“Today we are told it’s the tech giants who are killing us. Readers want everything for free, we must do click-bait, it’s a race to the bottom. Except that’s not true,” Witherow said LONDON: Despite the rise of Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook, UK daily The Times’ Editor John Witherow argued that now is the “golden age for serious journalism.” “Today we are told it’s the tech giants who are killing us. Readers want everything for free, we must do click-bait, it’s a race to the bottom. Except that’s not true,” Witherow said at Europe’s largest tech conference, the Web Summit, in Lisbon on Wednesday. “Good journalism does not need saving. It’s thriving. This is a golden age for serious journalism. It’s expanding into audio and visual and reaching new audiences.” Witherow added: “When young people ask me if they should go into journalism nowadays, I say, by all means, now is a great time.” Social media companies have come under scrutiny lately for becoming havens for fake news and misinformation. An Arab News report titled “Future of Media: Myth of Digital Transformation” dived into the issue. In 2020, a whopping 79 percent of young people in the Arab world received their news from social media compared with just 25 percent in 2015, according to the Arab Youth Survey. A 2018 study by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholars found that fake news spreads far more quickly on Twitter than true stories. According to their research, false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories. A propensity for the scandalous, the outrageous and the scurrilous makes the rise of fake news and hateful and violent content on these platforms a matter of grave concern.