The Fandomization of News

Pick your poison. For all its flaws, I'll still take citizen journalism over corporate interests. The MSM abdicated its journalistic responsibility in favor of activism and manipulation; they caused this as much as social media did.

"citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is.

Take that as a signal. The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more. I can appreciate that people might pick “unreliable“ over “actively manipulating.”

News has always been fake.

The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts.

As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival.

Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity.

Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades.

It has always been nonsense.

So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.

As opposed to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity?

Sounds like sour grapes because it's too hard to buy enough of gen Z's influencers.