Never Trump conservative Tom Nichols, on Twitter, writes sensibly in reply to a question about which news sources one should read. He advises
Start with a national newspaper every morning. Any of them. NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT, whatever. If you just read one newspaper a day, you’re light years ahead of anyone who’s staring at Facebook. The next day, read a newspaper again. Repeat.
Spot on: quality rests on quality. Facebook doesn’t care at all about quality (which begins with accuracy) – it’s a data mining operation more than anything else. See This Is How Much Fact-Checking Is Worth to Facebook (“More than nothing, but not much more”):
What is fact-checking actually worth to Facebook?
Poynter has reported that other organizations received $100,000 like Snopes did. A more in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review found that some organizationsturned down the money.
The amount that Facebook has paid out has increased, but also become more variable. Fact-checkers get paid per fact-check, but only up to a certain amount per month. The amount of money that’s flowing to all of Facebook’s 34 fact-checkers probably remains in the single-digit millions.
For perspective, Facebook generated $16.9 billion in revenue just last quarter. That same quarter, the company’s average revenue per user reached $7.37, so the money coming in from a million or two users over the course of just three months would be enough to cover the global fact-checking costs for the year.
At the local level, every newspaper in the Whitewater area (Gazette, Daily Union, or even the Register assuming a tree falling in the woods with no one nearby makes a sound) is a different version of the same reliance on press releases and puff pieces for right-leaning business welfare. Indeed, the publishers’ views are nearly indistinguishable from one another, and united in economic error and bad-ideas boosterism.
If that’s one’s news, one’s news comes not from quality but from inferiority. A day like that would begin with a weak and uncompetitive outlook, enmired as it would be in error, confusion, and fallacy.
We have a great and competitive country, accessible at the click of a keyboard, daily awaiting discovery and embrace.
Quality rests on quality.