Lies we tell ourselves

A fairly common discussion in journalism/adjacent circles on social media is:

Media critic: With all of the disinformation and misinformation online, the news industry needs to figure out how to better reach its communities.
Education advocate: What we really need is to teach high school students to be more discerning consumers of information.

No journalist would dispute the value of critical thinking and media literacy. But the claim struck me today as similar to Big Tech's endless assertions:

GenAI is inevitable; resistance is futile.

Yes, our own claims are rhetorical (not technological) determinism. But the logic is the same: we know what is best for our communities, and “best” reliably aligns with our existing professional practices, interests, and profit motives. By doing so, we try to reframe long-term economic and cultural changes as questions of individual behavior. "Things would be better if only readers would act correctly."

• Journalism is expensive to create, and readers should have to pay for it.
• Journalism is valuable; people should read past the headline.
• Readers should know the difference between news and opinion.
• Readers should seek news from the original source, not social media.

See the pattern? The claims aren’t always wrong so much as unmoored. Without a theory of change that assigns a shared responsibility to journalism itself, they are condescending platitudes.

If empty wishes were dollars, the business model problem would be solved.