Challenging primacy of mainstream mediaIt is true that ever since the rise of social media and the concomitant emergence of quasi-media outlets such as anti-secrecy groups like WikiLeaks, the primacy of mainstream media has been challenged as never before. Prior waves of technological advancement, which include the rise of radio news in the 1920s, of television news in the 1940s, and of online news in the 1990s and beyond, saw the mainstream media adroitly adjust itself to the new environment and emerge refreshed to fight the battle for viewership in new landscapes. Yet social media, quasi-media and blogs have wrenched an essential power away from mainstream media —the power to be a purveyor of facts. These would include, in addition to the strong tradition of fact-checking that the U.S. media already follows, describing the President’s untruths as outright “lies”, which is also a description of the intention behind the statement. Many in the media still struggle with the idea of making this a standard practice, but equally hard to ignore is the question: what other options do mediapersons have given the deliberately misleading disregard of facts by their President?

Source: The Hindu February 19, 2017 18:37 UTC