Real Life Doesn't have an Algorithm…At Least, Not Yet

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Real Life Doesn't have an Algorithm…At Least, Not Yet

The World Economic Forum just released its 2026 Global Risks Report, and it should come as no surprise to anyone working in a newsroom that "misinformation and disinformation" ranked as the second highest risk. Number three? Societal polarization.

We deal with this every single day. It’s the angry emails in the inbox; it’s the conspiracy theories in the comment section. It is the algorithm that drives us apart because anger engages more than facts.

I was thinking about this recently, looking back at the era of The National Enquirer. You remember that rag—it sat at every grocery store checkout, peddling aliens and celebrity lies. But here is the thing: we all knew what it was. It was contained. It was a joke. It certainly wasn't competing with the 6:00 PM news for credibility.

Today, the internet has taken that grocery store checkout rack and dumped it onto every countertop in America.

The problem for us as journalists is that on a social media timeline, a well-sourced, vetted investigation from your station looks identical to a fabricated lie from a content mill. The visual cues of "truth" are gone. We are fighting for attention in a sea of digital garbage, and often, the garbage is winning because it confirms biases rather than challenging them.

There is a trend online right now where users are posting about bringing 2016 back. It’s a nostalgia for a time when things felt simpler. Ten years ago, we still had a shared sense of reality. We might have disagreed on the solution, but we generally agreed on the problem.

That shared reality is gone, and rebuilding it is the hardest job this industry faces.

While I remain optimistic that quality journalism still matters, we have a lot of work to do to cut through the noise. Maybe the first step is reminding our viewers—and ourselves—that life happens in the physical world, not on the screen.

Real life doesn't have an algorithm. At least, not yet.