> A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media.
What does "accurate media" mean?
The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.
The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.
Any student of history learns this in their first semester.
> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age
LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.
True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.
All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.
The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
"Accurate" means that an institution is not actively trying to mislead, and takes steps to correct factual errors when they occur. All traditional news media in healthy democracies do this. They distinguish clearly between reporting facts and opinions.
"Objective truth is unattainable, so we shouldn't even try" is overly pessimistic and does not reflect reality. Opinions are not facts, and the truth is not an opinion. The truth is often complicated, and a healthy media landscape contains all the relevant perspectives, but none should get away with misrepresenting the facts. You are saying that truth does not exist, while certain organizations and actors are actively doing their best to get away with lying to your face.
It has nothing to do with an "official" narrative - there is none. It is objective truth that RT is a state organization that exists in order to manipulate and lie to Western audiences.
You can read entire twitter threads today completely composed in Russia, where the trolls write both sides
That has never happened with newspapers. Today's many people entire window to reality is through the internet and like it or not, people believe what's popular or if not, can believe an opinion is popular if it's widespread online.
It's very easy to create racial tensions for example that way, as was done by the russians