Sure, the mere fact that the news is no longer news, is old news. But how and why it is happening is big and un-reported news.
When six companies control 90% of the news outlets, that is unprecedented concentration and loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society.
When those corporations which normally sell-off any lossmaking division instead hold loss-making 'news' divisions in a now-chronically lossmaking industry, the payoff is not some potential future profits; the payoff is in influencing public opinion to favor policies advantageous to your larger corporation.
So, of course the how and why it is happening is unreported by the organizations that are making it happen.
This isn’t wrong but let me put a finer point on it: when BigCompany Inc starts dumping sludge into your town’s lake, you need independent journalists to figure that out. Corporate talking heads aren’t going to do that. And certainly not the people running a link farm.
What news is reported is as important as whether the facts are true. The easiest path to propaganda is to simply report other, more convenient, facts.
Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.
For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.
And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.
The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.
So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.