This country is under influence | Mulshine

We can’t compete. I admit it.

I’m talking about old-fashioned journalists, whether left, right or center.

The competition is just too overwhelming.

A good example came to me the other day when I decided to take a look at TikTok, one of the social media platforms that is leading to the bankruptcy of print journalism.

This includes this newspaper, the last copy of which will be printed in February.

On my computer screen there was a lady with a dog as big as her.

She had to take the big fluffy dog ​​down an escalator. But the dog was afraid of moving metal stairs.

Carefree. She picked up the giant dog and carried him up the escalator. It was fun to watch, although I can’t say why. Either way, it earned him a spot on a site with 1.6 billion viewers worldwide.

This is the future of journalism, if you can call it that. A recent report from the Reuters Institute in Oxford, England, found that “TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over fjournalists as the main source of information for young people.

---

Don’t miss the best of NJ.com’s editorials, opinion columns and editors’ commentary. Add your email here:

---

The report, based on interviews with 94,000 people in 46 countries, said 55% of TikTok users get their news from “influencers,” compared to 33% who get their news from traditional media like newspapers and broadcast journalism.

This begs the question: How can we have an informed electorate when most voters get their information from all these influence peddlers?

The short answer is: we can’t.

If you’re like me, you probably had to look up the term “influencer” when you first encountered it.

In my case, the granddaughter of one of my cousins had started a fashion blog about 10 years ago, when she was still a teenager. I guess she had a good sense of style because she quickly had tens of thousands of followers and was considered one of the top fashion influencers on the internet.

The last time I saw her, she was playing on the swing with my daughter. It was now a fashion conglomerate. Whatever she recommended, people were going to buy it.

This was my first look at what is the influence of these influencers.

It’s great when the subject is something like fashion. But it’s different when it comes to politics.

All kinds of unfounded accusations can resound on the Internet, and few can be refuted.

We, the mainstream media, certainly have our faults. But there can be consequences when a member of the mainstream media gets it wrong.

This was demonstrated last week when Donald Trump won a $15 million judgment against ABC News over an inaccurate claim that Trump was found liable for rape in the case of writer E. Jean Carroll.

I’m sure hundreds of influencers have said worse things about Trump. But ABC was one of the few companies big enough to be held responsible.

In the past – whether good or bad – there were a limited number of media outlets and they worked hard to verify the accuracy of information before printing it.

As a newspaper delivery boy at the time, I delivered at least six New York newspapers. I also covered the Star-Ledger and the other in Newark, the Evening News.

Each had a particular angle on the news, but all strove to be accurate.

But accuracy isn’t necessarily a priority if you’re running a podcast or blog.

TikTok also has other problems at the moment. The US government accuses the Chinese government, which owns TikTok, of using the site to collect data on US citizens. The Supreme Court has set a hearing for January 10 to decide whether the company wants to block government efforts to impose a ban on the platform if it is not sold by January 19.

Meanwhile, this site and others play a major role in American political campaigns.

Conservative political activist Rick Shaftan told me that platforms can raise a lot of money from political campaigns for endorsements.

“It’s a scam, but that’s what these guys do, is they go out there and have followers and they retweet your stuff to their followers,” he said.

Whether this works is an open question. But in today’s media environment, everything is an open question.

My question is why this lady with the giant dog didn’t just take the elevator.

But I guess if she did, she wouldn’t have performed on TikTok.