In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. [definitional]
In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and analysis that separate truth from falsehood. This rejection of equivalence defines journalism’s raison d’être as well as its organic reciprocities with its readers. Under surveillance capitalism, though, these reciprocities are erased. A consequential example was Facebook’s decision to standardize the presentation of its News Feed content so that “all news stories looked roughly the same as each other… whether they were investigations in The Washington Post, gossip in the New York Post, or flat-out lies in the Denver Guardian, an entirely bogus newspaper.” This expression of equivalence without equality made Facebook’s first text exceptionally vulnerable to corruption from what would come to be called “fake news.”
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1610