Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

When the Syrian government fell last year, a CNN reporter was filmed, quote-unquote, rescuing a man from prison,

only to learn later that he wasn't an inmate at all.

The man was not an enemy of the state, but instead one of the

regime's intelligence officers. This was certainly an embarrassing episode for the most

trusted name in news, but unfortunately not a once-off problem. In fact, the entire news establishment

has all but lost the faith of its consumers. Getting the news used to mean subscribing to a newspaper or listening to the radio or flipping

to one of three TV networks.

By the 1990s, 24-hour cable news ushered in the new era of news consumption, and this

need to turn viewers into consumers and keep them tuned in had a predictable effect on the whole process.

Denzel Washington once said, sounding very much like Neil Postman or John Somerville,

that if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read it, you're misinformed.

He went on to note that one of the long-term effects of too much information

was that the media now had a need

to be first, not necessarily true. And social media platforms could deliver the salacious outrage and

the constant breaking news even faster, but were also forced to deal with things like algorithms

and an unprecedented level of competition. So the more emotion a post could manufacture, the more

interactions it earned. This has created a feedback loop where crazier ideas get platformed,

more nuanced approaches get sidelined, and everyone becomes an expert. Even more important has

been the postmodern mood permeating both popular and academic culture.

Generations of students have now been taught that truth and ethics depend on where someone

...