Background Briefing offers an educational approach to providing information in an era of “fake news”.
A Pew Research study finds that 67% of Americans get their news from
social media, mostly Facebook, in a form of reality-shopping where
outlooks are shared and opinions reinforced, often by political spin
or even foreign manipulation. This is undermining our country’s
consensus on what is real and true and making us less able to deal
with the challenges the nation faces.
In an increasingly divided country with a leader who calls the press
“the enemy of the people” and has his followers swallowing his lies
while believing that the media spreads “fake news”, we need to find a
way to inform citizens and restore civic engagement.
Five days a week the one hour daily news analysis radio program
“Background Briefing” covers three or four major issues in the news
offering the equivalent of the Presidential Daily Briefing which is
largely ignored by this White House. We invite our listening audience
into a public radio Oval Office as we all learn from an open-source
version of the daily briefings, receiving fact-driven intelligence
from the most informed specialists, closest to the scene analyzing and
contextualizing international events and national issues without false
equivalence or “balance”.
The nationally-syndicated one hour daily public radio program
“Background Briefing” with Ian Masters available 24/7 at
backgroundbriefing.org offers an alternative media platform in a media
landscape dominated by monopolies and oligopolies following the loss
of net neutrality in what could be the last frontier of non-commercial
non-corporate media left in the country.
Instead of the interviewer as the anchor or media personality, the
guests are the “stars” and the goal is to extract the most insightful
and salient information while allowing the facts to speak for
themselves and the objective truth to follow its own non-ideological
course.
“Background Briefing” focuses on national security in the broadest
sense going beyond defense and intelligence to encompass the soft
power of cultural influence, economic strength and social justice
covering everything from healthcare to human rights, the environment
to enterprise, sociology to science, the law to labor, immigration to
innovation, race to religion, economics to education, transportation
to technology.
America has already entered an authoritarian mediascape similar to
what Vladimir Putin has perfected. There is no consensus on what is
real or true anymore as daily lies issue forth from the White House,
echoed and amplified by Fox News and right wing talk radio. Yet as
Apple’s Tim Cook warns, today there are far more powerful and
pervasive media tools like Facebook which are being used to divide
Americans and manipulate them with fake news. If we are to save our
Democracy, facts must be weaponized to stop the spread of
authoritarian fictions.