dmp said:
I think the folks funding this and pulling the strings didn't know exactly where it would lead (cause yes, the fake news sites were funded with big $$$) but this propaganda got people tuned out from reality, distrusting the 'establishment', and oblivious to the real changes being done politically that were just enabling the rich to extract more and more money from the middle class. I think this played a big part in where we are now. Enough people believed this nonsense to get Trump elected.
I actually think only part of that is true. In my opinion, it isn't just big money behind fake news as the PBS article showed, but just regular people wanting to make extra money. There are even some towns abroad where several people began making a living putting out fake news.
So what I think has happened - and what is far, far worse - is that our entire society has been led to an ultimately foreseeable conclusion (though we're surely not done yet). The very basis for our society is an adversarial one where everything is divided into left vs. right, good vs. bad, plaintiff vs. defendant, buyer vs. seller, conservative vs. liberal. R vs. D, capitalist vs. socialist etc, and it is that way not only because it serves the purpose of the few powerful people that run a lot of things, but because the system itself promotes it. Any financial entity in our society has as its goal to make a profit. There is morality concerned in that. And so we all do what we can to make money.
In the process of doing so we dumb things down, because it sells. And it's not just fake news, it's fake anything! I work in post-production, and so much of reality- and lifestyle programming is fake it's mind boggling. But many producers never think twice about that. And it spread from those genres to documentaries as well. I used to hear dialog heavily edited only in reality and lifestyle programming, which was a minor issue because "who cares", but the very fact that the population has been taught to accept that type of sound meant that it's now in a bunch of "documentaries" as well. So, now, when we hear dialog that's been edited, we don't even think twice about it. The documentary's demand for a clean unedited source gave way for the need to tell a story efficiently and quickly. So we now rely not on the source to tell us something but on the altruism and intellectual skills of the producer/director/editor. But of course their jobs are to tell a story, and the story's job is to sell the content, meaning truth gives way to a good story (profit) and it's therefore no wonder we are where we are.
Add to that all the other types of content, as I mentioned, where at one point in time it'd have been seen as "wrong" to lie about something just to make money. Nobody cares any more. Greed has taken over, and I can tell people don't think about things in depth any longer because who the f wants to spend the time? Can it be condensed into a snappy click-bait headline? Cool, I'll read that and take it as the truth if it conforms with what I believe, but don't ask me to click on a bunch of links to follow the story to its source. No time for that.
I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but the terrorist massacre in Norway was preceded by exactly this type of nonsense, and I actually predicted that bad things would come out of it (before the massacre). And before then we had the borderline mass-psychosis that was "repressed memories" and the hundreds of people that ended up suffering from false accusations and convictions. And now of course the media landscape is far, far worse, with people willing turning away from the more and more mediocre "legit" news outlets.....
I'm sorry, I'm rambling..... I'll stop now.... I mostly agree with you I think..... with some caveats... is what I wanted to say...
