Howard Rheingold Quotes

Ten percent of the American population thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Those are the people that have not learned the skill of filtering information from the vast barrage of inaccurate information that we're all faced with everyday. I think that's a very 21st century skill.

If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. Don't just swallow what politicians tell you.

If I allow journalists to describe a collection and they make mistakes, I'm upset, because the retractions are never noticed.

The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.

You shouldn't presume that all quotes that are in a magazine or a newspaper are accurate.

Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.

People think that if they read something in the newspaper or see it on TV, it has to be true.

Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.

Get in the habit of vetting your research as you go - particularly research conducted online. Verify facts from multiple reputable sources before you record them.

We have entered a time when a writer's first idea is his best idea, when the first thing a reporter hears is the first thing that she reports. We live in a time now when we have seen major television networks take video off of YouTube and broadcast it to millions of Americans without verifying whether the video had been fabricated or not.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.

If bloggers are to improve our public discourse - helping busy and usually uninformed people make sense of the world - it is necessary to use some sort of standard with which to judge their reliability. Perhaps the answer (strictly advisory) is a body of their peers. Perhaps not.

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

I think that everyone is kind of confused about the information they get from the media and rightly so. I'm confused about the information I get from the media.

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

The public doesn't know what to believe anymore. We don't know what stories are supposedly true, this idea of 'fake news.' We watch it on what I guess you would call a split-focus. It's half entertainment and half mystery.

I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.

You can't believe everything that's written or reported in the media.