On social media, the reason for the traffic jam is different. Word is that it was an attack. Right after, a story spreads claiming it was a hit‑and‑run. No one confirms it and no one denies it; after all, no one saw the supposed tree because traffic had been diverted. There’s no news anywhere. No one knows what really happened except those who live nearby. Reality has already turned into an urban legend.
He turns on the computer. All the news sites have vanished. The information aggregators are in sepulchral silence. Only social networks remain, overflowing with explanations for everything—except for the void.
He opens the stock market website and notices everything is down 20%. Savings seem to be collapsing. He tries to open the financial news site—nothing. It’s down. He goes to the usual forum and finds 100 explanations for the crash. In truth, no one knows why, because there wasn’t a single piece of news. Something seems to be happening, but it’s impossible to know what. Television is only showing pre‑recorded series. Nothing current, nothing from today.
From today, only social media.
He reads there that all the ministers have been arrested for corruption. The post has a million likes and 500 comments. It appears in every feed, crushing the post from a head of government claiming the administration is fully operational and that everything was nothing more than a fallen tree. That post, with “only” 30,000 likes, is lost in a sea of irrelevance.
Social media algorithms have nowhere to fetch the truth from. They assume truth lies with those who have the most supporters. There is no news—only networks and robots deciding the importance of each post and treating it as truth not in the factual sense, but as intrinsic truth.
An undated image reappears of a prominent political figure with electrodes stuck to his chest. Comments follow quickly: “This time he was poisoned for sure!” Over a million comments and rising. News channels say nothing. Journalists don’t show up, don’t speak, and no one seems able to explain that the photo isn’t from today but from the last election campaign.
The Price of the Social Filter
That thing called journalism… like everything in life, we only value it when we no longer have it. It is journalists and the media who ensure the order that prevents chaos.
Without journalists, reality is hijacked by speed.
Without journalism, everything is true and everything is false at the same time, just like Schrödinger’s Cat: our reality is suspended between the factual and the fabricated. Without the power of journalism, the power of connection wins. Whoever is most connected leads the narrative, with no one able to say whether it is factual, ironic, or false. Truth does not survive without someone to write it.
Journalists are society’s filters. To understand their role, we must remove them from the stage and imagine how we would live without being able to turn to a television channel, a newspaper, or a digital outlet to verify what is happening.
Every time we say a newspaper is biased, we need to think about what it would be like if that newspaper didn’t exist. Or better yet, if no newspaper existed.
That is why journalism is the democratic safeguard, and why we must have many of them. Best practices say that in a video‑surveillance system, there must be redundancy—that is, one CCTV camera must always be within reach of another, so that it’s possible to know who turned off or corrupted the first. Media plurality is exactly that: cameras watching each other.
But if the media must watch themselves, imagine now if they didn’t exist, and if we lived solely at the mercy of whatever each of us manages to amplify on social networks.
The Value of Truth
When we say journalism is weak, we must imagine ourselves without it, and rethink whether we are giving it its true value.
How much does a journalist earn, that supposed bastion of democracy? Much less than a commentator, and far less than the value they bring to society by delivering truth “certified” by their ethical code and by the institution they represent.
So if that’s the case, why do we pay to watch series on any streaming platform, but not to know what is happening in the world, near and far? Why do we easily pay for the fantasy of entertainment but not for the truth of facts?
Our perception of value has excluded a profession that is as important as it is fundamental. We have excluded the need to have very good journalists, very well paid, so they never hesitate in the face of truth. Of course journalism has weakened, but it is only fair to take our hats off to those who remain in a profession that is rarely profitable because the “customer” simply does not want to pay.
There are good and bad journalists, but in a world where neither good nor bad are valued economically, we will end up with only the bad ones—before ending up with none at all. If journalism is the safeguard of democracy and FREEDOM, we must pay its fair price. Otherwise, next Monday will be the last in which we manage to wake up in reality.
