Larry D. Lauer

Not too long ago the news media world in the United States was composed of a handful of television networks, a number of large national and local newspapers, and a few wire services.  Many of these outlets maintained news bureaus in other US cities as well as around world. And most were commercially successful. This enabled large staffs of reporters and editors to operate on the principle that all news sources must be confirmed, and all stories  thoroughly fact checked. In fact, this was pretty much the cardinal principle of professional journalism. But that was then, and this is now. 

Today, with the advent of 24/7 cable, news aggregators, bloggers, social media commentaries, and citizen i-phone reporters, the news media world has become a dramatically different landscape.  Cable channels now promote political biases without apology, bloggers have no editors to satisfy, aggregators create their own policies for selecting  stories, newspapers have been significantly reduced in reporting and editing capacity,  the major networks have lost audience numbers and revenue, capacity to cover international news has been reduced, and consumers are now on their own to make sense out of clutter.

The danger in all this is that consumers can now select their news sources based only on what they want to hear. They can feed their biases without making any attempt to reach out to new or other ideas. And so they might  not ever learn how to separate fact from fiction. Or, how to recognize misleading, out-of-context statements.  Over time, this kind of unedited “news” can exacerbate and reinforce an already polarized society. And since extreme statements make headlines every day, the news media eventually can become an accomplice in the crime!  

Right now the only answer seems to be educating consumers to take responsibility for regulating and editing their own news consumption.  How else in today’s digital world will they ever achieve thoughtful understanding and balanced thinking?  To be sure, in this new and digital world few in the news media are any longer in a position to protect the public’s interest.

But, if citizens must now become their own news editors, where will they learn how to do it… or why it’s so important?  This year, that will be the ultimate core question for me and the students in my “media revolutions ” class. And because democracies are certain to flounder without a well-informed citizenry, it also might be the core question for our society as well.