ABSTRACT
It’s a truism that in light of the media’s power in shaping public opinion and discourse, it also has important obligations and responsibilities. Many of these obligations are frequently violated, and this doesn’t look like changing any time soon. Scholars can divide consumer-focused questions, very roughly, into three stages. At the first stage, there are questions about what media to consume: which newspapers to read, which television programmes to watch, who to follow on social media. At the second stage, there are questions about how to respond to the media that one does consume in belief-formation—whether to trust it at its word, dismiss it as “fake news”, or something intermediate. And at the third stage, there are questions about how to act on the basis of the beliefs one has arrived at. This chapter focuses most directly on the first stage: people's obligations as consumers in deciding what media to consume.
