This is my sandbox page, where I'm going to practice editing Wikipedia.
Learning to insert bold text
Learning how to link other wiki pages
Planning to edit the Post-truth politics article:
edit- add more about how post-truth politics is seen in the modern world, with specific major events and turning points
- add to the "drivers" section, and possibly break it up into more sections, detailing how journalism, the internet, and social media all play different roles
- try to add more of a universal, global perspective
- add some contemporary examples
- add more information to the United States section (since I am more familiar with that), adding more to historical examples and what is being seeing in the modern day, especially with Trump's election and issues of climate change
Possible sources:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2041905816680417
Article Drafting
editPost-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion instead of ideas or opinions about an issue, usually executed through the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering truth and factual information of "secondary" importance. While this phenomenon has been described as a contemporary problem, there is a possibility that it has long been a part of political life, but was less notable before the advent of the Internet. Post-truth politics is often compared to the world George Orwell created in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state changes historic records to fit its propaganda goals.
Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in Russian, Chinese, American, Australian, British, Indian, Japanese and Turkish politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media. In 2016, "post-truth" was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year, due to its prevalence in the context of that year's Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election.
Drivers
editMedia and Politics scholar Jayson Harsin in 2015 coined the term "regime of post-truth" that encompasses many aspects of post-truth politics. He argues that a convergent set of developments have created the conditions of post-truth society: the development of professional political communication informed by cognitive science, which aims at managing perception and belief of segmented populations through techniques like microtargeting (which includes the strategic use of rumors and falsehoods); the fragmentation of modern more centralized mass news media gatekeepers that largely repeated one another's scoops and their reports; the fierce attention economy marked by information overload and acceleration, prolific user-generated content and fewer society-wide common trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate; the algorithms that govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, sometimes based on what the algorithm thinks users want and not on what is necessarily factual; and news media that has itself been marred by scandals of plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda, and changing news values, all of which some scholars say issue from economic crises resulting in downsizing and favoring trends toward more traditionally tabloid stories and styles of reporting, known as tabloidization and infotainment. While some of these phenomena (such as a more tabloidesque press) may suggest a return to the past, the whole effect of the convergences creates a socio-political phenomenon that exceeds a mere return to earlier forms of journalism. It is not that truth and facts have disappeared but that they are the object of deliberate distortion and struggle. Fact-checking and rumor-busting sites abound, but they are unable to reunite a fragmented set of audiences (attention-wise) and their respective trustful-/distrustfulness. Since the condition is manipulated competitively by professional pan-partisan political communication, Harsin calls it a "regime of post-truth" instead of merely post-truth politics.
Major news outlets
Several trends in the media landscape have been blamed for the perceived rise of post-truth politics. While there are many drivers of this process, one contributing factor has been the proliferation of state-funded news agencies like CCTV News which allow states to influence Western audiences. According to Peter Pomerantsev, a British-Russian journalist who worked for TNT in Moscow, one of their prime objectives has been to de-legitimize Western institutions, including the structures of government, democracy, and human rights.[citation needed] Trust in the mainstream media in the US has reached historical lows. It has been suggested that under these conditions fact-checking by news outlets struggles to gain traction among the wider public, and politicians resort to increasingly drastic messaging.
Many news outlets desire to appear, or have a policy of, impartiality. Many writers have noted that in some cases, this leads to false balance, the practice of giving equal emphasis to unsupported or discredited claims without challenging their factual basis. The 24-hour news cycle, which requires constant reporting and analysis, also means that news channels repeatedly draw on the same public figures, which benefits PR-savvy politicians and means that presentation and personality can have a larger impact on the audience than facts,while the process of claim and counter-claim can provide grist for days of news coverage at the expense of deeper analysis of the case.
Many news outlets desire to appear, or have a policy of, impartiality. Many writers have noted that in some cases, this leads to false balance, the practice of giving equal emphasis to unsupported or discredited claims without challenging their factual basis. The 24-hour news cycle, which requires constant reporting and analysis, also means that news channels repeatedly draw on the same public figures, which benefits PR-savvy politicians and means that presentation and personality can have a larger impact on the audience than facts,while the process of claim and counter-claim can provide grist for days of news coverage at the expense of deeper analysis of the case.
Social media and the internet
Social media adds an additional dimension, as the networks that users create can become echo chambers (possibly emphasised by the filter bubble) where one political viewpoint dominates and scrutiny of claims fails, allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop which can repeat post-truth claims without rebuttal. In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them as being motivated by bias. The Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner laid some of the blame on the rise of clickbait – articles of dubious factual content with a misleading headline, designed to be widely shared – saying that "chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity" undermines the value of journalism and truth. David Mikkelson, co-founder of the fact checking and debunking site Snopes.com, described the introduction of social media and fake news sites as a turning point, saying "I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump."
The new digital culture also allows anybody with a computer and access to the internet post their opinions online and mark them as fact. Everybody's voice becomes legitimized as fact through eco-chambers and other users validating one another. Content is often judged based off of how many views it gets, creating an atmosphere based off click bait that appeals to emotion instead of researched fact. Content that gets more views is continued to be filtered around different internet circles, regardless of its legitimacy. Some also argue that the overwhelming abundance of fact available to everybody at any time on the internet leads to an attitude focused on knowing basic claims to information instead of underlying truth and carefully thought out opinions. [1]
Modern political culture
The rise of post-truth politics coincides with polarized political beliefs. A 2016 Pew Research Center study of American adults found that "those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views – and very distinct from each other."
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- ^ "Is Digital Culture Responsible for Post-Truth Politics? - Eliane Glaser | Open Transcripts". Open Transcripts. Retrieved 2017-03-03.