It’s surprising that the issue of “fake news” took so long to raise its head. Deliberate misinformation and bias have been around for as long as journalism itself – more than 400 years by some accounts.
The yellow press (a term coined in the 1890s to describe the sensationalist reporting of two New York City newspapers, the
World and the
Journal) and tabloid journalism encapsulate a form of writing that is, let’s say, highly economical with the truth. Gossip magazines and reality shows merely fanned the flames of the public’s insatiable desire for speculation and innuendo.
07 October, 2019
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Private, public, and civil society actors should work together to encourage more sustainable financing of universal access efforts
Access to communication and information tools...
30 September, 2019
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Private, public, and civil society actors should work together to encourage more sustainable financing of universal access efforts...
30 September, 2019
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Photo: London UK. 24th July 2019. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, delivers a speech outside 10 Downing Street. Credit: Michael Tubi/Shutterstock
On 19 September,...
23 September, 2019
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The rise of “fake news” charges and deliberate disinformation have led to an important counter effort: fact-checking. News agencies, civil society organisations, and...
16 September, 2019
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Google should have known better!
An Associated Press piece in The Guardian newspaper (“YouTube fined $170m for collecting children’s personal data”, 4 September 2019) notes a...
09 September, 2019
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Not everyone is familiar with climate change.
A new survey released by Afrobarometer paints a bleak picture of how agriculture conditions are worsening due to higher temperatures, delayed rainfall, and crop failure. Crucially, among some people, it also identifies little or no knowledge about climate change itself.
02 September, 2019
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Privacy was something that used to be taken for granted.
Ordinarily, the private life of an individual was not open to scrutiny, while public...
26 August, 2019
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“For the past twenty years, the main issue restricting ublic debate in terms of Turkish laws has been the prosecution and imprisonment of...
19 August, 2019
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An influential book on communications in the 1980s was Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Communication, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It...
12 August, 2019
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In an era when misinformation and “fake news” abound on social media, it is important to understand where people get their news.
...
06 August, 2019
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Walk around any city and your face will be caught on camera and might even be added to a facial-recognition database. That data...
29 July, 2019
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