On Thursday, Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, was in Indianapolis accepting the John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award and warning of an issue news media faces with social platforms.
Engel stated that the problem with social media is that it overwhelms individuals with information to the point that users are exposed to disinformation.
“There’s so much out there. The way to confuse people is to overwhelm them,” Engel said (h/t Deadline). “I call it censorship by static. I mean static like what you have on your television set when you don’t get good reception.
“When we used to have television antennas, we’d get snow, so what you have now is censorship by static, where there’s just so much information, a lot of it false or rumors or unimportant, that the actual important voices get drowned out. And it’s a very insidious kind of way of confusing people, making people disinterested, making people easily manipulated.”
The NBC News reporter preached that it’s up to the news media outlets to chase news that helps people understand the world rather than pursuing clicks and ratings as it leads to feeding their readers and viewers “junk food.”
“Try and help people understand the world a little bit better, because if we’re just chasing eyeballs and we’re just feeding people more junk food,” Engel added.
“And in a society that is struggling with information obesity, I don’t think that’s going to help the planet that we’re living in, the country that we’re living in, going forward.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
