Fake News is far more common than people think (not just the Gell-Mann effect, but that helps...) I quit trusting anything I saw in the media in 1998, when my wife and I saw NBC totally faking a hurricane report in Corpus Christi. The reporter was in a rain slicker, and there was a lackey standing off-camera with a hose spraying water. Corpus was on the dry side of a hurricane deep in the Gulf that wound up hitting near Yucatan - winds were up, but there wasn't a cloud for 400 miles. Fake News then, even faker news now.
Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this.
TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment.
The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
I don't feel that way. Social media circulates a lot of weird takes. For the many, many hot topics of 2020, I hear a lot of opinions that are something like, I'm bored of this so it's not important and it's all fake news anyway so I can make up my own story. That's a take that sounds like it should be quiet but it's instead really noisy.
> Not really a replacement for quality journalism.
The trouble (in my opinion) is that major networks don't really offer much in the way of "quality journalists."
They've mostly devolved into getting hot takes from pundits and "rah rah our team is great".
I listen to (and donate to) NPR (Iowa Public Radio specifically) because I think they are about as good as you can get for "quality journalism", but even their work devolves into garbage as soon as politics or culture come into play.
It probably doesn't help that a few years ago they redid their program structure to focus less on news and more on "think pieces" [1]
I don't know why, but the thought that 'trustworthy' news sources are pseudo-anonymous or actually anonymous sources on a message board scares the ever-loving-shit out of me.
