But was there any real guarantee that "old media" was more reliable? Weren't we just getting one view of the world which we assumed was true?
I agree, personalized propaganda is a nightmare.
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Well, part of that depends on your definitions of "new" and "old" media.
Some things can be readily compared - easy to compare the Washington Post of today to Washington Post of the 1970s.
But many of today's subreddits, facebook pages and 4chan boards don't have a direct equivalent in the 1970s.
Comparing 1970s WaPo vs 2018 WaPo will give you a different result to comparing 1970s WaPo vs (2018 WaPo + r/LateStageCapitalism + r/The_Donald)
> But many of today's subreddits, facebook pages and 4chan boards don't have a direct equivalent in the 1970s.
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter ()!
But seriously, The Birth of a Nation came out somewhat before r/RarePepes. Michael Moore films also (barely) predate social media. And people were reading about JFK assassination conspiracies and fake moon landings way before "new" media was around.
() The equivalent to a niche social media group was subscribing to a niche political newsletter.
With the old media everyone got the same story. It wasn't assumed to be true, because you knew who was saying this (it's hard for a large newpaper to hide their political affiliation), and the news piece was judged by other reporters on different papers and people you personally knew. Since you all were getting the same news, you could discuss them and argue about their validity. Now this just doesn't happen. Everyone gets a different news feed, which partly is the reason we need comment sections so much. And comment sections and forums were ok before the widespread use of mass censoring based on NLP or manual identification of political bias, pre-fabricated conversations, selective de-ranking and all other kinds of trickery. Simply put, it used to be that internet content was purely the result of individual personal effort, so there was something to trust behind every article, because you knew that someone was putting effort into it and getting almost nothing material in return.
Now the validity of news pieces only boils down to trust, and I trust the established media more than random strangers and small companies trying to make a quick buck, because the established media
can't hide lying and they have something to lose, their trustworthingness and billions of dollars. The same cannot be said for anonymous or pseudomymous internet companies that for all you know were created yesterday and will vanish tomorrow or after the next elections perhaps.