Facts Aren’t Dead. Yet. – Future Crunch – Medium
The internet however, did far more than disrupt traditional media business models. As Branko Milanovic points out (in one of my favourite articles of 2018) the internet levelled the playing field for control over the narrative. In the “good old days” he argues, a relatively small number of gatekeepers determined what was reported, about whom and when. From the 1950s through to the mid 1990s, the Western media had no competitors, which meant they were able to operate largely uncontested in their own countries, as well as abroad. That gave editors incredible control over what people thought not just in Anglophone countries, but around the world. They had a monopoly, and they weren’t afraid to use it. The honeymoon ended abruptly once the ‘others’ realised that they too could go global. First came Al Jazeera, and then state-sponsored news channels in Turkey, Russia, China and Latin America. Then came a shared, online media space and with it, blogs, cheap websites, Twitter, cameras on phones, Youtube, social media, Facebook, Reddit, and podcasts. In the space of a few years, the range of opinions available to the average person exploded, and that meant that people could suddenly choose their own news adventure.
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