Inside PR

Inside PR


Inside PR: Fake news and the chasm of perspective

April 24, 2017

We celebrate a big award win for Maureen Judge (read on to learn of her connection to the podcast), test Instagram Hyperlapse and struggle with bridging the perspective chasm that seems to support fake news. Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back for another episode of the Inside PR podcast. #IPRMustKnows Kudos to Maureen Judge It's not strictly PR, but it is communication, communication as in documentary filmmaking. So, a quick shout out to Maureen Judge, whose documentary film, My Millenial Life, won the Canadian Screen Award. Maureen is not only a talented film maker, but she also is Martin's wife. And Martin enjoys basking in Maureen's aura. Instagram Hyperlapse telescopes event videos Hyperlapse, a new Instagram app enables users to speed up videos up to 12 times the speed in which they were taken. This should prove to be a boon for people staging events who want to produce behind-the-scenes, preparing for the event, or other kinds of videos capturing a longer time span. Struggling with fake news and bridging the perspective chasm We'll be honest. Gini, Martin and Joe would all self-identify as progressive in our political perspective. And yes, we're struggling with the challenge of fake news and the decline of traditional news organizations. A story in the New York Times launched us into a discussion of the potential for social revenue sources like Patreon to support a bubbling up of entrepreneurial niche and community-based news media. But that quickly morphed into a discussion of the continuing problem of replacing the mid-sized news organizations that are most in trouble. And from there we found ourselves again struggling to come to grips with the immediate manifestation of these changes in the news ecosystem - fake news. In our struggle with fake news, we move past the problem with social algorithms that lead to its distribution and the measures being taken, finally, by Facebook and other platforms to deal with it. Simply tagging something as fake doesn't bring us any closer to why people would believe it in the first place. It doesn't bring us any closer to understanding why people distrust traditional news organizations. We have to understand the lived experience and perspective of those who reject the relevance of the facts that are advanced. They may be facts. But are they relevant to what these people really want to talk about? We need to listen to one another, engaging in a dialogue to find understanding and common ground. Yep, it's three liberals struggling with the challenge of fake news.