Why Don’t We Trust the Media?

Thanks to social media, we know too much and not enough about the purveyors of news in America.

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash.

These days, it seems like everyone has an idealogical axe to grind.

Thanks to the rise of popular social media platforms like Twitter, more people have a place to grind those axes, 24/7. Or at least, the 1 in 5 Americans who use Twitter do.

“I thought once people were able to freely exchange thoughts and ideas, the world would automatically become a better place,” lamented one Twitter founder famously, once upon a time, before uttering the biggest understatement in the history of Silicon Valley, perhaps the biggest understatement in the history of the whole world: “I was wrong about that.”

Truer words were never spoken: Finding out what everyone thinks about everything has been a mixed blessing at best.

First of all, it isn’t as clear-cut out there as we’d like to believe: Good people aren’t all good; terrible people occasionally do some good in the world. Most people are just doing the best they can with what they have, trying to get through the day, a mixture of both.

We’re all, like Twitter’s overly-optimistic founder, a bit more wise to humanity’s unpleasant sides these days. Courtesy of the microscope of social media, we find the world full of a million shades of…