There was a moment — brief but powerful — where we began to believe we had finally slain an old giant.

It came with the rise of platforms that promised to “democratise” media, to give voice to every individual, to let every athlete, thinker, activist, executive or celebrity broadcast their own story, without the filters of legacy institutions. Elon Musk said as much when he spoke about decentralising media, opening it up to everyone with a phone and an internet connection. No more gatekeepers. No more old hierarchies. Just pure, unmediated truth.

And, at first, it felt liberating.

Every podcast became a direct line to the person who actually lived the narrative. Every social media platform turned into a newsroom and every public figure into their own anchor. We were told to reject “mainstream media” — that it was biased, outdated, elitist — and embrace instead the beautiful chaos of direct testimony. Fake news, they said, wasn’t the problem; controlled narratives were. And now those narratives could be toppled by the digital mob. The story would finally come “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Except the horse wasn’t just mouthy — it was lying.

Without filters, the loudest or most charismatic or most monetised voice wins — not the most accurate one. The chaos of decentralised media has exposed why journalism’s gatekeeping still matters…

Without filters, the loudest or most charismatic or most monetised voice wins — not the most accurate one. The chaos of decentralised media has exposed why journalism’s gatekeeping still matters…

There’s a fundamental mistake baked into this confidence in self-broadcasted truth: just because someone says they’re telling the truth doesn’t mean they are. On the contrary, we now live in a world where everybody has a megaphone, but almost nobody is accountable. Every........

© Dawn (Magazines)