I have been trying for years to get my friends and family to eat more sustainable seafood, use less disposable bags, and generally try to think about what they use and throw away. I’ve had limited success.
But, once I started writing about some of these issues for a newspaper, I got comments along the lines of “So that’s what you were trying to say. I understand now.”
I’m not sure if this is because I was completely off-base in explaining things before, or if the fact that a newspaper published what I wrote made a difference in how people viewed what I said.
It’s a little terrifying to think about the amount of trust people place in the media. I’m not saying that people blindly follow whatever they read in print (although there are some out there who do), but there is a certain trust that what the media talk about must be worth some attention.
I think that’s what a lot of so-called old media (TV, newspapers) have going for them–trust. For a lot of people, that’s where you get news, because that’s been the case for so long. It’s a heavy responsibility, particularly at the speeds at which news breaks these days.
I also think it takes much longer for websites and blogs to build up that trust, and only an instant to lose it (for example, take the ScienceBlogs.com controversy, where some of their bloggers left when the site decided briefly to host a corporate-sponsored blog.)
Even though newspapers are the first draft of history, they impart validity on the stories they publish, especially for real Luddites who insist on paper copies.
That being said, I’ve encountered some real brow-raisers in papers. But it’s nothing compared to the crap that can get through peer-review!