Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow: There is a lack of gathering spaces in US for civil discourse
Celebrated investigative reporter Ronan Farrow told a Sarasota audience Monday that the decline of local news and the rise of social media has made it harder for people to be exposed to different perspectives.
“In more and more counties across this country, there’s no daily newspaper to convey shared truth,” he said at the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall lecture Monday morning.
Farrow applauded the lecture series as an opportunity for people to be exposed to different kinds of viewpoints.
Farrow is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. He, along with reporters at The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for their reporting on Harvey Weinstein.
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He told the Sarasota crowd about problems facing journalism, including economic ones.
“There is a set of economic pressures that have just decimated newsrooms across our industry,” he said. “Our people have just hemorrhaged jobs.”
He also noted that distrust in the news has grown in recent years.
“I work in an industry that, at one point in time, was widely trusted by the American public,” Farrow said. “Not so long ago, that was the case. And that formed a bedrock of shared truth that is essential for any self-governing society.”
Recent years have also seen the rise of social media platforms. Farrow said these platforms' algorithms can put people in a "silo of news" and reinforce their existing views.
"On some social media platforms, the more extremist misinformation you look at, the more you're going to get fed," he said. "The more lies you look at, the more you're going to see."
During this time of polarization in the U.S., a pandemic emerged that prevented people from gathering and conversing with each other, Farrow said. People started spending more time at home, looking at the Internet.
“For a lot of people, the bubble of information – or misinformation – that the algorithms have curated for them, have become the only lens through which they can view the outside world," he noted.
Farrow praised the Ringling College Library Association, whose members contribute financially so that the Town Hall series can "bring in voices from across the political spectrum."
"That is truly a lost art," he said, "and you in this community are keepers of that flame."
Anne Snabes covers city and county government for the Herald-Tribune. You can contact her at asnabes@gannett.com or (941) 228-3321 and follow her on Twitter at @a_snabes.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Ronan Farrow tells Sarasota crowd about the problems facing journalism
