A time to question core beliefs » Nieman Journalism Lab

focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — suspending the harassing account, deplatforming the white supremacist group... won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place... if we don’t begin to shift our mindset to ... an ethics of responsibility... we cannot begin to act differently...challenging the assumptions ... enshrined within journalism ... and Western thought...

the presumption that facts are enough to save us, and that, when confronted by hate and other malignancies, sunlight will disinfect them... foundational to the political philosophies upon which the United States and other liberal democracies are built... [and] reach back into the Enlightenment...We are primed in the West to believe that light ... will cure...

the belief that individual people are wholly autonomous, atomistic, independent... [the] reporter’s job to publish the facts and the reader’s job to decide what to do with them... in our own discrete little bubbles... that freedom is about remaining free from external restriction, including editorial restriction... that the marketplace of ideas will filter... floating the best arguments and most relevant facts to the top...Rationality will prevail...

the marketplace of ideas... cannot even begin to function in the face of algorithmic amplification, media manipulation, and economic systems that reward and incentivize the loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices... ask how free speech can be when those loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices are able to snatch the microphone away... ask how reliable an ally the truth really is...

there will be people who... defend status quo action and status quo thinking... it’s served me well. But I am comfortable. But I am profiting...nothing short of a Green New Deal for network pollution will do