Decline of Real Journalism and Fake News are Cause and Effect

These are related trends: the decline of traditional journalism and the emergence of fake news everywhere.

I’ve accidentally chronicled the decline of journalism in this blog, with occasional posts over the last 10 years. Check out the category journalism here and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, suddenly, so-called fake news is a big issue.

Is that a surprise? We’ve severely discounted the traditional processes related to editing and news values and journalistic ethics that drove our culture for most of the last century. We chose social media instead. We gave the tweet and Facebook post the same credence we used to give to the newspaper and network news.

And, voila, fake news is a problem. What do we do about it?