Media Extra: Trumped.

 The post-election media analysis is well underway. Here's one example that places a chunk of the blame on Facebook. It calls that social media "a sewer of misinformation" during the election cycle.

"There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the list of actors has to start with Facebook. And for all its wonders — reaching nearly 2 billion people each month, driving more traffic and attention to news than anything else on earth — it’s also become a single point of failure for civic information. Our democracy has a lot of problems, but there are few things that could impact it for the better more than Facebook starting to care — really care — about the truthfulness of the news that its users share and take in."

     This truth-determining is what used to be handled by the media before our million-outlet media expansion.

When everyone is his or her own media, there's is no true truth editing going on. 

 Thursday 11-10-16
UPDATE: From an article about the failure of journalism in covering the election. In the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Yes, social media played a role, enclosing reporters in echo chambers that made it hard, if not impossible, for them to hear contrarian voices; yes, the brutal economics of the news business hurt all our efforts, decimating newsrooms around the country and leaving fewer people to grapple with what was a gargantuan story; and yes, reporters can be forgiven, at least initially, for laughing off a candidate whose views and personality seemed so outside the norm of a serious contender for the White House.

     While all those things are true, journalism’s fundamental failure in this election, its original sin, is much more basic to who we are and what we are supposed to be. Simply put, it is rooted in a failure of reporting."