The major problem of our time is trust (for both "small t" personal trust and "capital T" trust in a crypto sense). While any feeling of absolute or universal truth is probably beyond our grasp at this point, people will (and largely have) learned which sources are considered 'trusted' within the circles of influence they travel in.

The people who care about the 'legitimacy' of a news organization are moderates who are passively engaged and are being rapidly driven to the margins. The 'objective truth' of the matter is less relevant than how it is received. Activist politics is en vogue thanks to the feelings of helplessness brought on by globalization, and if you're not an activist your views are not really an important part of the process anymore. You'll have to pick one of the two options that the activists come up with because they won't show up to vote for a centrist candidate. In either case, a moderate platform cannot win.

For the record, I feel the above situation is incredibly dystopian; but we're hardly the first country where pathos supersedes logos and ethos.

But why is this the danger now in a way that it hasn't been previously? You could have presented fake documents for hundreds of years now, but it's not like we don't have any credible news organizations as a result.

It gets increasingly cheap to manufacture convincing fakes, but it doesn't get any cheaper to do quality journalism. The risk as I see it is that there is such an overwhelming tsunami of manufactured reality that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.

The funny part is that Dan Rather and his producers were fooled by a deeply unconvincing fake — a supposedly Vietnam-era typewritten document that was obviously made using Microsoft Word using default settings. Furthermore, many many people continued to defend it as real for a long time after partisans on the other side had thoroughly debunked it.

If 2004 news could be fooled by a fake that took a couple of minutes to make, I’m not that worried that today’s news is any better.

It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images.

And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies.

Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as dumb as you seem to think.

Anyways the problem is of distribution, not that a lie can be told. If we can't trust our distribution lanes to actually reflect the institutions we're trusting, then we can't establish our trust networks.

And this is a real problem: our distribution lanes are divorced now from our actual information distrubuters; medium, Facebook, Twitter, etc fuck around with our trust networks, randomly injecting their own bullshit into our feeds and messing around with feed-order based on non-trust metrics (eg money paid) such that they've become fairly unreliable.

And our classical trustable institutions have become less trustworthy, as they flounder about trying to make sense of the "digital age", and have so far done so in a pathetic fashion

In the past you had to pay a person to write that fake text. Wait a few more years and you'll see convincing text coming out of some algorithm at the cost of an EC2 instance.

That's fine and well, but again, I don't think the existence of it is new; if they generate 1 lie a day, or 1000, or a million, it doesn't change much. It gets resolved by the trust distribution network.

When that network breaks down, you only need a single good lie to do the damage.

The delegitimization didn't come so much from the forged documents themselves. It came more from, after the whole scandal erupted and it became blatantly obvious that they were faked, not only CBS and Rather, but the entire Mainstream Media doubled down on them being real, and the narrative being real. They all still, to this day, insist that they were real. That's what couldn't be engineered or tricked.

> They all still, to this day, insist that they were real.

This is, itself, "fake news". I can't find any indication that other mainstream media outlets defend the documents "to this day". The reporting largely seems to be "certainly smells like bullshit, and we can point to specific issues with them that seem to support that".

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/those-discredited... cites a wide variety of news organizations looking into them and finding problems, stating "When the mainstream press checked the sources mentioned or ignored by '60 Minutes II,' the story came apart." and noting Newsweek specifically calling them "discredited".

I think it is the other way around: mainstream news organizations will cry fake news to delegitimize bloggers and amateurs. If everything is easily faked, the only ones to trust with the truth, are the entrenched media companies. Powerful people will be the first to benefit from fake media, when they can claim that the video evidence must be fake ("They photoshopped my arm around her waist!").

That trusted source didn't bother to vet the faked documents and instead rushed it onto the air. That trusted source continued to push that narrative even going so far as to say, "fake but accurate," destroying all credibility and ultimately retiring.

The only difference is today, they don't retire out of shame, they just keep on doing it, keeping viewership via emotional draw rather than rational news. Real news has been dead since that incident in my view. It's mostly state propaganda, regardless of party.

You're mixing up Rather with the trusted source. Rather received documents from what was apparently a long-term, trusted source. CBS certainly screwed the pooch in that incident, but a long-term relationship with a well-placed source is inherently a form of vetting.

Sorry, I was meaning Dan Rather being the trusted source of news for the populace. He was the successor to Walter Cronkite after all.