if every major source is untrustworthy, if it's all a chain of lies all the 
    way down, how does anyone know anything?

That's exactly the sort of thinking that modern autocracies (like Russia, China, Egypt, etc.) use to keep their populations pliant. They know that people see government propaganda for what it is. However, they also know that merely knowing that what the government is telling you is propaganda isn't enough to serve as a basis for popular resistance to the government. Therefore, the authorities do their best to muddy the waters, ensuring that every news source, no matter how rigorous and well-researched is tarred with the "bias" or "fake news" brush. What happens then is that people, by and large, just give up and remain content to hunker down and get on with their steadily worsening day-to-day lives, without paying attention to the large scale abuses that they're subjected to.

It worries me immensely that we're seeing this pattern in the United States.

I'm not sure that that is worse than excessive credulousness. I think it's advisable to be skeptical of the news in any source, no matter how reputable -- who are the sources? What are their motives? Is this analysis credible and does it fit with the facts presented? Even the big names get it wrong.

There's no surfeit of credulousness among broken political societies. Where you'll find "excessive" credulousness is among high-performing societies where, not coincidentally, there's usually less reason to be cynical.

Skepticism is not the same thing s cynicism. And skepticism is not the same thing as holding all literature to the same exacting evidentiary standards, and requiring all consumers to have the requisite skill and motivation to scrutinize those standards.

The so-called mainstream media _is_ biased. That much can't be in dispute. The issue is the character of that bias. The bias of the New York Times is not the same as the bias of Russia Today or the People's Daily. And equivocating bias is it's own form of bias, perhaps the most pernicious kind.

I mean, no reason to be cynical except constantly publishing information sourced to anonymous operators with their own agendas that may or may not be accurate. I just don't think what would make the world better is more people uncritically reading the papers that led us into Iraq.

The entire motive for this "mainstream media is fake/lies push" to get people to ignore anything that doesn't come from them. It's exactly the same as the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt legal strategy pursued by people like SCO only you don't have the benefit of court managed discovery to force a version of the truth out in the open.

"Even the big names get it wrong" isn't the same thing as "trust no one [but me]"

I don't think that's entirely true. Of course Trump and other mendacious characters have seized on it, but I think the general distrust and skepticism of news media is both organic and well-warranted.

I wouldn't call it organic. The Republicans have purposefully employed a multi-decadal strategy of painting the "mainstream media" as biased and untrustworthy. This has sown excessive and mostly unwarranted _generalized_ cynicism, and granted people carte blanche to outright reject challenging facts and perspectives in favor of much more partisan narratives.

This cynicism has infected not just conservatives but most other factions. It turns out that if you repeat a narrative often enough even your opponents as well as the "mainstream media" will pick it up and run with it.

The organic parts would be the dissolution and fragmentation of the mid-century media empires--broadcast news, regional newspapers, etc--into all the various cable and Internet outlets we have today. That fragmentation means readerships are more self-selected, creating market pressures for outlets to cater to their particular readerships' preferences and biases.

This is in some sense a regression to a 250-year mean of political culture, but that's a mean of slow and highly volatile social, economic, and scientific progress.

And there's no excuse for the slash-and-burn, nihilistic tactics adopted by conservative strategists. You simply cannot have a functioning democracy unless society retains the _myth_ of an objective, shared truth. It's one thing to nurture skepticism, it's another to nurture cynicism.

Not that there's no fault on the part of the left or other political factions. But I'm not going to equivocate factions which, say, pursue ill-considered policy objectives with a faction that undermines the fundamental prerequisites for a functioning body politic.

The Donald Trump phenomenon and the age of alternative facts is principally a result of a _particular_ concerted partisan political effort. And it's not new--it goes back to before Reagan, although really got going with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, which finally solidified a unified GOP narrative on all policy matters. The only difference is that we're now much more focused on some of the starker consequences of that shift in strategy.

You think the problem with the media is a lack of centralized control? Sorry, I don't think we're anywhere in the same neighborhood on this issue.

Not centralized, but consolidated: when people all got their news from the same half dozen or so sources, they were a lot more capable of agreeing on basic sets of underlying facts with which issues could be debated, instead of just going through endless cycles of recusals and spin about the facts and their basic interpretation.

Sure, it didn't live up to certain capitalistic ideals, but maybe it turns out that not every domain of human life benefits from existing in a bare knuckle free market.

Media has undergone a massive consolidation in the last few decades, though, and a bunch of blogs without serious resources don't change that.

You're not sure that living under a repressive authoritarian regime is worse than generally trusting the mainstream media? Really?

That's obviously not what I meant.

The more confused and uncertain people are, the easier it becomes to manipulate them. Thus we are treated to spectacles like Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas - who is ironically head of the House science and technology committee - suggesting on the floor of Congress that people should ignore the media and get their news directly from the President.

It seems almost every day now I hear politicians saying things that I'd edit out from the script if I were writing a dystopian movie because they were too cheesy and crude to be good characterizations.

Everything becomes much clearer once you realize that everyone is for themselves, and that includes mass media who report stuff in a way that increases the clicks and the views.

The majority of us have been conditioned to worry, actually worry, about stuff that we have absolutely no control nor expert knowledge. The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that order. Turn on the TV or open your facebook and you'll that the hierarchy is completely reversed.

    The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our 
    immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that 
    order.

In response, I'm just going to quote Martin Niemoller:

    First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Socialist.

    Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
    Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Your approach rules out collective action on any kind of scale that can change the direction of a nation. There are always concerns at the family and local levels. What we need to understand is that sometimes concerns at the larger levels (country, planet) that outweigh our local concerns.

I agree with you regarding the importance of thinking and acting locally, especially for the majority of people who don't realistically have the power and influence to make a difference outside of their locality.

But it's a tremendously cynical and harmful to believe that "everyone is for themselves." It's just not true: there are millions if not billions of people who live much more for others than themselves. The supremacy of self-interest is not some foundational truth of social reality - it's an economic theory of human behavior which corporations and power hungry individuals want us to believe in because it props up the system of predatory capitalism that enriches them at the cost of the public good.

Interesting ego trap you've fallen into there.

Lucky we have HN.