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If it doesn't make sense, and they keep doing it, and the disastrous results keep not happening, then perhaps your model is wrong. I think the part you've got wrong is thinking that their stupid reporting will hurt their credibility. Their credibility does not derive from them telling the truth. It derives from being credible institutions endorsed by credible institutions. Since the people behind them in fact control all the credible institutions, as long as they keep toeing the party line they will not lose credibility.
But it’s not exactly right. If you’re in a fact-selling business, being right is at least a small part of credibility. Which is why they’re failing as the source of information for the rabble who no longer believe what’s on 60 minutes and in the NYT or the mainstream press. And where that ends up is these “credible sources” can no longer see their purpose and therefore are abandoned. How can they be trusted enough to indoctrinate the masses when the masses are choosing alternatives and not taking American Pravda seriously? Samsdat is accurate at least, and that accuracy isn’t fake. It’s like the loudspeakers in North Korea. They were giving accurate forecasts of the weather, so people listened to them over the government news.
Then they're not in a fact-selling business, because it isn't. Even if they were, their readers will never check the facts.
No. Where that ends is pretty much here, where a majority still believe the NYT and 60 minutes and such, and some minority believes instead in Fox News and the Daily Caller. Eventually the majority group will take over Fox and bring some subset of the minority back into the fold.
Why are average people reading news then? I mean I can sort of get why aperachniks are reading American Pravda rags, but again, as a useful activity, a person reading the news would be looking for accuracy on things that matter to them. As it becomes more obvious to average people that a given source isn’t accurate, then it’s really only useful to the choir as the point of them reading and watching news is to know what to say in dinner parties or business talk or whatever. NYT might be useful for that, but if most people now see a NYT article as simply skimping for wokeness and global order and so on, it’s not going to convince them of anything. In fact, it would probably do the opposite— if NYT starts telling me about civilian deaths in Gaza, my first thought is “Israel must have gotten an important target.” Beyond a certain point, obvious propaganda starts pushing people in the wrong direction from the POV of the writers.
Because it makes them feel informed. And aligns them with their friends, co-workers, and acquaintances who also want to feel informed.
The average people are the choir. People who care about the ground truth rather than the pravda are the weirdos, dissidents, and heretics. If the NYT starts telling them that IDF soldiers are headshotting kids in Israel, they start believing worse things about Israel. Even if they wanted to check, they can't, and they don't want to.
Totally off topic, but I am seeing this comment as 1d old and the comment it is replying to as 12h old, some sort of bug?
To me it looks like the follow-up came 22 minutes after the previous comment. Must be a space-time anomaly on your end.
Some artifact of leaving the page up all night, a refresh solved it.
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