george weston. you can the ones who told you to sit down to go alternative medicine the colonel was virtually as used to retreat. overseas top stories for you new protests for britain as students take their last chance to block a hike in university tuition fees slamming the government to a ton using education to cut expenses as a bails on failings european economy. we could be expounded in a song to the top of an online poll to become time magazine a possible they get it speculation mounds that america is driving here for extradition to sweden from london eventual trial in the queue at the. end of the u.k. finally allows russian embassy officials to communicate with a young woman accused of the spear knowledge that was to media it seems to be seeking new targets to complete the three like story. the headlines up next our

debate crosstalk and it discusses whether today's media is about information overload to distract people away from what's really happening in the world. and you can. follow in welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle we're told we're traveling on the information superhighway but many assess information found in media to be biased and even worse wrong are we experiencing information overload in an era when traditional media is shrinking. and you can.

discuss what some called information overload i'm joined by jeff no bitch in new york he's an entrepreneur in a freelance journalist also in new york we have steve rendall he's senior analyst at fairness and accuracy in reporting and in phoenix we go to dan gilmore he's director of the knight center for digital media entrepreneurship and arizona state university and another member of our cross talk team you know on the hunger steve you've been on the show before so thanks for coming back i'm calling this program the age of disbelief and the current business model at least for people to make money in mainstream media i say is the following the business model is. fear sells sex sells even lies sell there is no interest in the condition of democracy there's no interest in the condition of society and of course last but not least there's very little interest in doing real journalism anymore do you agree or do you disagree with my assessment there. i think i probably mostly disagree

i think that we've always had a culture of lying as i have stone as i have stone the great american journalist once said all governments lie i think what we're seeing with the advent of the internet and all of this independent more democratic media is more people calling out those lies i think the p.d.f. thing is just an extreme recent example of that but i think if you look at the lies that were debunked in almost real time during the iraq war i think you'll find out that the reason that people disbelieve that is that they're finding out more about the government all governments lying about their government lying as well steve people still continue to watch these sources ok i agree my description is obviously exaggerated but you still get these people the fear and lies and their ratings continue to grow their revenues continue to go and it's that's why i'm mocking it it's a business model it seems to work because traditional media is having

a very difficult time. i'm not sure i understand that and i agree with all that up to this point and that is that i'm not sure a lot of people watch this media the same way that they watch a traffic accident the same way that watching a car crash because it's entertaining to see bill o'reilly bluster and bloviate along with the. lies that he tells as we've documented on on a regular basis at faire is can be very entertaining how much people believe what they're watching i think i think it's less than it was twenty five years ago when my group fair was founded i think that's a healthy thing i don't think that's healthy i think to know that media get stories wrong all the time that governments lie quite often and i think that's a good thing so i don't think yes it's an age of disbelief that's not necessarily

a bad thing that's interesting if i go to you jeff i mean i thought i would like how steve is characterized this but i still think this the these these cable networks and you know we might well i think fox has been mentioned you know they still influence people because i think you could correlate it with elections possibly but the age of disbelief i mean a lot of people who started out this program saying you know it's quite interesting when you have a lot of the traditional media dwindling shrinking because of the business model you have citizens journalism on the rise of course but you have when it comes to traditional media you the least seem to have to disrupt locate themselves you have an a.p. article all over the place where we have fewer and fewer competitors in the market if we don't include these new media here so we do. a lot of people use find it bewildering the the amount of information that we can have thrown at us all the time how do you digest it who do you trust and what is the future of this because i

want to talk about citizens journalism a little bit later because a slightly different animal but what do you think about all this. well i think steve brings up some some really good points and you know i'm a tech guy at heart so i love the internet i love google i love wiki pedia and when i you know when i watch the news when i read an article i fact check it i just you know i don't rely on a single source like like people might have done a long time ago i regularly read you know twenty thirty blogs and i think what's come up. is is these blogs that specialize and they sort of take over where mainstream media might might not do a great job ok if i go to you dan i mean this there's a big debate about this alternative media that out there are these blogs and all that in and i have a few blogs i really like but i come across blogs that are just they're just politically motivated they want to poison the public sphere they want to the they

don't address facts fact checking is not their priority blusterer is their priority and again you know this goes along with the would say like with the cable networks because there's a profit motive to tell lies is been mentioned on this program but i mean there's always the element of truthfulness i mean how do you verify these things. well you start by assuming that i think the age of disbelief should be the age of skepticism and all of us as the people who have been a passive audience in the past are learning i think too slowly but we're learning to be an active user of media and to be skeptical to start but not equally skeptical to use judgment to ask our own questions to seek information beyond the traditional sources so do a whole lot of things that we didn't tend to do in the age of just lean back and

let it wash over us media this is a more active time now and i think that's going to produce because of all the new entrants it's going to produce a more diverse and i think better media ecosystem in the future when you think about that go ahead jump in can i can i jump in i mean when you retired to rise blogs as a high end you first to sorry jeff there is going to. go ahead jeff i think just to take a couple steps back i think you're characterizing blogs as presenting you know a lot of misinformation they're highly opinionated and they're throwing lies around those are not the blogs that i tend to read those are those are opinionated blogs but those are blogs that most of those are blogs a lot of people do read though. they are what a lot of people do read but i think it's important to mention blogs like like gotham schools for example is a blog here in new york city and they specialize in new york city education and

they're all reporters and they are regularly doing very very good journalism you know blogs like tree hugger or clean technica blogs like tech crunch for example those are the blogs that i'm that i was referring to that i regularly read because they have reporters they are doing real reporting in journalism they're not just citing a source and presenting a huge amount of of opinion and you know an analysis so i just want to say and i go do you see what are the blogs i was talking about is that obama's trip to india cost six hundred million dollars a day or something like that or a obama is a muslim. the. ground zero mosque that is a terror mosque those are the kind of blogs i'm talking about and they do have a lot of influence and they do go into the mainstream go ahead steve. there's there's no doubt about that if you look at the quote unquote ground zero mosque story which isn't just a mosque and it wasn't it's not proposed to be build on ground zero that story did

bubble up from these sort of fever swamp rightwing islamophobia blogs one particularly atlas shrugs was famous for this and we had a mainstream media that too readily accepted that newsweek magazine for instance used the title ground zero mosque so we do have we were increasingly dealing with separate sets of facts or factoids because in my opinion one side quite often uses things that are they're not actually factual but. the optimistic thing that i have to say about this is that if you look just back to two thousand and three two thousand and two two thousand and three in the build up to the iraq war you see that the mainstream media almost completely collapsed one exception was people a surprise winner charlie hanley who wrote a story he went and checked all the places that the white house and collin powell

claimed were were producing biological and chemical warfare agents in iraq he checked them all out they had all been sealed for years since one nine hundred ninety one the summer of ninety one and he reported this back that was completely ignored even though that story went into every major news room in the united states it was totally ignored we it fair put it out electronically and otherwise we did everything we could but we were one of the few groups on the job then if you look at the at the information landscape today you would have places like atrios you would have glenn greenwald at salon you have a whole new generation of media critics that are really good at fact checking yes many of them are opinionated but they're very good at fact checking and. the echo chamber that would have been there had george bush tried to start that war in two thousand and ten i'm afraid would have been

a little bit more resistant would have presented a little more resistance to a war that was based on lies in the months after the war started george bush said four separate times we had to go to war because saddam hussein would not allow the inspectors in anybody who knows what happened in that war knows that the inspectors were in they had to be asked to leave four days before the war started that lie by george bush was challenged by exactly no zero mainstream media outlets dana milbank at the washington post made a joke about it oh that's just bush being bush but this egregious lie that that iraq had not allowed the inspectors and was not challenge by anybody except for small groups i think it would be challenged far more force fully today ok dan if i go to you i mean one of the issues that did steve brought up is very important is that everybody seems to have their own set of facts these days i mean there seems

to be no consensus on what facts are anymore because you can always bring up your own report because everybody's got their own report that they can still go and this is one of the problems again this age of disbelief because you can bring out your own report i mean is it can be you know it's verified by this person and this person. well if if people bring out a report that is based on false hoods it's the duty of people who know that these are false is to say this is not true this is on the other hand get i would have to jump in here we're going to a short break of all right back to when we come back after a short break we'll continue our discussion our media stay with our.

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welcome back rostock i'm you know about to remind you we're talking about the age of disbelief. but before to see what russians thing about their own media dick told you progress continues to change people's lifestyles information today is one of the internal

elements of a globalized world the advent of new types of mass media is worse song for many then else he could about information overload saying the more we know the less well this is that at the same time governments are striving to make media as a verse as possible the russian public opinion said appalled all citizens to assess media diversity fifty three percent of the respondents said media today are very diverse and can satisfy their highest demands however another thirty three percent are not satisfied with the variety and content of the more than mass media in the information age made his role increases and demand for diversity rises as well back to peter. ok dan i'd like to go back to you in phoenix and we're talking about verifiable facts let me kind of. expand upon what i was trying to get out here is that we have special interest groups you know in the financial sector we have medical companies insurance companies i mean they can come out with these really

mega reports are they looked really authoritative and they've got these great doctors from all the great institutions and all across america in the world and you know in the it's very difficult at times for people to be challenging these because you have a congressman a little people in legislature that just want to embrace them their special interests i mean we know how it all works here that's what i'm kind of getting at here i'm. and it's just not like someone writing a fifteen hundred word article on a foreign policy issue that you can say well that's a mistake that's a mistake that's a mistake but i'm saying when it gets into policy here we saw how some of the cable networks really embrace some of the critical reports on obama's medical care and other reforms that he is pushing because there are thorough tape of quote unquote. we have been learning over the last few years that the some of the institutions that we had considered to be authoritative and relatively honest have not proved to be fully so and this is again requiring the audience the those of us who are the

consumers of this to start with skepticism and i also i also think that the traditional media have a big obligation in this world to stop doing what they've been doing a lot in recent years which is to take every single thing that's presented as if there are two equally compelling sides and only two to every issue even when one of the sides is just false if you're doing a story about the holocaust you don't need a quote from a neo nazi it's the kind of thing that we do in the media in this country that i think just has to change if it's a lie say so you know jeff it seems that when i go to jeff real quick here one of the things i've noticed is that what is presented as news and even as debate in expression in the united states is you have one propaganda side fighting another propaganda site and they know it's a game it's played is

a game it's sports ok and it is it's so transparent i mean you don't even get the sense that there's even believe what they say but you know this is the there they were it was on this side of the propaganda argument in this side and it really misses that again and this is why i called the age of disbelief because you're not being asked to think you're not asked to use logic you're dishonest to go to emotion or how much you can humiliate your partner or criticize them at home and i mean for me maybe i'm going too far but it's not making people really think about the issues ok all you want to do is that obama's good obama's bad republicans good . or republicans bad you know it's this psychotic everything's a dichotomy but that doesn't really help our society move forward expression in a crisis go ahead. yeah i mean i agree i think i think you have sort of a paradox right were we can now access any information at any time instantaneously . and i think what what that what that requires is an open mind so it is easy to

put on your blinders and you know focus entirely on news that kind of aligns with your worldview and watch one program and kind of you know get those news reports and things that kind of jive with you or you can go in with an open mind and try to discover information and other things that kind of counter your your perspective and challenge and i think that's you know that's the that's the issue nowadays is that we can easily put on those blinders but i think we can just as easily fact check and kind of go out. and learn and i think i think the main thing is it requires education it requires an education in understanding how to consume news and how to consume the information that you're that we have access to you know steve i think i think all of us here are all very similar on the panel is that we

will take the trouble to fact check we go to other sources i have wide variety of sources ok and things that even don't really fit with my world view but i feel i need to be challenged all of the time to make sure i'm not missing something but you go back to this propaganda versus propaganda that's just a very convenient it's easy it's convenient for a lot of people to just want to passively consume and be reaffirmed in their beliefs whatever the world is supposed to look like and i think you know what i'm getting at here is that the how do we get people to do that more often because all four of us do that all of the time ok that's it's very much part of what we do but how do we get other people to do that instead of just passively consuming this junk political dialogue that doesn't fix anything on society. i think you're making a very good point i think we're talking when we talk when i talk about my optimism when i talk about all the different variety of of good information that you can get out there we have to talk about that at the same time as we talk about the digital

divide we talk about working people who don't really have time to sort through a lot of this information other people who don't even have access to the internet that's the digital divide so how do we i think there's more good information available than ever before i think it's not widely disseminated and a lot of people don't have time to sort through that's why it's incredibly important that the most powerful media get it right to begin with that our national debates include this sort of thing we're looking at the new york times for instance which fired judy miller reporter judith miller for credulous reporting that she did that helped lead us into war in fact it wasn't fox news that led us to war more than any other media outlet in the united states it was the new york times that led us to war but michael gordon another palace court journalist he just by palace court i mean somebody who just he basically kneels me for power and repeats what

they tell him and michael gordon had written several of those same offending articles with judy miller and he's still there talking as a matter of fact about iran you nuclear weapons program nobody knows for sure if they have one he's writing about it as a matter of fact this is a big problem because our biggest media the media that it's most important for shaping opinion is still not getting things right or being careful enough they're still basically slaves to power in the u.s. that means basically governments and corporations and if i go to jeff i mean i don't want to ask you to be a foreign policy expert here ok but if we just heard the. ok do you think the the blogosphere has been is mature enough that if the right wanted to go to war with iran like we did with iraq do you think that the blogosphere this time could play a more significant role in stopping that if that's exactly what people in the

blogosphere want because all. the all of it failed for iraq can we avoid war if the war of party wants to pull it off again in iraq do you think it would be different this time well i think we need to take a step back and just kind of look at the bigger picture which is that in the past five years right half of all journalists working in television network news have lost their jobs a third of all journalists working in daily news have lost their jobs and half of half of journalists working in and. i think we all read the same pew report yeah. so so so it becomes an issue with those journalists kind of doing their job and vetting all this information and i think that's the that's the biggest issue and what ok well i'm sorry if we if i could go to. dan to dan do you think that we the blogosphere is mature enough now that will

can start really influencing policy like that because i think it is a repeat you know i think everybody failed in the most people in the media failed overwhelmingly to stop war in iraq is this new media strong enough now to be able to put a brake on power. i think there are certainly a growing influence in the the newer media whether i can't speak to the specific case because it's a little too hypothetical right now but there are in some fields. certainly politically the the blogs are being read more than ever in politics the new media sites are very much part of that information ebb and flow in the technology world the online media pretty much are the media it's pretty much moved over to online in technology and that sort of thing so they have enormous influence there and in

various parts media things are moving over from the print broadcast to the to the web and other media but i have to also agree that the traditional media still play an enormously enormously important role and it's so essential to hold their feet to the fire because they are power in their own right and power needs to be held accountable so i'm very happy that this new world of media critics is getting more and more active ok ok steve i'm going to give you the last word on this program what would you see like to see happen for to keep to make mainstream media more accountable as we move forward with the blogs fear the internet in mind. well i think i'm going to repeat myself a little bit here and that is to see the independent. democratic media that has

been spied on by the digital age become even stronger to hold them or to account there are many good people working in the mainstream commercial media some of them just need need to be emboldened they need to know that they have support outside their you know their their offices at the new york times or c.b.s. news but the iraq war was a tremendous failure i know i keep bringing it up but it looms hugely well yeah i'm afraid that it's well worth harold and i agree with you i hope that we can learn our lessons from our past mistakes many thanks to my guests today in new york and in phoenix and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time remember i'll talk with.

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