The problem is on the demand side, not solely on the supply side. People desire reinforcement not challenge. That is natural. I suspect it is true of us all. Those who are capable direct their potential to be challenged in specific ways, allowing themselves to have biases reinforced in the unimportant places. And they have access to the knowledge in their specific areas.

This is the reason for the enduring power of the filter bubble: it is a stable equilibrium because it serves both the purposes of the demand and supply side.

You can test this by making high-reliability websites that state honest priors. You'll get an audience but the audience will be pretty specific to your subject matter and not be popular. No information source has had all of the following characteristics:

* Broad-based popular support

* High information content

* Novel information, i.e. information you can't get elsewhere

* Sustained presence

This may actually be desirable. Novel reliable information is an advantage, but it may not be a present sufficient advantage, and species survival may depend on presently boosting those capable of acquiring and utilizing information advantage. i.e. a time may come when we need to be good at it - if we have more people with this characteristic then, it'll lead to better outcomes.

This is well known in the industry. The attitude among journalists was that they had a sort of professional and civic duty to “feed people their vegetables.” But that’s a bit too high on Maslow’s hierarchy to be thinking about when you’ve laid off 80% of the staff and still barely make payroll. (My dad lived through the peak and much of the decline at our city paper before he got out).

The problem is also in the change of how the demand can manifest. For example, I would never buy a clickbait newspaper. But sometimes I click on clickbait articles online. In both cases, there is a part of me that is interested, and a part of me that knows better. If it only requires a mouse click, the interested part sometimes wins. If it requires taking out my purse, the interested part loses this fight.

The horrible thing about online advertising is that it allows people to make profit from making you look at something, even if it immediately makes you disappointed. From that moment, the need to write non-disappointing articles has decreased significantly.

Definitely true. We could compare it to the food industry (from production to retail including restaurants).

Its ideal purpose is to provide people with nourishing, healthy, enjoyable food.

But its actual incentive is to give people the food they choose to buy, which often isn't nourishing or healthy.

This is true. You can do good journalism and lose money (or have a wealthy backer who funds your loss-making newspaper) or you can make a profit by getting your "journalists" to publish lots of sensationalist stories. Y'know, Clickbait. (source: I ran a newspaper).

What about 538?

Does 538 have broad-based popular support?

How does its viewership compare to that of gossip-based media like E! or anger-based media like Fox or CNN?

> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed. It's not bad at it by mistake, it's bad at it as an inevitable consequence of its design.

You speak of a failure in design as the root cause of the failure to achieve the purpose of “to inform”.

From a teleological perspective, viewing the media as a tool designed “to inform” would be a mistake, it would amount to nothing more than a supposition.

Having “better informed” people was never the stated purpose of mass media so it would be wrong to say it is not fulfilling its design objectives. What would be applicable here to help us better understand the actual purpose of the media is POSIWID: ”the purpose of a system is what it does”[0]

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

If you're smart enough to come up with a point like this, why not use that intelligence to make a less inane point? You're not wrong, you're just correct in a way that responds to a very narrow reading of what your parent comment was saying, and doesn't make any attempt to figure out why they'd be saying it.

Clearly the person you're responding to wants a system that makes people better informed, and I think there's a lot of other people (myself included) who want the same thing. So the question is obviously, how do we change the news ecosystem from what it is, to a system that makes people better informed?

> So the question is obviously, how do we change the news ecosystem from what it is, to a system that makes people better informed?

People tend to want their worldview confirmed. If you want people to be better informed, one way would be to make them angry when they encounter things designed to manipulate them.

>So the question is obviously, how do we change the news ecosystem from what it is, to a system that makes people better informed?

I think that other than marginal gains, this is a pipedream. The reason the news media is the way it is is due to the choices of the people consuming it. A change in the industry itself is unlikely to put a dent into this, because people will just go elsewhere to get the 'news' they want to hear.

We would need some kind of a fundamental change in society. Maybe if we completely revamped the style of childhood education, it would be possible to change what people look for in the news. I think that practically such a fundamental change is next to impossible. People talk a lot about how we need changes to the education system, but they're usually either spewing hot air or only want small changes.

I disagree. The last bit of what you're saying is particularly telling. It seems to me that you think large change is impossible because you think large changes happens all at once, instead of as a series of small changes, and as a result you're undervaluing small changes.

I think the question that needs to be answered before that is "how do you get people to want to be better informed".

If that was already true, there never would have been an Enquirer or Weekly World News.

This is a typical capitalist strategy for displacing blame and therefore responsibility: the supply side says they're just putting out what there's a demand for, and blames the demand for their own actions. The truth is, marketing creates demand, and people can't consume content if you don't create it.

Ultimately, I'm not looking to blame the supply side, either: certainly there's some blame for the demand side too. In fact, I don't believe blame is a productive thing to do in this situation or most situations. But I am trying to change it from the supply side, because when you try to create change from the demand side, you run into more issues with affecting free choice which makes this and many other problems more intractable.

I also think you're wrong about why the Enquirer et al exist: some people take these as just humor and get their information elsewhere, and others want to be informed, but due to bugs in the human brain, think that sources like the Enquirer are good sources of information. Neither of these are "people not wanting to be informed".

>So the question is obviously, how do we change the news ecosystem from what it is, to a system that makes people better informed?

By bettering basic education. People could learn the relationships and interdependecies of the system and society itself, including the role of information. Why not learn everything through RPGs?

This would create a demand for better news sources in the long term.

I don't understand your reasoning for why you think better basic education would increase demand for more informative news sources. Could you explain more?

Sorry for replying late.

Because education increases environmental awareness, and informative news provides it. So you'd want informative news to remain environmentally aware.

The most educated people I know all have at least a handful of opinions that are provably untrue. We're talking about people who correctly modeled economic crashes, developed and implemented SAP modules for a lot of companies you know, and (multiple on some of them) PHDs. Among them, a flat-earther, a guy who believes communism is straight-up awesome, and one who honestly believes that most "corruption" is a made-up attack on the corrupt.

Each time I encounter this, I am stunned. But it still happens.

From the BBC's mission statement: to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate* and entertain.*

From the CBC's mandate: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as the national public broadcaster, should provide radio and television services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens* and entertains*

From PBS's mission statement: PBS is a membership organization that, in partnership with its member stations, serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives. PBS empowers individuals to achieve their potential and strengthen the social, democratic, and cultural health of the U.S.

You'll find that kind of language repeated for most public broadcasters. The corruption of those ideals by private enterprise in the name of profit should not come as a surprise.

"From a teleological perspective, viewing the media as a tool designed “to inform” would be a mistake, it would amount to nothing more than a supposition."

I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people; that is a statement of its purpose, and it appears that the collective actions of people in society have redesigned it to eliminate most of the informing.

It doesn't have to have ever been designed to inform by specific and aware human intention; if it informed as a side effect of being unoptimized for disinformation, then in that sense it was designed to inform.

By analogy, natural foods are not designed, in one sense, to keep you healthy, as evolution can make some things good for you and others bad.

...but the purpose of eating them is healthy nutrition, and if we started systematically only eating the toxic ones, then we would say something about our society is structured wrong for the purpose that we have of getting nutrition.

> I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people; that is a statement of its purpose, and it appears that the collective actions of people in society have redesigned it to eliminate most of the informing.

Your expectation that the media should inform people is reasonable but unrealistic. The original designers had fairly specific design goals in mind and it did not explicitly include “to inform”, this can only be tacked on.

Today we have newspapers, radio, TV and of course the Internet as tools of (mass) media.

If you were among the original designers of the newspaper[0], which was the first tool of mass media for centuries, but your preference to inform was out-weighed by competing interests (aka politics), then of course you are well within your rights to be outraged — you are entitled to criticize the design for falling short of your expectations.

In other words, unless you were personally part of the design team, you can’t really speak about what the design should be or should have been, since you are in no position to influence the system’s purpose before it was built.

You can only deal with the consequences of the designers’ creation, which includes working around the limitations of the system as designed, or building a new system from scratch.

A new system that addresses those limitations would not only be expensive to build from scratch, it would also have to compete for attention and funding to be sustainable — the market has to decide if they truly care about being better informed or not.

Facebook, which is perhaps the most modern type of media, is as vulnerable as the others when it comes to ability to misinform.

[0] ”News was highly selective and often propagandistic. Readers were eager for sensationalism, such as accounts of magic, public executions and disasters; this material did not pose a threat to the state, because it did not pose criticism of the state.” culled from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_newspaper_publishin...

"Your expectation"

I wrote "should"; I am not predicting in my comment that that the media will inform people [more] in the future; therefore calling my "expectation" unrealistic is uncalled for.

Referring to "the original designers" is confusing to me. You seem to be implying that "the media" was designed by some person or entity as a monolith, which is a theory that is unfamiliar to me and not mainstream (that I'm aware of).

Also, you seem to be positing that "the media" was not only created as a monolith but is controlled as one today, since you say that it can only be worked around or replaced. It really seems like a heterodox and far out theory, that "the media" is not subject to to change. Perhaps you could elaborate, since I thought the discussion was about recent changes to the media?

Let us leave aside my use of designers for a moment and turn to the actual businesses that constitute the media.

On the one hand, media businesses are, in most cases, for-profit enterprises similar to other enterprises.

On the other hand, “to inform” or to have better informed citizens is in the public interest. “To inform” essentially an altruistic goal. Something done for the greater good is hard to monetize unless you ask for donations. Altruism as a business model will not pay the salaries of journalists.

My argument is that the two goals: “for profit” and “to inform” are incompatible goals — either you found a non-profit media entity with the altruistic goal of better informing people, or you found a for-profit without the pretension of altruism.

By arguing that “I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people”, that the media’s collective purpose is to better inform, essentially what you are really saying is that you want for-profit enterprises to behave in the manner expected of non-profit enterprises? As I said, this is a noble but unrealistic ask. This is the crux of our disagreement.

"what you are really saying is that you want for-profit enterprises to behave in the manner expected of non-profit enterprises"

I mean, I do want them to behave differently that they have been previously, I don't know how you could interpret my comments otherwise.

I feel like you are arguing by definition - you have some definition of "for profit entities" that excludes morality. A definition can be anything you like, but I don't think that particular one has a referent in the real world - and it's obvious to me that it shouldn't.

So, for profit businesses operate under constraints already, and the only debate I can imagine is under what sort of constraints.

And particularly, as the concept applies to mass media, quite a few have noted that the purpose seems to be to create the consent of the populace for what the leadership wants to do.

Sometime's that's informing from a real benevolent perspective of let's get everyone on the same page for what's best to the best of our knowledge. Other times it's an obfuscation scheme to allow some to profit off of the rest of us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> the purpose seems to be to create the consent of the populace for what the leadership wants to do.

Having spent a lot of time working for and with governments I can assure you that most of the time, behind closed doors, they truely hate the press, and wish it would go away. And this is true of even the most open and democratic governments.

Autocratic governments, again and again have shown what they think of a free press.

The idea that mainstream media is a mouthpiece of government just doesn’t add up.

I think it's a question of how far outside the Overton window your own viewpoint lives.

Newspapers may pester governments with annoying questions about specific institutional failures and corrupt individuals, but they'll tend to be aligned on what the institution was supposed to achieve, what faithfully executing an office would look like.

The New York Times will ask the NYPD, "Why did you beat up that guy in a routine traffic stop?" or "How is it possible that you billed more overtime hours than there are in a week?". Not "Why haven't you shot the rich yet?"

That's not an issue unless you think of leadership as a homogeneous blob. Of course they don't like the portion of the media pushing the other guy's cognitive structures; and ultimately that's what they mean when they complain about the media.

The way you can particularly see this is in the suppression of news that doesn't ultimately help out _any_ of the current leaders with it's dissemination, only the populace.

> POSIWID

Can we either make a reasonable-sounding word or phrase that means the thing or just say the thing? Who is going around really saying “POSIWID”?

> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money.

This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so.

In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?

>In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending,

Can be. Among others, Matthew Walker still has a job. https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure...

> In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?

The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belong; you will no longer be highly read and cited once it is clear that your results can't be trusted. Unfortunately, this seems not to be true in journalism—you can purvey intentionally, and explicitly, wrong information, and it will still be consumed actively by those whose biases are confirmed by it. We can discuss how to change that, but changing what kind of news people want to read is surely even harder than changing what kind of news journalists write and publishers publish.

Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius

But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.

What you're saying is probably broadly speaking true for journalists in general. But what many people actually consume news-wise can only be compared on the surface to actual journalism. Consumers of this material have no interest in determining if what they're reading is true, and there are no consequences for those spreading misinformation while pretending to be journalists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784665

Best we can tell, Bloomberg's Chinese Big Hack story was completly made up, but it doesn't appear anyone involved suffered any consequences.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...

> The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belong; you will no longer be highly read and cited once it is clear that your results can't be trusted.

That's a feature, not a bug. A system which depends on people being saints, isn't going to work.

> changing what kind of news people want to read is surely even harder than changing what kind of news journalists write and publishers publish

Agreed, I think that's the root here.

It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money.

So truth ethics etc. are all secondary values.

This sounds good in an edgy r/im14andthisisdeep sort of way. But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.

That really depends on the size of the fish and the size of the pond. If you're a whale in an ocean of minnows (hello Amazon) you can effectively dictate the terms of business, ethics be damned.

> But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.

This seems like a fairy tale you tell young naive business majors with no experience. The real world isn't like that.

You think oil companies, tech companies, defense companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc have been profitable for decades because of integrity and ethics? No you become profitable and wealthy by being amoral and cutthroat then paying PR firms to spread the news about how good you were all along.

Do you think Google, Facebook, Apple, etc are so profitable because they are moral? Do you think Nike became Nike by having integrity and ethics or by exploiting cheap labor overseas?

Thank you for thinking I'm deep an edgy.... But why is long term important? people need to see long term effects to know that it's more profitable. But right now, people see success without ethics, so why should they think long term? There might be a day of reckoning, where these short term gains result in long term catastrophe, but until then, people do what works. And today the only measure of what works is money.

> > It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money.

> But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.

Both your parent's view and your view could spring from a belief about how the world is, rather than from non-anecdotal hard data. I'd like to believe the more optimistic version, but I find it hard to do so. Do you have some data to support it?

That doesn't sound right. It can be a sustainable way to run a business, but some publications do fine despite a well-earned reputation for dishonesty, such as British tabloids.

More generally, plenty of companies cause negative externalities, profiting by causing damage that they don't have to pay for.

The two richest people on the planet right now are both known for being almost entirely void of morals when it comes to their business dealings.

They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-trea...

"The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." - Bezos

Gates's philanthropy is fine, but my comment was on his business dealings. He has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, completely void of morals.

Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies.

Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did.

The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_...

    Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal
    to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing
    an argument or complaint due to what are perceived 
    to be more important problems. First World problems
    are a subset of this fallacy.

Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.

My bar for evil is a lot higher than "signed exclusive distribution agreements with some OEMs in the 90s."

Illegal? Sure. Evil? So some other millionaires didn't get to become billionaires. Meanwhile the world got a single API to write software against for almost two decades, how many ISVs existed because Microsoft provided an insanely stable (in regards to API churn) platform to develop against?

Hell right now with 2 major mobile OS players there is a huge tax on developers, imagine if the 90s had been a wild west and there had been 4 or 5 major players.

One can also note that given how mobile played out, there is a good chance that the desktop market would have coalesced around a single dominant OS and a secondary minor OS anyway.

And yeah I know everyone is pissed about BeOS, but they also had their chance to be a player until they tried to hard bargain with Apple and Apple walked away!

While I agree with the general feelings about the evil threshold, Microsoft in the 90-ties built and took advantage of a natural monopoly in order to crush their competition and expand in new markets.

Let's not go to the other extreme and downplay what they did. If they had their way, the Internet wouldn't be an open platform and open source would be illegal.

Personally I don't care about exclusive OEM deals. What I care about were the dirty campaigns against open source and them trying to leverage their huge patents portfolio against Linux and later Android. Or them planting shills inside Nokia, weakening it enough for a takeover of their mobile division and then running it into the ground, thus destroying one of Europe's top tech companies. A conspiracy theorist would say that this was economic warfare, maybe sponsored by the US, but for me incompetence is enough for blame.

Or how about their long battle against open standards, like ODF and their use by public institutions?

And the Microsoft of today, in spite of popular belief, isn't very different. Their priorities may have shifted, but even post Balmer they continued to use their patents portfolio against Android and they continued to fight against the adoption of ODF. Their predatory culture is still there and as seen by the ads and aggressive telemetry in Windows 10, as soon as they can gain some economic advantage, they'll take it, regardless of cost to society.

Their "Microsoft changed" marketing campaign has been genius in its execution. On the other hand I'm glad that they are doing well, because otherwise they have the potential to become the biggest patent troll. Just like when their Windows Phone failed to gain traction, "if you can't innovate, litigate" seems to work well.

Start by defining evil... Or are we supposed to take your subjective categorization as an objective standard?

Nobody earns a billion dollars; the only way to get that kind of money is to pay a whole lot of people significantly less than the economic value of their labor. The internet economy has just made it easier to abstract away ethical problems such that you don't recognize them as hugely problematic when you're making them.

With the current system, we're reliant on the whims of a couple of billionaires. Some are relatively benevolent, but far more are on the level of the Kochs, Larry Ellison or the Sacklers. Business schools have taught the "fiduciary duty" doctrine for a long time, which is basically "maximize profit above all else, or we'll find someone else who will".

I don't see the ethical problem. I'm paid significantly less than the economic value of the labor; this is because my company does a lot of coordination work to connect my labor to clients who need it, and I'm not particularly good at that kind of work so I can't effectively do it myself.

I don't think "reliant on the whims of a couple of billionaires" is a fair characterization. In what way does the average person rely on the whims of Larry Ellison?

At least these days, it's not so easy for a journalist to have a career ending mistake. My example for this is Daniel Lyons, for whom I have practically no respect at all as a journalist. His participation in the SCO debacle should legitimately have been career ending (and IMHO was not at all mitigated by his subsequent apology). His "Fake Steve Jobs" work breathtakingly poor judgement, again IMHO. I mean there is trash journalism and then there is making stuff up and hinting that maybe you know more than others do (all the while saying, "It's just a parody"). Let's not even talk about bit that's mentioned at the end of his Wikipedia article (I really hope that's not true!). But let's face it, he's a talented writer. He writes engagingly on topics that are interesting for a lot a people. The fact that he exercises absolutely no judgement whatsoever in his research is unfortunate, but even this is appealing to a lot of people who want to believe what he writes. I suspect that there are more people on HN who love him than hate him. How would you filter this kind of writing without some draconian censor forbidding him from publishing?

This doesn't really solve the Fox News problem: if an audience agrees with what you're saying, they will begin to trust you regardless of the facts. Many people have no way of knowing what the truth really is when they get their news exclusively from the a small group of propagandists coordinating a message.

Who gets to decide when someone is lying? What happens when that power to determine truth from lies is obtained by a bad actor to create a new truth?

> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed.

No. What is wrong is that people believe the news industry exists to make people better informed. That is an industry PR lie such as "Do no evil", "Fair and Balanced", "Serve and Protect", etc. The truth is that newspapers have always lied because they were created to lie.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -- Thomas Jefferson

The NY Post was created by Alexander Hamilton solely to attack his political opponents. The lies hamilton printed in the ny post about aaron burr is one of the reasons why he got killed in the duel.

Your frustration stems from a false premise : News industry exists to keep you informed.

Instead of banging your head trying to make your conclusions fit a false premise, why not do away with a false premise?

All men are good. Harvey Weinstein is a man. Therefore, Harvey Weinstein is good.

Would you waste your life trying to find ways to show Weinstein is good? Of course not. You'd work your way through your logic and conclude your premise was wrong and that all men are not good.

Let me start with the following caveat: I’m not convinced journalism’s quality now is worse than any time in the past.

That being said, I think content aggregators are partly to blame. I mean if you’re just reading the daily paper, maybe the front page has exaggerated headlines, but once you’re in the issue it can mellow out. But content aggregators are always trying to find the latest splash.

A small (but important) correction: generally, journalists do not write headlines; sub-editors do. Most subs have been journalists but most journalists do not become subs.

I think the distinction is moot. They all work in the newsroom, and are that side of the "journalistic integrity" divide. Subs are not part of the management team, or commercially motivated.

Exactly. I stated calling systems that work this way "Bad by Design."

Sometimes the design is deliberately setup that way by an individual or group with something to gain, but other times it is just because the system contains different parties with competing interests.

Anytime I see a clearly inefficient or ineffective system the first question I try to figure out is whether it works that way by design. In many cases once I learn more about it, the answer is yes.

I get why corrupt politicans hate the media, which is because it holds them accountable. Why do you choose to help them tear it down? Are we better off with no media and just the raw tweets of our leaders?

The article here is about how the media can often help spread misinformation, which can be really bad in a pandemic, so going to guess that's what they're concerned about.

Thia isn't specific to news. It's everything in the marketplace. Anything for sale is optimized for short term profit -- lowest cost of production, highest impulse purchase pressure -- junk food, fake healthy food, furniture made of shoddy materials, shiny appliances that will break, etc.

Incentives matter

The majority of publications and articles did not got it fundamentally wrong. There is subset on right wing that is popular and got it wrong intentionally. But mainstream had bad article here and there while majority being not fundamentally wrong.

I don’t think the deficiencies of major news organizations have ever been as blindingly obvious to me as they have been over the past month. I knew it was bad. I didn’t realize exactly how bad it was. For them, even a national crisis is just an occasion to twist against Trump. Yes Trump is far, far, far from perfect, but there’s a huge difference between honest, factual reporting and these transparent efforts to use a tragedy to take him down. Nothing more obvious than the attempt to pit Dr. Fauci as somehow being "against" Trump or being "silenced" only for him to come on national radio and set the record straight.

The anti-Fauci stuff is mostly posted by GOP-partisan organizations though as a way of bolstering Trump.

On the other hand, it is pretty standard mainstream news when in the same presser, the doctors are saying the opposite of what the President is saying.

This is simply not true. MSNBC, NPR and PBS ran stories, podcasts, and discussions for an entire week about the “growing disconnect” during this time.

A disconnect that one can divine for oneself by listening to Fauci talk anytime Trump is not in the room.

Birx, too. The difference in messaging and information content when she's on that podium or on Fox programming, versus when she's on normal-people programming, is stark.

They're being leaned on and it is starkly apparent when you're not coming in with priors that tend towards conspiracy.

Sorry, this needs to be said: The only conspiracy here is this drivel here that you wrote. Fauci has repeatedly stated, and acted as such, that there is no divide between him and the president. Is it feasible Fauci does not like Trump personally? Of course. But we are adults, and we have to work with people we don't like every day and still be able to perform our duties. Fauci is a professional.

"Sorry", huh? Right.

Fauci is a professional. That's why he's actively correcting what Trump says at every opportunity. He's downplaying that he's correcting Trump--but he is, and it's necessary, and it speaks to the complete mindfucked stupid coming out of the White House and it should alarm you a lot more than what you're handwringing about throughout all of your comments.

Stooging for these dirtbags will not look any better in the light of history than it does in the light of today. Stop.