I was first made aware of Jay Rosen when he began to pop up in my Twitter feed. As the last presidential election neared, he began to show up more and more often through the retweets of friends and colleagues. Now that Donald Trump has declared an all-out war on journalism, Rosen’s voice is ever more essential in the national conversation. A week after the President issued his “Fake News Awards,” here’s a talk with the NYU journalism professor that attempts to get to the bottom of precisely what got us into this situation in the first place. As a journalist — and, for that matter, a reasonably thoughtful human being — it’s a tough conversation. Rosen struggles to find a perfect historical analogue for the current state of the press in US, settling on the Civil War — a chilling comparison to say the least. There’s not a lot of hopefulness contained in here, save for the fact that perhaps the internet — the same medium that helped get us into this mess — could ultimately be the one that redeems us.

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