TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
The problem I see is that much of the new is heavily slanted with inflammatory language. And I’m sure that’s nothing new - that’s how newspapers work. They have a story they want to tell.
But when reading comprehension is on the decline, then these stories aren’t understood, regardless of whether they’re basic reporting on the facts or a straight up opinion columnist. It’s great to say that if we could all understand the basic facts then we’d be fine, but the basic fact of it is that we can get the same basic facts, but disagree about the why and how of those facts.
Easy example: for decades, we’ve had proof that the climate has been changing. That fact, most people are aware of and agree with. But a surprisingly large number of people will disagree with the why, and claim its because of natural temperature swings and humans aren’t really impacting it. I am pretty firmly the other way, but I’ve had these arguments with people, and even after showing them data like this XKCD, they refuse to understand or change their minds/actions.
Yeah they certainly have a gap in terms of science reporting. They reported on global warming as a debate, because the newsroom was dominated by arts majors, poli sci types.
But it has improved somewhat.
In recent times it’s been the independent media that reported the pandemic as a debate while most of mainstream media didn’t. There were still significant gaps, to be sure, but most of mainstream media reported on the pandemic much better than most of independent media did.
