With ads for print media down, the news media is poised to cut their reporting staffs, a move that Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times, November 6, 2016, finds ill-timed given the flood of fake news in online venues. Bogus stories about the election run along side stories from the reputable press. Journalists and others are worried about the collapse of the print news business in the face of burgeoning lies in the political realm,. Rutenberg says the cure is good journalism which depends on the industry’s success in creating innovative and profitable business strategies.
It’s not just the decline in print journalism that poses a threat to democracy writes Timothy B. Lee, Vox, November 6, 2016, but the way news materializes online. Lee says most go to social media, mainly Facebook, to access news on a feed. To get stories on the feed, reporters are encouraged to produce “clickbait” articles that seduce the readers but contain soft content often one-sided or inaccurate. Facebook, Lee claims, exacerbates the problem by uses algorithms that value “engagement” over fairness, accuracy or importance.