin: Accountability is so important. It is a problem in our industry if somebody gets something wrong and the audience doesn’t see that they’ve suffered any consequences for that.
One of the things that a lot of the creators told me is that they commit an hour or two to engaging with the first comments on their videos to make sure that they’re seen giving the community a feeling that they’re being heard. Little things like this could begin to make a difference in journalism, like investing in comment moderators. But it’s not just having comments—it’s really seeing them as serving a real function. I’m not sure what the right mechanism is, but audiences want some kind of mechanism for redress. People who feel like they’ve been harmed or wronged by some coverage want and expect to be taken seriously.
Warzel: There’s one part of me that feels like we’re in a moment of low trust in institutions in general, which means media organizations are swimming against the current. I realize there are no magical solutions here to restore trust, but I’m curious what advice you’d give to legacy media right now.
Angwin: Three things. First is understanding these elements of trust that we need. The audience needs to feel like they have reason to believe you’re benevolent. They have to have reason to believe in your ability and expertise. They have to have a reason to understand where you’re coming from—meaning no more view from nowhere —and they need to know what they can do if you’re wrong.
None of these things right now are being addressed inside the stories themselves. We have to understand that these stories travel on their own, and they need to be embedded with stand-alone reasons for skeptical audiences to trust the people who produced them. The way I’m experimenting with this in my own work is by adding an “ingredients” label in each story. The label says what the hypothesis is and what the findings are and the limitations of the reporting and analysis. I’m not sure that that’s the right model, but it’s an experiment in attempting to do this work. Being clear about those elements of trust in the story, as opposed to just relying on a brand, is my most important finding.
Item two is that actually we have to start taking creators seriously—especially the ones who are doing journalistic work. We need to stop worrying about how to protect our own brands and individual institutions and focus on what we can do to make sure that important, trustworthy information is flowing to the public. One thing I’m doing that’s been really interesting and fruitful is building journalistic tools that creators can use to do their own investigations. For example, the YouTuber Hank Green did a 30-minute video about a tool I built that showed how many of his YouTube videos had been stolen to build Claude’s generative-AI model. Now, if you look at my own channel, the views are pathetic, but because I’ve built tools that other people used, it’s become an extension of my journalism, and my work has been seen by millions. I believe that journalists have to expand their thinking. The question should be, How do I get my information out there? And maybe an answer is: It doesn’t always have to be delivered by me.
Lastly, I just have to put in a word for the end of objectivity. I think that the main problem of where we are right now when it comes to trust is this idea that we have to be pure and neutral and have no thoughts, but just be receptacles for facts. The more that we can transparently bring our expertise and intelligence to the task, the better it will be for everyone.
What would a government shutdown mean for you? Here’s what we know.
President-elect Donald Trump, with help from Elon Musk, quashed a bipartisan spending bill two days before a deadline to avert a full government shutdown. Here’s what a shutdown would mean for you if no deal is reached.
Putin Tells Reporters He’s Eager to Meet Trump at ‘Marathon’ End of Year Press Conference: ‘I Will Be Ready’
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Thursday he was ready to meet with President-elect Donald Trump during what CNN described as a “marathon” end-of-the-year press conference in Moscow.
During the presser, Putin discussed topics from his country’s war on Ukraine, the fall of his ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and a second Trump administration.
According to CNN, Putin was asked about his plans to speak to or meet with Trump by Keir Simmons with NBC News. In his reply, Putin indirectly disputed reporting from Bob Woodward that he and Trump had spoken as many as seven times since January 2021 – when Trump left office.
Putin said he was “ready” to meet with Trump.
“You asked what we can offer, or what I can offer to the newly elected President Trump when we meet,” Putin told Simmons. “First of all, I don’t know when we will meet. Because he hasn’t said anything about it. I haven’t spoken to him at all in over four years. Of course, I am ready for this at any time, and I will be ready for a meeting if he wants it.”
Putin also disputed he was in a weakened position to negotiate, given his country has been at war with Ukraine for nearly three years and his strongest ally in the Middle East had been overthrown earlier this month. Putin said:
You said that this conversation will take place in a situation when I am in some weakened state… And you, and those people who pay your salaries in the US, would very much like Russia to be in a weakened position. I adhere to a different point of view. I believe that Russia has become much stronger over the past two or three years. Why? Because we are becoming a truly sovereign country, we are already hardly dependent on anyone.
Putin further portrayed his military’s campaign against Kyiv as having been successful.
Trump told a crowd of conservatives at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix on Sunday that he was ready to meet with Putin to discuss ending the war in Europe.
“President Putin said that he wants to meet with me as soon as possible,” Trump said. “So we have to wait for this, but we have to end that war. That war is horrible, horrible.”
President Joe Biden slammed Russia on Thursday after Russian forces bombarded a number of Ukrainian population centers on Christmas. Biden said :
In the early hours of Christmas, Russia launched waves of missiles and drones against Ukrainian cities and critical energy infrastructure. The purpose of this outrageous attack was to cut off the Ukrainian people’s access to heat and electricity during winter and to jeopardize the safety of its grid. Let me be clear: the Ukrainian people deserve to live in peace and safety, and the United States and the international community must continue to stand with Ukraine until it triumphs over Russia’s aggression. In recent months, the United States has provided Ukraine with hundreds of air defense missiles, and more are on the way. I have directed the Department of Defense to continue its surge of weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and the United States will continue to work tirelessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in its defense against Russian forces.
The post Putin Tells Reporters He’s Eager to Meet Trump at ‘Marathon’ End of Year Press Conference: ‘I Will Be Ready’ first appeared on Mediaite .
Laura Loomer Calls Out Elon Musk’s ‘Retaliation’ After Having Her X Account Locked: ‘So Much for Free Speech’
AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey.
Laura Loomer accused Elon Musk of “totalitarian” behavior after she and other critics of the X owner were stripped of their verification badges after criticizing Musk’s comments on American workers and foreign H-1B visa holders.
Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and loyal supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, was locked out of her X account and stripped of her verification badge (she has more than one million followers) after criticizing Musk. New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and the pro-Trump ConservativePAC were also stripped of their verification badges.
“[Musk] is now admitting it’s retaliation,” Loomer wrote on Friday in response to a message put out by Musk.
According to Musk, accounts that are “found to be engaged in coordinated attacks to spam target accounts with mute/blocks will themselves be categorized – correctly – as spam.”
“Live by the spam, die by the spam,” he wrote.
“Translation: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” Mario Nawfal wrote in response, to which Musk simply said, “Yes.”
“So calling out mass migration is ‘a stupid game?’” she wrote . “So much for free speech. Quite totalitarian if you ask me.”
In an earlier post, Loomer accused Musk of targeting her for questioning his ties to China and criticizing his support for H1B visas.
“I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy,” she wrote . “Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.”
Loomer argued salaries paid under work visas are not livable wages and Musk’s stance stands against Trump’s hardline immigration promises.
Musk dismissed Loomer as simply “trolling for attention.”
“Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore,” he wrote in a Thursday post.
Musk has found himself facing backlash from conservatives over his views on American workers. He endorsed a post that said the right is split into the “tech right” and “right right,” with the former believing Americans workers are too “retarded” to perform some tech jobs, meaning they need work visas to bring in foreign help.
The post read:
So basically the right split into two factions, tech right and right right, and the tech right is like “hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs,” and the right right was like “no you need to hire americans,” and the tech right is like “but you guys are retarded,” and the right right is like “well you don’t train us,” and the tech right is like “you can’t outtrain being retarded,” and while all this was going on we learned some people *really* don’t like Indians.
“That pretty much sums it up,” Musk wrote in response.
The post Laura Loomer Calls Out Elon Musk’s ‘Retaliation’ After Having Her X Account Locked: ‘So Much for Free Speech’ first appeared on Mediaite .
Morning Joe’s Sam Stein Warns Trump Will Give Putin ‘Benefit Of Doubt’ To Leave Ukraine With ‘Take It Or Leave It’ Peace Deal
Morning Joe contributor Sam Stein warned that Ukraine could be handed a “take it or leave it” peace deal when President-elect Donald Trump enters office, citing the Republican’s past amiable relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump, due to take office on January 20, promised to rapidly resolve the war in Ukraine. So far, however, he has not clarified any specific plan beyond insisting both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agree to halt the conflict.
Retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s newly appointed Ukraine envoy, told Fox News on December 18 that both parties appeared ready to begin peace talks. He also emphasized that Trump, by virtue of his dealmaking reputation, is well-positioned to orchestrate a settlement to end the war.
On Friday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC, host Jonathan Levine asked Stein about whether Trump’s “relationship” with Putin would impact what a peace negotiation and outcome would look like. Stein responded by arguing that Russia was at its weakest point but that Trump would give Putin the “benefit of doubt” and offer him a better deal that he would get under President Joe Biden.
[It] was always the Biden administration’s line… to have Ukraine at the table. It is their country. We can’t have direct negotiations with Russia.Donald Trump is different than Joe Biden. He’ll take a different approach here. He’ll have direct negotiations or talks at least with Putin. Zelensky will be included, but my sense is that they’ll probably end up giving him a take it or leave it type deal.
What is interesting here, just the state that Russia is in, heading into the negotiations. I’m sure Putin imagined he would have more of an upper hand [in the conflict] at this juncture. Surely he thought… but what we have seen over the last couple of weeks is really a staggering setback for Russia across the world – what is happening in Syria, Iran, their economic situation. If you read the headlines out of Russia it is fairly abysmal. All that said, it is not a great hand that Putin has to play and as David said, you know, the outgoing Biden administration is pumping weapons into Ukraine and weighing the possibility of additional sanctions to weaken Russia further.
Trump could undo all of this, of course, but that would be a fairly politically precarious step to take right out of the gate. And so, yeah, I’m curious what he says directly with Putin, but if history is any guide, you imagine he’s going to give Putin the benefit of the doubt, try to get a deal done, because he’s on record saying he can get it done so quickly and then hand it to Zelensky and say take it or leave it.
Watch via MSNBC.
The post Morning Joe’s Sam Stein Warns Trump Will Give Putin ‘Benefit Of Doubt’ To Leave Ukraine With ‘Take It Or Leave It’ Peace Deal first appeared on Mediaite .
If Everyone’s a Publisher, Do We Still Need Professional Journalists? (Yes, We Certainly Do)
AP Photo/Rockford Register Star, Max Gersh
In the not-so-distant past, our information ecosystem was dominated by a select group of gatekeepers — major newspapers, television networks, and respected institutions — that offered us the rough draft of history. This centralized model, prevalent throughout most of the 20th century through the early 2010s, provided society with a semblance of a shared narrative. While perhaps elitist, it yielded coherence and a collective understanding of world events.
That era is over. The advent of the internet and the rise of social media ushered in a more democratic but also fragmented and wildly chaotic media landscape. The fact that anyone with an internet connection can publish content has led to a proliferation of voices and perspectives. Sounds good, right?
While this democratization has its merits, it yielded a cacophony where misinformation and even aggressively malicious disinformation absolutely thrives, in which the concept of a unified truth is elusive. Bad faith players – think Russian uber-villain Vladimir Putin – are exploiting this landscape to convince people in the West to burn down their own house.
The role of journalism in this new environment is under scrutiny. The younger generation, immersed in a digital ecosystem teeming with stimuli — from social media feeds to streaming platforms — often perceives news brands as just another voice. This indifference challenges journalism’s relevance and raises critical questions about its future.
The traditional gatekeeping model depended on high barriers to entry. Establishing a newspaper or television station required substantial capital, infrastructure, and in some countries regulatory approval. These constraints limited the number of players and allowed for the enforcement of journalistic standards and the cultivation of public trust.
Essentially, it enabled a certainly oligarchy – educated people, mostly of similar backgrounds and schooling – to gently nudge the publics in the democratic world toward a shared understanding. Was this elitist? Perhaps. Was it brainwashing? No, we wouldn’t go that far. Was it helpful? Quite possibly. It certainly yielded some societal cohesion.
With the digital revolution, this paradigm collapsed. The cost of entry vanished, enabling a multitude of content creators to enter the fray. Social media platforms, far from acting as gatekeepers, became gatewatchers, allowing information to flow freely but without vetting. Algorithms now dictate what people see, prioritizing content that is designed to keep you scrolling for just one more thing — often sensationalism over substance and engagement over accuracy. So what if the content is lies or meant to agitate you?
Disinformation spreads faster than truth, and bad actors — whether political operatives or conspiracy theorists — exploit this system to sow chaos. The result is an environment that reflects not a shared reality but the worst tendencies of human nature: tribalism, impulsiveness, and aggression.
One might have hoped that the public, recognizing how much fakery abounds, will flock to trusted news organizations. But something else happened instead; in the hyper-polarized, toxic and angry environment, fact-based journalism became itself a political position.
In the boiling cauldron of distrust that is our discourse, trust in media institutions among the wider public has eroded; one can envision how, in another generation, as today’s non-news-consuming teenagers take over the reins, that role will vanish altogether.
The crisis of confidence has coincided with a shattering of the media’s business model, which had been based on advertising revenue supplemented by subscription fees — because in the digital space so much content is available for free.
Online advertising dollars have largely migrated to tech giants like Google and Facebook; many media outlets have erected paywalls in response, but subscription fatigue is a growing problem. Consumers cannot realistically afford to subscribe to every news source they encounter. And the younger generation poses a particular challenge in this model. Having grown up in an era where information is abundant and often free, they struggle to see the value in paying for news. Moreover, they gravitate toward interactive, visual, and concise content, often found on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Long-form, in-depth journalism struggles to capture their attention, and the skepticism younger audiences feel toward institutions in general extends to mainstream media.
Some argue that the old gatekeeping system was controlling and exclusionary. In its absence, we are free to explore a diversity of perspectives. But without credible standards or a shared understanding of truth, dysfunction soon arrives.
The current situation is leading to a highly probable outcome that will create more inequality, not less. A minority of the public will pay top dollar for quality news and will be as informed as before – but with even better outcomes, because the digital world offers vastly more robust access to data and other information. This elite journalism environment will connect the dots in a manner that strives for professionalism and fairness, and that will give its recipients informational advantages ranging from smart investments to important global trends. Its consumers will be as residents of a villa in a jungle.
The masses of people in that jungle who do not want to pay for high-quality journalism will be exposed to whatever the market throws at them – extreme-left mobs or far-right rabble-rousers, Putin-engineered bots or commercial interests or conspiracy theories. It’ll be very democratic and will scramble the brains of its consumers – who will be most of the people—and will make them even more resentful of the elite.
In such an environment, the two groups will be increasingly alienated, and the results of democratic elections will become ever-more-bizarre, with the elite doing its best to either wall itself off from the masses – or manipulate them. It is an ugly, dystopian scenario.
If we want to avoid it, we must explore why so much of the public no longer sees value in professional reporting. Why has the social contract between journalists and society broken down? Journalists may see themselves as vital to democracy, but what does that mean if the next generation disagrees – or doesn’t care? If journalism has a mission but few believe in it, what’s the point? If a tiny elite believe in it, is that enough?
We say journalism must adapt.
Some aspects of the adaptation are obvious, yet bear repeating: News organizations need to leverage the platforms and formats that resonate with contemporary audiences – multimedia storytelling, interactive graphics, and engaging social media strategies. Flexible monetization strategies and innovative business models are essential too, from micropayments for individual articles to bundled subscriptions across multiple outlets. But there are several other avenues to pursue, at a societal level – if our societies wish to avoid the terrible schism we foresee.
First, media literacy is vital. A better informed public, equipped to navigate disinformation and critically assess sources, would reestablish the market for professional journalism in a way that would aid human progress.
For that to happen, education systems must prioritize critical thinking, logic, and discernment, empowering citizens to make informed decisions in a fragmented media environment. This is not being done. Our youngsters are basically being told that a Pulitzer-prizewinning global investigation into the modern slave traffic and the stock tips of an influencer with no domain expertise but plenty of followers are worth the same. In the name of non-elitism, no one is prodding our youth to pay some attention to the former.
Rebuilding trust is equally important. Transparency, acknowledgment of errors, and a commitment to impartiality can help news organizations regain credibility. This is a particular challenge when audiences see the media as elites and part of the problem. It is not enough to tell the audiences what we think they need to know. Engaging with such audiences through open dialogues and community involvement is needed. We cannot dismiss them as deplorable.
Third, societies that care should invest in publicly funded journalism. Almost every country in Europe maintains a BBC-like public broadcaster dedicated to high-level, fair-minded journalism – independent of the government and trying, at least, to steer clear of political bias. This should be considered in the United States as well, as the invisible hand of the free market is proving callously indifferent to the information needs and education of our citizens.
We fully realize that many will ask who appointed anyone as gatekeepers or as the guardians of democracy. Our answer is this: When you are flying into a storm, you want your pilot to be trained, smart, and serious. You don’t expect the pilot to ask the passengers to vote on whether you all should keep going or turn back. When navigating our increasingly complex world, rational people probably know they want those same qualities in their guide. There’s a word for that guide, and the word is journalism.
Shawn McIntosh is Chair of the M.A. in Multiplatform Journalism Program at the American University of Armenia, and has lectured in journalism at Columbia University and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Dan Perry was the top AP editor in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Caribbean, was chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and is the author of two books on the Middle East; follow him at danperry.substack.com .
The post If Everyone’s a Publisher, Do We Still Need Professional Journalists? (Yes, We Certainly Do) first appeared on Mediaite .
Trump Confuses With Odd Truth Social Post About Bill Gates, Mar-a-Lago and New Year’s Eve: ‘We Miss You and X!’
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
President-elect Donald Trump baffled users on social media with a new post either promoting a New Year’s Eve bash at his Palm Beach residence, Mar-a-Lago, or asking about someone’s whereabouts, possibly Elon Musk.
Trump wrote , “Where are you? When are you coming to the “Center of the Universe,” Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT”
“X” is the name of Elon Musk’s youngest child, who has been by the tech billionaire’s side throughout much of his time advising the Trump transition.
Screenshot
The social media post got immediate attention for Trump’s apparent claim that Microsoft founder and tech billionaire Bill Gates had requested to visit Mar-a-Lago, which would make him the next in a series of tech mogul to have visited with Trump in Palm Beach since his election. Gates, who backed Vice President Kamala Harris with a private $50 million donation in the 2024 election, congratulated Trump after his win.
Trump’s message appears to be constructed in a manner that indicates it was intended as a private message, perhaps to Musk.
“We miss you and x!” is the only curious clue that suggests this is a message for Musk, who is currently embroiled in something of an internecine fight with MAGA influencers over H1-B visas and alleged American mediocrity.
The post Trump Confuses With Odd Truth Social Post About Bill Gates, Mar-a-Lago and New Year’s Eve: ‘We Miss You and X!’ first appeared on Mediaite .
FBI was not allowed to brief President Joe Biden on evidence that suggested Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak, ex-scientist for US intelligence agency claims
The FBI was not allowed to brief the US President on evidence that suggested Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak, it was claimed last