What stayed with me most in this piece is the distinction between trust and mere affinity.
A partisan audience can appear to “trust” a source when, in reality, it is only recognizing itself in that source. That is not trust in the deeper democratic sense. It is confirmation with a social face. Real trust is harder because it requires a shared willingness to be corrected by something outside one’s own tribe.
This is why the crisis of journalism is not only informational. It is epistemic and social. A society does not lose shared reality simply because false claims circulate. It loses shared reality when the institutions that once helped people tolerate correction begin to look, to each side, like weapons of the other.
The most important point here may be that context is not decoration around facts. Context is part of truth’s architecture. Without it, even accurate fragments can become misleading, emotionally distorted, or politically weaponized.
That is why rebuilding trust will require more than better content. It will require better structures of explanation, more visible methods, and forms of journalism that help communities recover the capacity to disagree without leaving reality altogether.
Richard Gingras is hitting on the exact problem we’re seeing with AI integration: the 'Woodward-Bernstein' era of trust-us-because-we’re-the-press is dead.
Gingras argues that we need to rethink the architecture of the article to expose the process behind the journalism. I would take that a step further. We can't expose a process that doesn't exist. If the internal newsroom plumbing is still a black box of 'Dev to Production' shortcuts, then transparency just exposes our own technical debt.
We need architectural governance not just to manage the AI slop, but to build the very structured data Gingras is talking about. It is the only way to move from being the 'town scold' to being a trusted, accountable node in the digital ecosystem.
This is an exceptionally good summary of these issues. Personally I think it underplays the algorithmic tipping of the scales towards division and anger for profit - but I recognise not everyone will agree with that! I like the clear definition of objectivity - " a rigorous discipline of critical thinking that pursues facts accurately and fairly, regardless of whether they align with one’s personal beliefs or political agenda'. Absolutely. Out of fashion but more important than ever imo. Thanks from one Richard to another ;)
I don't agree for the following reasons, not to mention there's no data to back up the claim. I don't say this to defend Facebook but to clarify the business model. I should note I was the product lead for the algorithmic work on Google+ back when. It's an incorrect assumption that division and anger drives profit. Ad targeting is sharply contextual and news and politics are not desirable categories. An ideal scenario is my seeing a post from my daughter about my grandkid and seeing an ad for a clever toy and buying it. In general, serious news is not where the ads go. When Facebook stopped distributing news in Canada as a result of bill C-18, they reported that user satisfaction went up. Yes, there's a cohort of rabid political users but it's modest in size and non-commercial in value. There's a much larger cohort that wants nothing do with it. In social networking, engagement for the sake of engagement is not of value, it's engagement with relevant commercial value.
What stayed with me most in this piece is the distinction between trust and mere affinity.
A partisan audience can appear to “trust” a source when, in reality, it is only recognizing itself in that source. That is not trust in the deeper democratic sense. It is confirmation with a social face. Real trust is harder because it requires a shared willingness to be corrected by something outside one’s own tribe.
This is why the crisis of journalism is not only informational. It is epistemic and social. A society does not lose shared reality simply because false claims circulate. It loses shared reality when the institutions that once helped people tolerate correction begin to look, to each side, like weapons of the other.
The most important point here may be that context is not decoration around facts. Context is part of truth’s architecture. Without it, even accurate fragments can become misleading, emotionally distorted, or politically weaponized.
That is why rebuilding trust will require more than better content. It will require better structures of explanation, more visible methods, and forms of journalism that help communities recover the capacity to disagree without leaving reality altogether.
Richard Gingras is hitting on the exact problem we’re seeing with AI integration: the 'Woodward-Bernstein' era of trust-us-because-we’re-the-press is dead.
Gingras argues that we need to rethink the architecture of the article to expose the process behind the journalism. I would take that a step further. We can't expose a process that doesn't exist. If the internal newsroom plumbing is still a black box of 'Dev to Production' shortcuts, then transparency just exposes our own technical debt.
We need architectural governance not just to manage the AI slop, but to build the very structured data Gingras is talking about. It is the only way to move from being the 'town scold' to being a trusted, accountable node in the digital ecosystem.
This is an exceptionally good summary of these issues. Personally I think it underplays the algorithmic tipping of the scales towards division and anger for profit - but I recognise not everyone will agree with that! I like the clear definition of objectivity - " a rigorous discipline of critical thinking that pursues facts accurately and fairly, regardless of whether they align with one’s personal beliefs or political agenda'. Absolutely. Out of fashion but more important than ever imo. Thanks from one Richard to another ;)
I don't agree for the following reasons, not to mention there's no data to back up the claim. I don't say this to defend Facebook but to clarify the business model. I should note I was the product lead for the algorithmic work on Google+ back when. It's an incorrect assumption that division and anger drives profit. Ad targeting is sharply contextual and news and politics are not desirable categories. An ideal scenario is my seeing a post from my daughter about my grandkid and seeing an ad for a clever toy and buying it. In general, serious news is not where the ads go. When Facebook stopped distributing news in Canada as a result of bill C-18, they reported that user satisfaction went up. Yes, there's a cohort of rabid political users but it's modest in size and non-commercial in value. There's a much larger cohort that wants nothing do with it. In social networking, engagement for the sake of engagement is not of value, it's engagement with relevant commercial value.
Thanks for the response Richard