Modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate

It's all about incentives. Most major news organisations are private, for-profit entities. Profit is the primary incentive.

What turns a profit? High-brow commentary written by proper journalists, that only a small subset of your readership will fully understand and appreciate, or photos of the latest Hollywood B-list celebrity doing something embarrassing, churned out en masse by pseudo-journalists whose only qualification is being able to plagiarise content without being detected, generating far more page views and ad revenue?

Modern media? This is at least as old as 1928. Take Edward Bernays (the "father of modern PR" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bernays), whose book "Propaganda" said things like: "There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities."

And: "For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our national life."

Does awareness immunize you? "Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better informed about the processes of its own life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.

"If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands, commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more intelligently."

A terribly amusing read, from a pre-computing programmer of people. (http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf) When guys like Ryan Holiday talk about the "modern media", they're stirring nostalgia for lost days of yore — which didn't exist. At least not in the timeframe they seem to imply.

[Disclaimer: I'm only halfway through the video before writing this. I'll be embarrassed if he delves into the 20th century history in the latter half. And keep in mind that "Propaganda" had a more neutral connotation then. Later, it got associated with the Nazis, who were actually inspired by the success of US propaganda.]

PR gaming aside, I'm always a bit horrified when I read a general media story about something that I know a lot about (like, say, computer programming) because the articles are often a very superficial treatment of the subject while trying to not seem so superficial, and in a lot of cases they are either so simplified that the information they present is misleading or in some cases they are just spouting completely incorrect nonsense in a soothingly authoritative tone.

The reason I am horrified is not because I'm offended that they don't understand computers, but because I realize that the articles that they write in fields I'm not intimately familiar with are almost certainly equally stupid sounding to people who are, and thus I'm likely woefully misinformed on a great many things.

Ok, you can spoof media. But the real manipulation happens in the selection of topics that become newsworthy. Only the - for the target audience - most sensational happenings are 'reported'. This sensational funnel is inherent to the system and much more manipulative than any individual and deliberate forgery. BTW, Hacker News also works this way. By giving readers the ability to immediately respond it creates at least some counter balance to the sensational funnel.

In Croatia we have national tv and radio. If you own a TV set or radio you are obliged by law to pay a monthly fee. This in theory means that they should be objective and impartial. However, the top heads there are appointed through political connections. So they're mostly a propaganda machine for the political parties in power. Since the politicians here are only puppets in the service of big money and foreign power, their agenda is mostly to serve their interests. Except for some small independent web sites (such as advance.hr), all other private newspapers and sites sell cheap infotainment, often poorly translated articles from english and american yellow-press.