On Sunday I did an experiment. I scrolled through Twitter for 30 minutes until I saw posts I engaged with two days prior. My goal: to find ANY news coverage of recent protests. I found a few user-recorded videos, but I only saw three articles from news publications, two of which were from a police propaganda site.
How could mainstream media be so corrupt? Is the profit motive so perverted that cities have to literally be burning to receive coverage?
Nope. Turns out my outrage was misdirected.
Upon the most rudimentary of research, I found that of the top 10 newspaper publications, all of them had covered protests within the last few days. The least up-to-date publication had an article on June 29 as of writing this, and almost all the rest have stories within the last two days.
With two Google searches I found what I couldn’t find after half an hour on Twitter. Looking at The New York Times' homepage without scrolling, there’s three stories talking about the protests. Well, I had to scroll like an inch for that story on the bottom right.
What’s the takeaway from this? Is the mainstream media biased? Hell yes they are. Everyone is and so am I. Do they have an incentive to selectively cover protests? Yep. So do I and every other idiot with a cell phone.
However, none of them have an advanced algorithm that tends to ignore issues after a few days despite following 22 journalists/ news publications. None of them are social media.
Twitter is not a news publication. It barely counts as a news outlet.
I don’t know what you zoomers are taught, and I doubt it’s much as I saw two of y’all misspell “poison” and “figurine” with auto correct on. Anyways, back in my day, teachers said you couldn’t cite Wikipedia because user-generated content is unreliable. You know what social media is? User-generated content with ads. That’s it.
So here’s a new rule: don’t use social media as your exclusive news source. Why? Because Twitter, and probably Facebook, are shit.
They are not sufficient. Scroll through NYT and some other publications. Make it part of your morning routine or maybe something you do after work. Read an article, not a post. And if you’re scared and can’t make a decision despite having four different social media accounts, two different dating apps and five different streaming services, here’s a useful graphic to get ya started.
My advice is anything on the same x-axis as New York Post or below is fake news and everything above is probably fine.
