The goal of journalism, in the words of Carl Bernstein, is to provide the “best obtainable version of the truth.” This is hard to do. It’s not just a matter of sorting fact from fiction, dealing with “filter bubbles” and motivated denial of facts, or even contending with the public’s lack of trust for journalists.
A deeper problem is that human beings tend to form our ideas about the world from the images that come to mind most readily. In other words, if you follow the news regularly — even if the stories you see are factual — you’re likely to overestimate the amount of violence in the world, underrate the performance of the government, and develop an unduly low opinion of the average American.
[For more of this story, written by David Bornstein, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12...eking-solutions.html]
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