The Increasing Problem With the Misinformed

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus. When writing for the uninformed, your focus is to report the news, which is what every newspaper is doing today. But when focusing on the misinformed, just reporting the news doesn’t actually solve the public’s needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.

Source: The Increasing Problem With the Misinformed

This is a really interesting article with lots of cool graphs and ways of visualizing data. It is also somewhat depressing in terms of what it tells us about news, media, expertise and politics. Look at the different ways of graphing “truthiness” of statements via “fact-checker” and note what it has to tell us about the non-linearity of likert scales.

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