https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/media-fake-news-becomes-a-way-of-life/
The media has decided there’s more emotional satisfaction in failure than in performing the function with which the public entrusts it.
In December 2016, Ben Smith, then BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, wrote a memo to his staff that was meant to be a kind of charter for the dawning of the Trump Era. In truth it spoke to and aimed to speak for the entire mainstream media. Smith would eventually move on to the New York Times, which elevated him to a role as the supervisory voice of conscience for the whole media. But that December, he warned his staff of the danger of fake news, and the need of the media to be accurate and factual:
The information environment itself will become even more central to our coverage:
Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely. Hoaxes will have higher production value. It is, for instance, getting easier and easier to create video of someone saying something he or she never said — a tool both for fake news and false denials.
And powerful filter bubbles will drive competing narratives from parallel universes of facts.
The Times and The Atlantic have minted tens of thousands of new subscribers from across the nation since Trump’s election, readers who want to keep informed, even as their local newspapers shrivel into nothing. The importance of these institutions has lately been increased substantially by their ability to survive, grow, and set trends across a more tightly concentrated media environment. Their staffers have largely defined themselves as part of a resistance to Trump’s administration.
So how is the “information environment” now, three and a half years after Smith’s memo?
