Just How Bad is Legacy Media?

The first is the rise of politicized media “fact-checkers,” and the second is Facebook, the social media site.

It is arguable we have never had a completely free media, but today, independent media is pretty much there.

In 2016, I wrote a piece for the magazine’s website bluntly calling Facebook’s plan to collaborate with outside media organizations to fact check content on the platform “a terrible idea.” And years before that, in 2011, I had written a cover story for the magazine headlined “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking.’” It was the first major—and deeply critical—examination of media “fact checking” organizations, such as PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker.

For the next few days, I am going to run short - 1-3 minute reads - excerpts from a new book, Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You - a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened.

“What do you two do?” one finally asked.

In 2017, editors above my paygrade decided that we were going to be one of a handful of media outlets that agreed to collaborate with Facebook for the social media giant’s “fact checking” program.

I had just escaped snowy London; the house in which I lived had no central heating because my landlady felt that “central heating kills a house”. 

https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/just-how-bad-is-legacy-media