Democracy depends on well-informed citizens. We at The Altamont Enterprise have devoted ourselves for decades to informing you, local citizens, about your governments and your communities so that you can make wise choices in voting for leaders and, just as importantly, so that you can become actively engaged in shaping your future.

Much has been said since November’s presidential election about the shifting role of media, about how people get their news, and about what news sources they trust.

In the current edition of Nieman Reports, Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard, notes that the majority of Americans now prefer to watch or listen to the news rather than read it. She notes that Donald Trump, from his start in the Republican primaries, was the only candidate campaigning exclusively through television.

A decade ago, most Americans with a high school diploma or more education were daily readers of newspapers or their websites — now that number is at 40 percent. About 60 percent get their news from television. Allen also notes that, on average, Americans spend 20 minutes of their weekend leisure time reading while they spend three-and-a-quarter hours watching television.

(A 2016 report from the United States Department of Labor breaks it down further, showing that reading time increases with age just as computer time decreases. Individuals age 75 and over averaged 1.1 hours of reading per weekend day and 20 minutes playing games or using a computer for leisure while, conversely, individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 8 minutes per weekend day and spent 1.3 hours playing games or using a computer for leisure.)

Allen notes that Trump’s election website during the primaries didn’t have policy documents; it had a series of short video clips.  Trump wasn’t talking to readers; he was talking to watchers.

This reminded us of the sea change in Elizabethan England as the printing press was changing the structure of society. William Shakespeare was solidly in the oral tradition — his words vibrant as they were spoken on stage, the folios surviving by happenstance.

The mass communication that the printing press, starting with Gutenberg in 1440 and expanded by the Renaissance to a dominant force throughout Europe, engendered had profound and lasting effects — for one, bolstering a middle class as literacy was no longer confined to the elite; for another, leading to the Reformation as revolutionary ideas transcended boundaries.

Now, we are in the midst of another upheaval in how we learn about our world and communicate our ideas. While Danielle Allen uses the term “oral culture,” this new oral culture is different than the ancient world’s oral tradition. The spoken words of the ancient Greeks — or of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan actors, centuries later — reached only the ears of those who were present. The narratives that formed the basis of societies, from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Icelandic Njals Saga, were painstakingly memorized and repeated from one generation to the next.

This modern “oral culture” has the power to transcend borders the way the printed word did. But more, it can do so instantly, and it can be tailored to individual taste.

Today, nearly two-thirds of American adults get their news from social media, up from 49 percent less than four years ago.

Each of us have, just a click away, information from all over the world on any subject about which we are curious. This can make us broad-minded and well informed, or it can make us narrow-minded and ill informed. It all depends on how we use it. At the same time, newspaper readership has declined from an average 25 minutes a day in 2010 to 15 minutes a day in 2016.

We were pleased, when we surveyed Enterprise readers, that they spent an average of 45 minutes each on our paper.

In a traditional newspaper, like the one we printed and published online last week, readers can see a variety of views on a given topic. Last week, for example, we had two diametrically opposed letters from readers in Knox, both responding to a news story on the town board’s split votes, 4 to 1, in making appointments. Those letters were carefully edited. The facts were checked. Erroneous facts were removed; an editor’s note supplied relevant information.

The news (online and in print) that our letter-writers respond to is gathered by reporters who strive to be fair and thorough. In other words, there’s a traditional system in place to find the truth. As Walter Lippmann opined, “The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from free reporting and free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account.”

We’ve lived by that credo for half a century. Now, however, it is upended because without a central meeting place — like the opinion pages in our newspaper or on our website — there is no place for the exchange of ideas. One person can’t correct another so that the truth may emerge.

Each individual is putting together his or her own news feeds. Often, the middle falls out. Conservatives consult conservative sources, reinforcing their views. Similarly, liberals listen to or watch or read liberal outlets, adding to their own biases.

We know truth exists still and that now, more than ever, it is important to find it. We all need to educate ourselves. We had, until this week, held the false assumption that the younger generations, the so-called digital natives who far outpace their parents and grandparents with time spent on electronic devices, were able to access information from the internet in a reliable way — being able to distinguish truth from falsehood, and reputable sources from biased ones.

We were disabused of that notion when we read a Stanford study titled, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civil Online Reasoning.” For a year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group studied the ability of students to judge the credibility of information that “floods their smartphones, tablets, and computers.”

By June 2016, the group had analyzed close to 8,000 responses from middle school, high school, and college students; sites for field testing ranged from Los Angeles inner-city schools with few resources to well-heeled districts in the suburbs of Minneapolis. College assessments ranged from Stanford, which rejects 94 percent of its applicants, to large state universities that accept most applicants.

The researchers found “a stunning and dismaying consistency” and reported,  “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”

Middle school students, for example, had trouble distinguishing between ads and news stories on the homepage of a news website. Most could tell a traditional display ad was a paid advertisement but more than 80 percent of students believed that the native advertisement, identified by the words “sponsored content,” was a real news story.

High school students were shown a picture from a photo-sharing website of malformed daisies — some with two centers, others with petals pointing in opposite directions — along with the claim that the flowers have “nuclear birth defects” from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Less than 20 percent questioned the source of the post or specified a need to know where the picture was taken.

“By and large, students across grade levels were captivated by the photograph and relied on it to evaluate the trustworthiness of the post,” wrote the researchers. Nearly 40 percent of students argued that the post provided strong evidence because it presented pictorial evidence about conditions near the power plant. There was no basis for this in fact. There was no way to know where the picture was taken or if, indeed, it was truthful, undoctored photograph.

College students were presented with a tweet from the liberal advocacy organization MoveOn.org that reads: “New polling shows the @NRA [National Rifle Association] is out of touch with gun owners and their own members.” The tweet includes a graphic that asserts, “Two out of three gun owners say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported background checks.”

Only a few students noted that the tweet was based on a poll conducted by a professional polling firm and explained why this would make the tweet a stronger source of information. Similarly, less than a third of students fully explained how the political agenda of MoveOn.org might influence the content of the tweet.

There are lessons here for more than students.

We in the media have to be scrupulous about clearly identifying advertising, and readers have to look for and understand labels like “sponsored content.” All of us need to ask basic questions about the legitimacy of sources as we gather information. Just because we see a photograph doesn’t mean what it shows is true. We have to know its origin and trust its source. And we have to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of tweets as we seek information.

Some people, for example, during last fall’s presidential campaign, believed a website that said the pope had endorsed Donald Trump for president when, in fact, the pope had actually criticized Trump as “not Christian.”

The Stanford group correctly asserts, “Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed. But on the unregulated internet, all bets are off.”

The group goes on to quote philosopher Michael Lynch who observed that the internet is “both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.”

Like the Stanford researchers, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.

In these turbulent times, we hope our readers will continue to look to The Enterprise as a reliable source of news — a place where mistakes are corrected, a place where a variety of voices are heard, a place where differences are aired in a civil manner, a place where common ground can be sought to solve problems and where understanding can be deepened.

We are striving to provide some oral components at The Enterprise. Our editorial is read aloud each week and posted to our website, and we provide a video tour of our news each week as well on our Facebook page.

We know we are just one source of many but as we strive each week to maintain balance in our coverage, we urge you, our readers — and listeners — to strive for balance in the news you seek.

Don’t get caught in an echo chamber, listening only to those with whom you agree. Check your source before you believe, or share, what you’ve found online. A recent Pew Research Center survey says nearly a quarter of Americans say they have shared made-up news.

That same study, conducted in December, found that about two-in-three adults in the United States (64 percent) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. This sense is shared widely, the researchers found, across political parties, across incomes, and across educational levels.

Each of us needs to be careful about the news we consume and share. Our democracy depends on it.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer