zlacker

See, I agree with everything up to that last sentence. Because from what I can tell most people who say that just have a different idea of which media outlets that are the problem.

I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-doe...

>>Dubiou+(OP)
> They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)

The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.