journalism sucks
the assassination of truth
the first time i realized how badly journalism documented the world was after i was a chef at mehran's steakhouse. the news that followed got pretty much every fact wrong. i watched as they failed to correct the facts, while other news sources that didn't even send a journalist twisted existing wrong facts into even more wrong facts.
later on that fall when i was applying to journalism internships, i made the realization that our stock market is directly influenced by these sensationalized, badly documented stories, and our entire economy hinges on the a bunch of half-truths that make a ticker go up or down.
most of the news articles are paywalled, so nothing besides the title matters in determining the outcome of the economy.
in my documentary film class, we discussed the difference between journalism and documentary and just how hard it is to preserve truth. it made me realize that there is a third category outside of documentary and journalism – content.
the line between journalism and content has been blurring over the past decade. pent-up journalist and writer refugees continually retreat to independent mediums like substack and medium. blogs resurge as a way to get thoughts from individuals rather than collective newspapers. video journalists have moved to youtube, making suspiciously well-made content about topics that seem to be designed for views.
it was sad for me to realize that my view on the world now hinges on a few self-published memoirs, documentaries, archival papers, and stories from old people that don't see the light of google seo or the internet. that the default is not understanding truth because its buried behind ads and garbage and paywalls.
i wonder what the point of libraries is if most information that allows us to get context doesn't get printed and goes behind paywalls anyway.
i worry it'll only get worse with ai pumping more garbage. if this is purposeful, if some people want more garbage in the world to distract from the truth. i wonder if we'll forget about the magic of actually understanding the world.