Who can you trust
Who can you trust
The internet has garbage, but it also has tons of thoughtful writers covering the built environment.
Independent writers will continue to thrive as corporate outlets hemorrhage trust and readers.
This is true across all genres. It doesn't matter if the focus is local (town planning & public safety) or national (war & economics). I’d bet that the only exceptions to the trend are when independent voices contribute to corporate outlets.
Walter Lippmann, the father of modern journalism, said the "bewildered herd" can't be trusted to process information. He said that knowledgeable elites guide journalists to tell us what's important, what's true, what's useful, etc.
100 years later, people are getting wiser.
A common defense of corporate media is that there’s a lot of crap among independent writers. The worst outcome of a new (and possibly disruptive) alternative is often a description of the status quo. Since the status quo is total crap, an alternative that is partial crap is an improvement.
But seriously, the internet is amazing. It only takes seconds to validate material. Not that you as a reader will agree with all of an author's conclusions, but at least you’ll know what's real. We can't say that about the corporate press. They’ve already filtered the who, what, when, where, why, how for the greater good.
Curious about that Walter Lippmann character? Read this if you haven’t already:
Most of my subscribers read Urbanism Speakeasy in their email inbox. That’s fine, but I want to make sure you’re aware that Substack is home to a ton of writers from all walks of life. Hop in their search bar and look for content that interests you.
Here are some of the independent writers I’m supporting. Their pubs are below to make subscribing easy:
While the internet is indeed amazing for its ability to fact check, the internet is not so great at putting facts in context and helping people understand how the pieces fit together. The information overload causes a lot of people to tune out all news, not knowing who to trust or how to reconcile facts that seem to contradict each other. Ideally people would have the time to read different perspectives and come to their own conclusions, but in our capitalist society where people are increasingly crunched for time and so many things demand our attention, a lot of people want someone to curate the news for them to put the facts into perspective. Traditional media are definitely flawed because they all have an editorial slant and they conveniently choose which facts they think their readers ought to see, but that's inherent in any outlet that curates the news for you. I would argue that the problem with traditional media has more to do with its dependence on corporate or government funding. We should have taxpayer funded journalism where people get an allowance and get to choose who they trust. And eligible news outlets should have to uphold some basic standards of integrity.
Rodes.pub/Urbanism
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cY1R26FlscZCZ9OYMbbI8jV-6oEf1wANDqYY_xUxSok/