Tag Archives: COVID-19

Social media are mixed blessings for journalists

It is hard to imagine life without social media – or to remember the world before it. Whether you love them or hate them, use or avoid them, social media have been enormously influential, almost as powerful as the internet itself. That is partly because even those people not directly linked, liked, shared or tweeted on social media find themselves inescapably swimming in the social media soup created by everyone else. Read More

The weasels are still with us

Inveterate liars like Team Trump have come and gone down the ages but the language they – and others – use to disguise the disgusting lives on. Doublespeak or weasel words have a long history in public life even though most of us don’t understand what they mean. As languages grow, so too do weasel words, and journalists should not give them oxygen. Indeed, we should lead the fight to prick these bubbles of hot air. Read More

Finding truth through common sense

In the days before the digital revolution, discovering truth seemed a relatively simple matter – find people we could trust and go with what they said. With the Internet and social media, things have become a lot more complicated. Information is everywhere and journalists are losing the ability to determine who to trust. So, let’s put some science back into common sense and use it to fight the scourge of the 21st Information Century – fake news. Read More