[Grieving]

I used to work for a local newspaper that had been operated by the owner's family for generations. Our content was almost entirely unique, with the exception of a few filler stories we'd occasionally pull from another source (small stuff like "Spring Cleaning Tips"). The owner was proud that we were the last small newspaper in the state to resist being bought up by the owner of the capitol city's paper. We were well-respected in the area, and it was joked that the only time we lost a subscriber was when they passed away. The owner died a few years ago. Her sons didn't want to keep her "hobby project" afloat, so the paper finally was sold like all the others.

A couple of years later I wrote a script to consolidate stories from news sites across my state and display them with a nice UI, since I have family all over the place and want to keep up with what's going on. The majority of stories were duplicated across all of them, and local news had become the filler content. Even for stories of national importance, they can be interpreted in so many ways that you'd expect different people in different areas to have different analyses of the facts (which is what used to happen), but that doesn't exist anymore. With the pushback against "fake news", official news sources are the only acceptable source of information, and those are monopolized by an increasingly tiny minority of people. BTW I don't put "fake news" in quotes to say that it doesn't exist, but that it's a catch-all term for propaganda that goes against the official propaganda.