If you needed information about the past, you went to the library. If you needed information about the present or the future, you looked to the newspaper. The morning paper was a lengthy, meaty read, and by the time you were done with it, your thumbs were smudged with ink, and you had everything you needed to know — news, analysis, commentary, and practical knowledge.
Today, if you want political commentary you may go to a blog instead. Movie times? The theater website. New House? Trulia.com. Garage sale? Craigslist. Job? LinkedIn. Restaurant review? Yelp. Science breakthrough? Gizmodo.com. Personal ad? Match.com. Travel recommendations? Tripadvisor.com. If you want information on companies, politicians, candidates, advocacy groups and issues, sports teams, events, hobbies, etc., you go straight to the source — websites — and skip the intermediary, the newspaper.
The newspaper has lost much of its historic role as an information hub of all thatap fit to print, but it still is the main source of news. While magazine, television, and public radio journalists, and occasionally other individuals, make valuable news contributions, newspaper reporters day in and day out provide news that is unrivaled in its depth and breadth. The loss of newspaper staff at The Denver Post and other papers necessarily means less news, fewer investigations, and a more uninformed and ill-informed public. As our crisis of information, and it is a crisis, deepens, we need strong newspapers more than ever.
The information age that made us richer in knowledge is now making us poorer. The same internet that has eased access to information is enabling the proliferation of false and incomplete information. In the past, the technical and visual quality of online material was a reliable proxy for determining legitimacy. Most people were not taken in by solicitation emails from wealthy Nigerian princes thanks to their atrocious grammar and spelling.
During the last election, however, Russian Facebook posts and Twitterbots were sophisticated enough to dupe quite a few Americans. Unfortunately, itap only going to get worse. Emerging technology can alter photographs and video without leaving telltale distortions. In the future, fake news will look less like Infowars and more like National Geographic. Fact and forgery will be indistinguishable.
Determining what is true has always been a bit tricky. We assess the plausibility of news based on logic and prior knowledge, but we cannot independently verify most of what we know. We are bound by time and space and thus absent from the vast majority of important events past and present. We must rely on trustworthy intermediaries to recount and interpret what happened.
Journalists are not the only witnesses to events but they are the only ones held to specific journalistic standards in the retelling. Journalists can lose their jobs for erros and falsifications. A guy with a video camera and a website doesn’t have to try and depict multiple sides or viewpoints, only his own. He need not retract false information. If he can’t find an expert to quote, a quack will do.
And while some bloggers provide thoughtful, factually accurate commentary, it is just that, commentary. Good commentary is useful, but it is not news. It is the interpretation and analysis of news originally brought to light by reporters. The viewpoint is necessarially one-sided.
Similarly, websites operated by industry, think tanks, universities, advocacy groups, governments, businesses, and community groups, even when 100 percent factual, are selective in their content and biased toward their own interests. Though valuable, their content never presents the whole picture.
Newspapers don’t present the whole picture either, but they take us a little closer. The breadth and depth of their news coverage guided by professional standards that limit bias, however imperfectly, ensure readers are exposed to information that they are not looking for or expect to see.
We human beings don’t really want to see the whole picture most of the time because we are motivated to seek information that confirms what we believe. A daily diet of blogs, websites, social media posts, and cable news is like a diet of crispy delicious bacon; it satisfies without nourishing. Ultimately it starves.
Krista Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer
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