The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.

The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.

But is it equally unjustified?

I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there:

* If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it.

* If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning.

* If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it)

The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.

I think it is equally unjustified.

If people tended to do their due diligence about sources, then fake news wouldn't be a problem, and verifiably false and incredulous memes wouldn't have any social or political influence. But they do, because people mistake cynicism for intellectual rigor, and don't believe they need to check the sources for the alternative media, because it's enough to simply mistrust the mainstream and assume the alternative is probably correct, provided the story it tells is sufficiently cynical. As a result, any valid alternative criticisms by the alternative media are just drowned out by the racists and crackpots going on about QAnon and gay frogs.

Perhaps a lack of providing direct links to credible sources is a problem for the mainstream media, but that doesn't necessarily justify an implication that the mainstream media does so in order to protect attempts to mislead people with false information, and that, therefore, the degree of falsehood is on par between the mainstream and alternative media.

The alternative media, meanwhile, often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so. And voicing any opposition to the alternative narrative just gets you called a tool of the establishment, leading to exactly the sort of echo chamber mentality that it tends to criticize elsewhere.

I think breaking things down into "alternative" and "mainstream" is not productive. I see no particular reason to come in with an a priori assumption that the mainstream media should be given a default presumption of truthfulness until proven otherwise, and the alternative media should be presumed false unless proved otherwise. To me, they're all in the same category to start with, and each media source starts presumed false unless they prove themselves worthy of trust.

I mean, seriously... why should they be given a default presumption of truthfulness? Because they were... there? Because they were so honest before? But how do you know that? You can't just the honesty of a source if it's effectively the only source you have. (And in practice, despite there being "three news networks", they seem to have been the same source in practice. I can only remember minor sniping between the various sources every once in a while.) Why default to trusting them? I'd say it's basically just the availability heuristic at play, in a way. It's easy to see the availability of effectively a single source, and approximate that to honestly, but you have no rational basis to make that approximation.

If anything, after decades of fairly unquestioned and monolithic dominance, the simple heuristic of "unchecked power corrupts" suggests that the mainstream media is virtually 100% likely to be deeply corrupt. I find the idea that the media was allowed to operate in a state of highly ethical reporting for decades and it simply never occurred to any commercial, governmental, or intelligence entity that "Gee, golly, it sure would be useful to exert a lot of control over that" to be an idea that requires a degree of trust in commercial, governmental, and intelligence entities that I can find only marginal evidence in favor of and significant evidence against.

The media often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so, all the time.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue here. Your bullet points are equally applicable to "alternative" media outlets and "mainstream" media do often link out to government reports, sources, etc in their articles.

Maybe we're consuming different sets of MSM and alternative sources, but my experience is not only that they are not equally applicable, but that your suggestion that they are is completely ludicrous.

95%+ of MSM articles I read that reference an external document do not link to it. MSM articles are usually littered with links, but they're internal links to lists of other articles by the same MSM outlet about the topic. Meanwhile, the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration - is basically unimaginable to me; I've never seen it happen as far as I can recall.

> the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration

This is literally what Alex Jones does.

Does InfoWars count as "alternative media"? I mean, it's clearly not "mainstream", but the format - the medium - is no different to a mainstream news show. I wouldn't've thought it fell into either of the two categories we're discussing.

Yes, but while the Internet has resulted in more propaganda, it has also resulted in more opportunities for clarification and other sides of the story to at least be available. Your story may not make it through the FANG gauntlet of algorithms and, as such, a mass audience may not see it, but it feels to me like alternative angles are way more available now than they were in the 90's and before.

After two years of Russiagate this claim is hard to swallow. I seek out alternative news specifically because the mainstream is full of shit.

We have a lot of fun (\s) in Germany right now:

A youtuber named Rezo ja lol ey made a video shortly before the elections (European and regional parliaments) about how one of the biggest parties CDU (and also SPD), the ones in the government for many many years now (Merkel's party), have been acting differently from what they said they'd do, and how they're massively messing up on climate action. He calls for viewers not to vote for them, (and of course not AfD, alternative for Germany, a newish right-wing party who denies climate change - their youth organization is starting to challenge that) and to vote for people with a better climate agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ (destruction of the CDU)

This video blew up very fast, and had a few million views before the elections (now at almost 14 million, Germany has 83 million inhabitants). The CDU actually made a response video but didn't publish it, and then published a 11-pages pdf. There was a support video of 70 more German youtubers too.

https://www.cdu.de/sites/default/files/media/dokumente/wie-w...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpg84NjCr9c

In the elections, both CDU and SPD lost a lot of votes, and the green party gained a lot. Some of the discussions and statements in the more official media are.. interesting.

Some CDU politicians seem to think that this video is the reason for their losses, and not their policies or the way they treated the young voters before (protests against internet upload filters on EU level have been called 'paid for', marginalized or laughed at, they tell the Fridays for Future protesters to go back to school and leave the climate to the pros etc).

Main CDU figures have mentioned Russian disinformation campaigns, said to review the guidelines for publishing ('If 70 publishing companies would have said not to vote for CDU, what then?'), said that the Green party had profited from a shift in public fear of climate change from terror and security etc. Now they're trying to set up a conversation with Rezo, offline. It's all quite weird.

> The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.

Being able to control the flow of information is much more powerful than being able to buy bots. When information was monopolized by a few outlets, those outlets had tremendous power and they did abuse it. Infamously, the New York Times denied the widespread famine in the USSR during the 30s and mass starvation of Ukrainians, now considered an act of genocide by many countries (most estimates ranging from 3-5 million Ukrainians starved). This sort of thing cannot happen in today's connected world. If millions of people are starving, YouTube video after YouTube video of dead people littering the streets would be posted to call out the deniers on their falsehood (provided the victims had internet access). But the 1930s was before the internet, and the world just had to take the word of reporters. The NYT author that denied the starvation won the Pulitzer prize for his false reporting.

> The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.

I don't think there's much basis for this claim. I think that the internet makes stupid people that believe in falsehoods much more prominent and and easier to find. Florida's reputation for being a crazy state is analogous to this. Florida police are required by law to publish all arrest reports, which makes crazy stories easy to find and publish. The internet essentially does that for the ignorant and stupid. I'm willing to bet that despite increased anxiety over people being led to falsehood, actual belief in falsehood is either the same or declining.

I think you're also misrepresenting the situation when you say that trust in mainstream media is being replaced by trust in alternative media. Do you earnest think that people trust the average YouTube video more than mainstream media outlets? I think that's an important factor at play here: much of the alternative media is well aware of the fact that can't rely on trust to get people to listen to believe them, and so they have to back up their claims with solid evidence if they want to be trusted. Those YouTube channels I consider reputable are very cautious about only making claims that they can back up with evidence.

The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't." And the "no there isn't" side can burrow comfortably into a huge mass of media telling them that their reality is the true one and everyone else is delusional, which makes it impossible to bring them around no matter how much evidence you marshal. "Here's a photo of a Vietnamese villager we burned with napalm." "Pffft. Photoshop." "Here's some footage of Vietnamese fighters in battle with American soldiers." "Pffft. Crisis actors."

Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.

>The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't."

We always had that too. Not for "a war going on" or not, but e.g. about atrocities "our side" did during the war (which establishment media would downplay), or private interests served by such and such law (which establishment media would hide).

Those were alternate realities (e.g. are X foreign group "freedom fighters" or "CIA sponsored death squads"), not just simple disagreements on technical points.

>Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I find my way to an "alternative", non-mainstream site. This fictional site specifically claims that they found the student records of the brother of a prominent (fictional) Congressional representative, and also found the divorce certificate of that representative and her former husband. This fictional site claims to have found embarrassing information about the representative from cross-referencing those two legal documents. The Congressperson and the mainstream media immediately dismisses this as a crazy conspiracy theory[0].

My question, then, is:

1) If this fictional site is lying, how would I verify that if no other media organization will verify or disprove this information?

2) If this fictional site is telling the truth, what grounds would I have to believe this if all the mainstream sites are calling it a conspiracy theory?

3) If someone were to go on an major investigative journey to uncover something that goes against all major media biases, how would he be able to present his case without being immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist?

4) If someone- mainstream or alternative- were to go on the internet and simply tell lies, how would we be able to fact-check them if they were the only news organization covering that particular story?

[0] ROT13: uggcf://cwzrqvn.pbz/qnivqfgrvaoret/bssvpvny-fpubby-erpbeqf-fhccbeg-pynvzf-gung-erc-vyuna-bzne-q-za-zneevrq-ure-oebgure/

Really people living in parallel realities were always with us unfortunately. From moral panics to the "paranoid style" of politics which involves a vast conspiracy of their favored scapegoat which is impervious to evidence as counter evidence is more evidence of "their" control. Where "their" has been variously the Jews, the Catholics, Illuminati, and Marxists, cultural and otherwise, and more.

>Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels).

People were able to express those opinions, there were tons of publishers putting out independent papers, pamphlets and books. They didn't have the same reach as something like the New York Times, but I don't think the internet provides an equal amount of eyeballs either. It's easier to access now, but it's also easier to access something like the NYT.

And this same thing has been going on for centuries. Practically the same post was written about the Sans-culottes.

> The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions.

I think the real enabler isn't the internet, but the ubiquity of recording devices. Now that a significant slice of the population is carrying around near-professional-quality cameras at all times, we no longer "need" to trust established media sources. For many newsworthy events, someone will have uploaded phone footage to YouTube, or an indie publication will have covered it with a camera they dropped a grand on, and video proof is better than any journalistic credentials.

Of course, that last part is rapidly ceasing to be true as we get better at doctoring video, heralding the end of this brief era of democratized journalism. Over the coming decades we as a society are going to have to re-learn what it means to have trustworthy media sources.

Fake news is neither about the availability of multiple perspectives, which have been around for millenia, nor about the power of the Internet, which has been around for decades, nor about misrepresentations of fact, which have been instrumental to every war the US has prosecuted in the post-WW2 period.

The term "fake news" appeared, along with an obsessive need to "fact check" and censor, following the election of Trump. It is the result of the inability of the establishment (i.e. liberal capitalists and Washington) to control narratives. Electing Trump signaled a grave threat to the control of this establishment and thus a need to tighten its failing grip on narrative.

It's funny because you're literally just parroting Trump campaign and Republican establishment propaganda.

The term "fake news" did not appear after Trump's election[0], nor was it created by "liberal capitalists and Washington," nor did any of the stories deemed fake news (ie, Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton's kill count, Hillary Clinton having some neurological disorder) represent any sort of hidden truths slipping through the grip of the establishment.

"Fake news" always meant exactly what it indicated - false news items being presented as truth - until Trump and his supporters co-opted the term and rebranded it into something exclusively invented by his enemies to discredit him.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news

It didn't appear then, but it became a grave concern at that point. Meanwhile conspiracy theories have existed for ever. Pizzagate is nuts, but so is belief in reptilian aliens controlling governments, etc.

The energy to contain these stories escalated dramatically, with Zuckerberg being dragged in front of Congress, etc., after Trump's election.

Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russiagate, which escaped your list along with widespread condemnation from establishment media.

I don't suggest that Pizzagate, etc., are true, merely that the sudden alarm about them is a symptom of elite anxiety.

By the way, i am not a Republican and am not parroting anything. Please don't poison the well. Just make your argument.

> Pizzagate is nuts

I agree. But child abuse among elected officials does happen. A former Speaker of the house [1] was jailed for payoffs to admitted sex abuse victims. I'm not saying this in support of pizzagate, which I believe to be false. I'm saying this to call attention to another threat from "fake news", that legitimate and outrageous complaints can be swept under the rug by loudly exclaiming, "fake news again!" and people being conditioned to automatically dismiss claims when they hear it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Hastert

You may not be a Republican, but you are nonetheless parroting their propaganda.

Linking the phenomenon of fake news with a liberal media conspiracy while downplaying or discrediting any connection it had with Trump's campaign and his supporters is parroting their propaganda.

>Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russiagate, which escaped your list along with widespread condemnation from establishment media.

Because my list was of items which occurred prior to Trump's election, establishing a basis for the origin of the term. And it has yet to be established to what degree Russiagate is fake news, although your attempt to dismiss through equivocation is recognized. For someone who's not a Republican, you're really good at their techniques and talking points, though. Mention liberal sour grapes or the deep state next, maybe you'll get bingo.

The sudden alarm about Pizzagate, Zuckerberg and fake news is not a symptom of "elite" anxiety, but public anxiety over the sudden weight of influence that conspiracy theories and lies once relegated to the likes of 4chan and Reddit seem to have to influence the public. There is no secret cabal of liberal globalist elites who are harmed by any of this, it's only the public and their ability to discern the truth that's harmed.

It's not clear to me how you are identifying "public" anxiety, as opposed to the anxiety of Washington. We can observe the latter in the behavior of Congress, e.g. The former is unclear.

In any case, let's go with "anxiety". Why is there sudden anxiety? Why should we worry about Pizzagate now while we didn't worry about similar things two years ago?

The answer is simple: Trump was elected. He is not alone; there is a widespread revolt of rightwing "populists" in progress worldwide. Marine fucking LePen just beat Macron in an election.

The people who support Hilary Clinton and Macron (i.e., "liberal globalist elites" to use your term) are materially harmed by this trend. They are desperate to understand how they can reverse it; but they refuse to consider that their ideology is simply unpopular. Instead, the problem must be "fake news".

>Why is there sudden anxiety? Why should we worry about Pizzagate now while we didn't worry about similar things two years ago?

Because Pizzagate, along with other fake news, misinformation and slander campaigns, appear to have contributed in a nontrivial way to Trump's election, and all of them are by definition complete and utter bullshit.

We should worry when obvious nonsense takes precedence in our political discourse over actual fact.

You seem to believe "Russiagate" is fake news, so why aren't you as concerned about Pizzagate or any of the other anti-left conspiracy theories as you are about Russiagate? Is fake news only a problem when it attacks the right, and only a solution when it attacks the left?

>They are desperate to understand how they can reverse it; but they refuse to consider that their ideology is simply unpopular.

But Pizzagate is not an attempt to reverse any trend, or a legitimate criticism of any ideology, nor does it present a valid political alternative to any existing policies. It's just an extension of an already established right-wing trope linking liberalism and supporters of progressive ideas (particularly gay rights) with sexual assault and pedophilia.

Again, we're not talking about actual news, but news that is literally fake. The Democratic Party does not run a secret sex-slave network and Hillary Clinton does not practice satanic pedophilic rituals. You and others may not support Clinton or Macron, but Pizzagate doesn't help your cause.

>Instead, the problem must be "fake news".

The problem is fake news. And the problem is people like yourself, who seem not to believe that the falsehood of fake news is actually a problem, as long as it targets the people you disagree with.

First, let me be clear that i am not on the right, I am on the left. The actual left, not the Resistance "left" that favors the national security state, perpetual war, income inequality, etc. From this perspective i see Russiagate as an attack on my (left) position: it is an attempt to drum up support for imperialism while simultaneously demonizing left critics of the establishment as "Putin sympathizers", etc.

The difference between this and Pizzagate was that Russiagate was promulgated by the NY Times, Wash Post, MSNBC, et al, while Pizzagate was, and remains, marginal. You suggest it contributed meaningfully to Trump's victory; I don't believe that. I think Trump won because he coopted a largely leftist critique of capitalism that resonated with Americans. This critique was also available in Sanders' campaign, which was marginalized in favor of Clinton's "things are fine, more of the same" message.

This is exactly what is happening everywhere else; Macron lost because he wanted to maintain the "there is no problem, we don't need to reform our ideas" pose. The result is people vote for the only folks offering change, even ersatz change: the right.

The appearance of these rightwing movements after the crash of 2008 is also not a coincidence. Neoliberalism is in crisis, serious crisis that goes well beyond a mere confusion over facts. People are looking for alternative facts in the first place because they are dissatisfied. The first, easiest place to find those answers is the fascist right.

So long as neoliberals continue to deny this crisis, continue to pretend their policies are good and should be popular, and continue to incorrectly blame "fake news" or "the Russians" for their woes, they will continue to lose elections, and real power, to a dangerous creeping fascism.

Do you believe that there are secret sex slave networks in the world, anywhere, at all? If so, who participates in them? Do you believe that satanic rituals are practiced anywhere in the world? Who practices them? Do you believe that pedophilia is a thing that exists in the world? If so, which ones are the pedophiles?

>Because Pizzagate, along with other fake news, misinformation and slander campaigns, appear to have contributed in a nontrivial way to Trump's election, and all of them are by definition complete and utter bullshit.

While keeping this discussion respectful, I would like to propose another hypothesis: that the rise of fake news may correspond severe distaste towards the direction that the country is heading.

There are many people who disliked Obama's policies. There are many people who liked Obama but disliked the country's direction at the end of his second term. There are many people who disliked Trump's political opponent. And finally, there are many of the people who fall into these aforementioned camps who felt a level of entitlement among elitists whom casually dismissed their concerns.

Imagine hearing that your daughter lost the track and field state championships to someone who used to be a boy. Or seeing violent criminals get away from cops because the cops were too afraid to do their job. Or having your gun taken away from you in a high-crime neighborhood with a police response time of an hour.

Imagine people in those positions, who feel that bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are making what feel to be obvious stupid decisions. Can you imagine why they would be more likely to believe that those bureaucrats are involved in a child sex trafficking ring?

>Can you imagine why they would be more likely to believe that those bureaucrats are involved in a child sex trafficking ring?

Honestly? No. And if I could, I still couldn't sympathize with them.

There is a big difference between having an honest disagreement about political policies and being willing to believe a politician is trafficking in child sex slaves and the occult. I wasn't happy about Obama or his policies, from the complete opposite end of the political spectrum being discussed here. I wanted an anti-war leftist, and got a pro-war centrist. But I still didn't believe he was a Muslim interloper who wanted to start a race war. I despised George W. Bush, but I don't believe he "did 9/11."

How would one go from "hearing that your daughter lost the track and field state championships to someone who used to be a boy" to Pizzagate? From "seeing violent criminals get away from cops because the cops were too afraid to do their job" to "The Clintons had Vince Foster killed?" There is no rational way to connect those dots.

It's not just about Trump though.

The establishment, power players, etc, wants to control the narratives, and be able to label "fake" whatever they want, whether it's against Trump or in his favor. They'll want the same power tomorrow too, when Trump is long gone.

Back in the day, part of what's called "fake news", and basically the part the establishment didn't like, was labelled "disinformation".