[jhiska]

It's not "interesting" because the media industries have been doing this everyday for at least 2 centuries. Maybe more interesting is how people keep getting amnesiac about this.

We can attribute any of it to "the Internet" or "Facebook" or "Twitter"... or to any other communication platform that lets people reach a wide audience.

[indubitable]

One of the big reasons I find it interesting is because I expect there's probably more news outlets now than ever before, yet we see such a peculiar level of homogeneity in the views they espouse - perhaps even more so than in times past. The New York Times has an awesome archive going all the way back to the 1850s. In fact there's a lot of really great free newspaper archive resources [1]. And in perusing these archives something that I think has really changed is that in the past there was a far greater diversity of published views. By contrast today views tend to be quite uniform except in archetypical difference, such as partisanship.

In a way I would not be surprised if behind the scenes people were collaborating with one another, feeling that expressing different views would undermine the credibility of what's said as different organizations contradict each other. But ironically I think this sort of homogeneity is playing a large role in peoples' diminishing trust in media. It makes the news seem very artificial and orchestrated. And the homogeneity means that when they get things wrong - as seems to be the case here, it makes the entire industry look just awful. Being wrong is one thing, being so collectively ill informed as to not have even meaningfully considered the possibility of a binary truth (it is a weapon, or it's not a weapon)? That's something far worse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...