The News Is Broken. So Are We

    

    The news business has always been about money. Sell papers, chase clicks, rack up the ad revenue. That’s not a conspiracy theory—it’s the business model. And it explains why Rolling Stone once ran a graphic gang-rape story at the University of Virginia that turned out to be fiction, why a short clip of a kid in a MAGA hat got turned into a national racism scandal, and why the Washington Post once won a Pulitzer for an eight-year-old heroin addict who didn’t exist.  

    Mistakes happen. But these weren’t quiet ones. They were loud, profitable, and corrected only after the damage was done. No wonder trust in the big outlets has collapsed. Polls show it scraping the bottom; people treat the evening news the way they treat used-car salesmen.  

    Enter the citizen journalist: every idiot with a phone. No million-dollar budget, no fact-checkers, no editorial meeting. Just someone standing near the action who hits record. Sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes they get it first. Either way, they’ve made it harder for the old gatekeepers to weave the story they want you to swallow.  

    That shift terrifies the people who used to own the microphone. Last week, Anthony Albanese gave one of those solemn national addresses about fuel supplies and “misinformation” on social media. Translation: too many people are seeing raw footage and asking inconvenient questions instead of waiting for the approved script. The government’s solution, as usual, is more regulation. More power to decide what counts as “reliable.” Because nothing restores public confidence like bureaucrats deciding which clips are too dangerous for you to watch.  

    Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the chaos is working. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But it’s working better than the old monopoly ever did.  

    CNN and Turning Point USA can cover the exact same protest and sound like they attended different planets. One sees systemic oppression, the other sees entitled idiots blocking traffic. Both will cherry-pick. Both will spin. The difference now is you don’t have to pick a team and die on that hill. You can watch the longer video, read the police report, notice who started throwing things, and decide for yourself.  

    The real problem isn’t unverified TikToks. The real problem is the growing urge to treat disagreement as a character flaw.  

    I’ve watched friends unfollow each other because one thought the Sandmann coverage was a disgrace and the other thought it was justice. I’ve seen family dinners turn frosty because someone dared question the latest government line on “disinformation.” We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that if you don’t share my exact news diet, you must be morally defective.  

This is childish.  

    You can think the legacy media is a pack of self-important hysterics and still have a beer with your mate who swears by the ABC. You can believe citizen footage often saves the day and still roll your eyes at the guy who believes every blurry video proves the deep state. Hate the opinion. Not the person.  

    It’s an embarrassingly basic idea. Hate the take, not the taker. Argue like adults. Keep the friendship. It used to be the bare minimum of civilisation. Now it feels radical.  

    Social media makes it worse, of course. Algorithms feast on rage. Outlets on both sides have discovered that moral panic pays better than nuance. And governments, left and right, have discovered that “protecting you from misinformation” is a handy way to protect themselves from scrutiny.  

But none of that excuses us.  

    The information mess we’re living through is permanent. Smartphones aren’t going back in the drawer. Outlets will keep chasing clicks. Politicians will keep trying to tidy the narrative. The only variable we control is how we treat each other while it happens.  

    So disagree. Loudly. Point out the bad reporting, the lazy framing, the regulatory overreach. Call nonsense nonsense. Just don’t turn the person on the other side of the table into the enemy. They’re still your neighbour. Still the one who’ll jump-start your car when the battery dies. Still human.  

    We’re not going to fix the news by pretending it’s infallible. We’re not going to fix politics by pretending one side has a monopoly on truth. The only thing worth fixing right now is the reflex that says “different opinion equals bad person.”  

    Because if we lose that, the rest of it—trust, facts, democracy, whatever—doesn’t matter anyway. We’ll just be tribes screaming at each other while the world burns. And the joke is, we’ll still have the same postcode.