The News As We Are

It is great when you can have a slice of life experience in your everyday commute to office and back. Comparisons of the present day to the earlier days (I refrain from the the clichéd term "good ol' days" because it is a loaded term playing into the nostalgia effect we experience) showed a stark difference in one area: mobile was the new newspaper. Almost every person I saw, everywhere I turned I could see people: young and old alike peering into their contraptions of metal, glass and plastic. You may say that's no big surprise; the smartphone has been the single biggest revolution we may have seen in the last decade. But what is really interesting in this is that while nearly ALL of them were consuming information or news of some sort, NONE of them were reading a known news site or e-paper.

The recent US elections also threw up an interesting statistic: Supporters of one party were more inclined to believeing fabricated news of the other party and less inclined to accepting the unflattering facts of the party they support.

And so we are poked and prodded each day with news that bears resemblance to what we feel is true rather than what we know to be true. An election in the free world starts becoming a rabble-rouse, a critique on a policy implementation becomes questioning one's nation and an unpatriotic act and disagreement has to result in defilement. This however is not a recent phenomenon. We have had such form of mud slinging and name calling going on for centuries. It has had many names: rumours, gossip, witchunt, propaganda; the list is endless. However, with each passing century the structures of the press and media got created and they operated with great integrity and commitment to this thing we called 'the pursuit of the truth'.

So what has changed now? Well, everything with respect to the press and media. Press cannot be independent if no one is willing to pay for it. And in that desperation, the agencies have given birth to a medium they don't fully have control over: sponsored news. This medium is all about the clicks and shock value of news. And it takes little help to push news from the realms of fact into the dark allies of fiction. Of those people I saw consuming news, most were from sites like Facebook  and Twitter which manages to put every biased article and subjective view that the user has seen before into his or her path. And just like a tuning fork vibrating at its resonant frequency, they too start receiving news articles that are more a reflection of their psyche than reality.

How do we resolve this breaking news piece? Sadly, this is just the beginning of the things to come. In the tug of war between freedom of press and regulation and discretion of news, freedom always wins. But it will do us well to remember that not all free societies have had a happy endings; not because of the freedoms they enjoyed but because of the lack of discipline in how they enjoyed it.

It would do us well to invest in a news source that values you more than clicks, that values independent and objective journalism over breaking sensationalist news and that stands for news as it is rather than as we are. And this investment is not just monetary, it will be of our time and energy to verify and fact check what we share and read and respect different perspectives before we form an opinion. That is when truth really triumphs!