By Debra Zimmerman Murphey

“At its worst, social media also offers ‘everyone’ an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection.” — Roxane Gay

The Pew Research Center says one in five Americans get their news from news influencers online. Additionally, the UNESCO “Behind the screens” survey, conducted in 2024 with expertise from Bowling Green State University in the United States, examined 500 influencers across 45 countries, and exposed critical gaps in content verification practices, according to MS NOW.

The study found “that 63 percent of influencers lack rigorous fact-checking protocols, despite their significant impact on public discourse.”

The Loss of Journalism = Less Facts

A deep dive into ombuds (once known as ombudsmen) at media outlets provides a fascinating window into what has happened in the content and news worlds.

For context, ombuds in journalism are/were independent internal critics inside media outlets whose principle roles are/were to investigate audience complaints, parse fairness and accuracy in reporting, and write columns to hold newsrooms accountable.

Years back I interviewed then-NPR’s first ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and the since-deceased Ben Bradlee, then executive editor at The Washington Post. The Post was among the first newspapers in the U.S. to establish an ombuds program.

The impression from both Dvorkin and Bradlee was that this kind of internal checks and balance was critical to the trust news consumers placed in newsrooms.

However, little did any of us know what was on the horizon:

• fact checkers and ombuds lost their jobs;

• community journalism was decimated;

• cable media brands pour their resources into talking heads instead of investigative reporting;

• news operations continue to consolidate in the name of profit;

• increasingly, people are getting their news from social media; and

• The Trump Administration targeted and defunded public broadcasting.

Nearly 3,500 local print newspapers in the U.S. have gone out of business since 2005, according to a landmark study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news.

Social media — which is filling that void — is a readily available, but fractured, medium.

Social media content runs the gamut from the politically historic writings of Heather Cox Richardson, analyses by S.E. Cupp and progressive Van Jones, and the works of 60 Minutes conservative correspondent Ross Douthat, to reels, fake accounts, and to click-seeking influencers and content creators providing misleading or speculative content.

The McConnell Factor

Numerous hypotheses and angles have circulated on social media about Republican Senator Mitch McConnell.

A lack of a clear and definite response from his staff and a void of transparency (from the White House, the GOP and the news media) have triggered a lot of confusion and conspiracy theories.

“Confusion over what constitutes the facts surrounding news fundamentally applies to the work that both the media and professional communicators do,” says Maury Tobin, President of Tobin Communications, Inc. (TCI). “PR professionals and opinion leaders need to help ferret out the truth for the general public because there’s a lot of misleading content today.”

The power of trenchable journalism is that it provides context — namely the who, what, where, when, why and how.

“Conspiracy theories are a biological inheritance. We will never live without them. Our brain fills in gaps when no evidence is present,” Derek Beres wrote on Big Think. “Conspiracy theories are low-beta transmissions — simplistic messages designed to satisfy an answer in search of a question.”

There is an understanding in PR and strategic communications that if there is an information void, people will fill it.

The Big Content Bang

Overall, only 56% of U.S. adults [less Republicans than Democrats] said they have a lot of or some trust in the information they get from national news organizations — down 11 percentage points since March 2025 and 20 points since Pew first asked this question in 2016.

Nonetheless, in many instances today, we’re not upselling critical thinking. Social media upsells propaganda and distortion.

Big tech companies and automation — not humans — are primarily running social media.

Through PostgreSQL, Instagram’s old database, user information was stored in one big notebook.

Now, through its newer database Cassandra, it uses many notebooks to spread around the world so nothing gets slow — even when millions use it at the same time, reports Techahead.

Trends also reveal that “8 AI bots now write half of X’s community notes,” Indicator revealed in May. (The site says its mission is to expose digital deception and to teach people how to hold bad actors and platforms accountable.)

The Context on Context

“We’re not in a war against facts. We’re in a war against people not seeking facts,” explains Tobin.

The reward center of a social media user’s brain releases dopamine, explained American author and psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke to writer Bruce Goldman. (Source: Stanford)

In Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, she cautioned about addictions to the Internet and social media. There’s also a tendency for digital consumers to interact with content that confirms their needs and thinking because of algorithms.

A recent example is a video clip that was shared of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — the only black governor in America — in a polite exchange with Mark Mullin, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The video from political commentator Josh Greene was labeled “A Top Democrat Just Praised The Man In Charge Of ICE.”

Social media users were virally piqued.

But missing in the video clip: Moore is the newly appointed Chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association (NGA) and the short clip was of him interacting with Mullin — a guest speaker — at a NGA summer event in Oklahoma City.

Also missing in the video clip: It is not atypical for chairs of entities to adhere to protocols and standards that elected officials, nonprofits, associations, and organizations have for events.

Not missing: outrage by people responding to the video clip.

“When anyone can be a journalist the content is near-endless, supplying social media feeds 24/7/365. Instead of opinion sections or dedicated programs for pundits, social media feeds mix opinions and facts together. And the more outlandish a story, the better it does,” according to the U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

Facts Are the Currency of Civic Mindedness

What’s often missing on social media are the facts and context that flesh out why people should care about an issue. Why and where something is/was said is important.

Facts and experiences conveyed through journalism, literature, broadcasting, teaching, and knowledge are how humans document what becomes history.

“While evidence suggests technological solutions to misinformation on social media are effective, researchers worry that social media companies’ interest in employing, evaluating, and improving these tools has waned in recent years,” wrote Wendy Glauser in “As Social Media Scales Back Fact-Checking, Can Technologies Fill the Gap?” (Source: PubMed Central)

Research shows that fact-checking labels reduced belief in false information and reduced misinformation sharing, Glauser notes. That research was conducted by Cameron Martel, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. 

“Common technologies for combating misinformation include everything from algorithmic labeling of posts that contain misinformation, to downregulation of AI-deemed inaccurate posts, to mass awareness campaigns that encourage critical thinking,” according to Glauser.

The problem, however, is this isn’t regularly happening.

Media Minus

The argument is that the media failed us.

But the facts reveal this isn’t the whole story:

1. There was a disinvestment in news operations and stellar journalism; and

2. News operations lost subscribers and information consumers to provocative content, the mechanisms that would allow immediate engagement with journalists, and warp-speed clips and memes.

Even after McConnell’s recent release, there wasn’t any current photograph that his office provided.

The BBC, for example, used a stock image from Getty and The New York Times published a file photo it had, and the caption said it was from earlier in 2026. But people on social media were saying that the news outlets were trying to pass off old pictures as current pictures of McConnell; however, the news outlets noted that they weren’t current pictures.

Some people don’t know that media outlets will use stock photo companies or older pictures on file if they don’t have a current picture — and the mass public may miss these finer details.

This is a common practice but, albeit, can be a confusing practice for people who aren’t adequately informed.

Spoiler Alert

It’s not like AI is going to save us without verification, sourcing, and defining moments being accurately relayed by humans.

In early 2025, Meta announced it would end its partnership with third-party fact-checkers and instead rely on crowd-sourced community notes. This means everyday users can comment on the accuracy of information.

“However, 21% to 28% of posts that community notes deemed as misleading were deemed true by the AI bots,” Glauser points out.

Northwestern’s Medill 2025 report explained that “although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts — areas with extremely limited access to local news — continue to grow.”

In 2005, just over 150 counties in America lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. This is a crisis on facts.

There is no accuracy or fact boat coming to rescue society or news consumers regarding the proliferation of false information, quotes taken out of context, a failure to apply standards to influencers on social media, or to fight the propaganda war labeled fake news — an absolute oxymoron that lots of Americans and the global community bent into.

We, each and everyone of us, are the rescue crews. We bear the responsibility to fact check, provide context, back information with sources, and be balancers on the scale of truth.

Debra Zimmerman Murphey is a former journalist who now works in strategic communications and on independent research and writing projects. She has over 40 years of experience in news reporting and editing, content creation, and advocacy. She is VP of Content Development for Tobin Communications, Inc. Her areas of interest and expertise include sustainability, infrastructure, federal policy, foreign relations, the state of journalism today, and animal advocacy.