Right in the centre - Information and truth need to line up
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- Published on Thursday, February 2, 2017
By Ken Waddell
The Neepawa Banner
How people get their information is undergoing a huge transformation. That is no surprise given that everyone from toddlers to the oldest of senior citizens have access to the world at their finger tips. With a phone, a laptop or a regular computer, the news of the world is more readily available than at any other time in human history. The old phrase listing of news, weather and sports has been lengthened to include everything from recipes to recreation, from fashion to fatalities.
The problem is that with the flood of information, comes the task of sorting truth from fiction. There has always been some false information in the news and information stream. Now, it is very hard to sort out truth from fiction. The internet is rife with input from people who wish to purposefully mis-inform. To a more traditional seeker of news like myself, it is appalling that people will go out of their way in some perverse way to mislead. It used to be called lying. Lies have now adopted many new titles, from fake news, to spin, to misinformation, to alternate facts.
There is a huge move afoot to get news out first. Newspapers used to 鈥渟top the presses鈥� to re-jig a front page to break a new story or update an earlier one. Radio somewhat changed that, as news could be updated on very short notice. TV raised the bar in the news game, as they could do on-the-spot coverage providing video footage of events as they unfolded. Now everyone who clutches a smart phone can be a mini TV producer.
That鈥檚 all well and good but all this wonderful progress, and it is wonderful, has accelerated the frenzy to be first with the news or to be the most sensational. Damn the facts! Facts just get in the way of a hurry up story. Just this past week, a world renowned columnist dashed of a story about the Quebec massacre. Trouble is, he got it wrong. He said that we now knew the ethnicity of the shooter. Only trouble was the police didn鈥檛 know at that point. Furthermore, the assumed identification was wrong.
I have said many times that in the media world, we have way too many repeaters and not enough reporters. But there鈥檚 the problem. How do you afford to pay reporters? We used to hear about citizen journalism and there is now lots of it. Ordinary people covering events from the mundane to the spectacular and posting their stories on social media. There are two problems with that process. One is accuracy is tough to determine and two, nobody is getting paid to do so-called citizen journalism. The internet and other media will suck up everything a citizen journalist produces and transmit it to the world, but they won鈥檛 likely get paid
It boils down to reliability and sustainability. Whether it be newspapers, radio, TV or a web site, there has to be some income to support the spreading the news, the reporting, the photography.
Then there is reliability. How does a person know if what they are reading is the truth? It boils down to local reliability and long term reputation. The only valuable news is reliable news. If news and information isn鈥檛 reliable and verifiable, it is at best useless and at worst dangerous. It鈥檚 one thing to trust entertainment to unreliable sources. It is quite another to be adrift in a sea of misinformation about important issues.
Democracy and truth are at stake when a person consumes news and information on their way to making important decisions. That鈥檚 why news and information have to be locally sourced, it鈥檚 the only way to ensure reliability. If falsehoods will satisfy your search for information, then there are thousands of sources to wallow in. If it鈥檚 truth that we want, then the only really reliable source is local. A big part of that local content can only be found in the local newspapers. There鈥檚 a reason that local papers, both weeklies and dailies are so often quoted by electronic media, local papers are the foundation of the news and information business. Once it鈥檚 print, you can鈥檛 erase it, so it had better be correct the first time.
