Pew: Republicans, young adults now nearly as likely to trust info from social media as from national news outlets

When national outlets release stories with the same level of verification as the typical Facebook post, this should not surprise us. The trend of mistrust really accelerated after Dan Rather's false story about Bush's national guard record. Sadly, things have gotten worse in the newsroom since then. We need to be careful that we not become cynical of every news release, but we also need to be willing to hold journalists (on both sides of the political spectrum) accountable for promoting stories that cannot be supported. One positive about the social media presence is that now we are more likely to find out about the media distortions than we were 35 years ago. Back then, if Paul Harvey didn't correct a falsehood, we seldom even knew about it. Sure, some people had access to Cal Thomas, but you had to pay for that. I get the impression that some would like us to go back to those days when the media could lie and no one would know it.

My take is that it started with teens, and I remember it being infuriating when I'd be trying to pass on wisdom, and they'd be countering with some nonsense they saw from some influencer. I also saw it a LOT with COVID-19, where friends would be peddling utter nonsense they got from the fever swamp. I even got in trouble a bit when I responded to one thing my wife had received on Facebook; the claim from the fever swamp was that it was horrible collusion that executives at the Mayo Clinic were also key players/directors in other areas, and my response was "if not these guys, who exactly would you recommend?"

(one example; former CEO was a member of a U.N. panel. OK, would you rather have another representative from England's NHS or something?)

The adherence to hierarchies of evidence has always been tenuous--I remember being appalled when a quiz I took in college had questions gleaned from Redbook (what's next, the Weekly World News?)--but it seems that these days, the fever swamp is rapidly approaching parity with traditional information/knowledge sources.

At one point, it's understandable--it's not like the NIH under Fauci distinguished themselves for wisdom during COVID, for example--but at another point, it's terrifying.

This issue is more complicated than it appears.

On the one hand, legacy media outlets, such as the NYT and CNN, are legacy for a reason and are typically the most reliable sources on the basic facts of most reportage. Their training and resources remain second to none.

Leaving aside the issue of leftist bias, however, there's also the fact that their very status makes them more "conservative" (in terms of disposition, not sociopolitically), and a lot of major stories I've seen lately have been broken on social media, such as Twitter, long before they were seen as significant enough/legit enough to get MSM coverage. That's a huge advantage of social media: they typically get to stuff first, or cover issues that the MSM doesn't see as important or would simply rather not cover for a variety of reasons.

Additionally, through my own experience, I've learned to be skeptical of the conclusions of official news in general. I often share with my students, I've personally been involved with a few major news stories in my life that have gone national. In both cases, I was told by people I knew actually involved in the cases that the facts that were being reported weren't exactly accurate. The true details were being deliberately obscured/massaged to protect individuals involved from blame and to soothe any concerns on the part of the public. I tell my students I found it an unlikely coincidence that those two just happened to be rare instances.

I thought of this recently when I read that story going around about the museum worker who threw away the beer can art exhibit or whatever it was. The worker happened to be a random "temp" worker, not the normal employee, the article was careful to say. I thought to myself, how convenient... and unnecessary to add. More likely they wanted to protect a longtime employee.

Note that none of the specific examples I've given here are malicious--they're actually well-intentioned--but nonetheless they are instances of deliberate misleading/dishonesty with the public and appear to be very common. I suspect this has only gotten worse and with different motivations as the journalist class considers the result of news stories and their role in shaping society more important than a commitment to honesty. The downside of all this is I think a lot of people, right and left, have intuited that the major media sources are not exactly to be blindly trusted. This makes additional space for fringe sights and social media shared news.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but just some thoughts I've had over the years. It's, as I said, a complex issue, and one that takes careful navigation. Sometimes social media gets it right and gets it first. Sometimes not.