I think it’s easy, too easy, to say something like “all mainstream media is biased and untrustworthy.”
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
I don't trust any of them entirely (including these two) but I use Reuters and AP for world news, they have commercial reasons to at least combat bias since they provide the news to the other orgs who then add their own ~~bias~~ commentary.
In reality I think the answer is much the same as it has always been, read the same thing from different sources and apply some critical thinking to it.
Unbiased media is simply not possible, you could 100% tell the entire story about whatever story you are telling and still be biased by the stories you don't run.
As for what we do about young people, education on media literacy in schools would help though whether already pressed schools end up been responsible for yet another thing is a good idea is going to vary from country to country but we should be preparing people for the society they are going to be living in better and that always comes back to education.
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
Now who would want that?