[palmfacehn]

The above poster speaks to the crux of the issue. CNN, Forbes and other sites are doing things that a normal webmaster could be nuked from orbit for, after a "manual review". Yet, these are the manually curated sites which Google claims have high trust signals.

There are a few disparate incentives. One is a political desire to buttress the "official truths" of the legacy media. The other is a market incentive for the dying legacy media sites to earn revenue.

There is a third, related market incentive for the dissatisfied media consumers. CNN isn't as compelling as it was two decades ago. Eyeballs and ears are naturally straying towards the perceived value of alternative media sources. Therefore, to continue the ancien regime, it becomes necessary for Google to prop up CNN and others.

There is a possible world where Google creates value by indexing and sorting through a decentralized and open Internet. This chain of events does not support that. The trend is for gatekeepers to panic. The search results have been sabotaged as a result.

Is Google more valuable as a gatekeeper for established institutions? Can that amount to more value than the potential ad revenue of a larger web? Time will tell.

[rightbyte]

I feel gaslighted when "fake news" is brought up by people, that consider CNN etc to be somewhat reputable. Like, the atmosphere on those sites are surreal nowadays. There are fake news, fake ads etc.

Like a article with a picture of some fat person, a picture of a child star, and the headline "you can't believe how child star whatever looks like today!". But the fat person is not the former child and nowhere to be seen in the article, etc.

Those sites are as reputable as pornsites.

[palmfacehn]

These are the same sites that platform the doom-mongers warning us of the dangers of "disinformation" and appealing for censorship. The viewers may merely be victims of the propaganda. Those disseminating the propaganda should be held to a higher standard.

[rightbyte]

There is this establishment push to push news down our throats as people turn off their outlets.

Like algorithmic feeds in general. And e.g. the Windows startmenu and what not.

Tradionally people chose what news publishers to follow. Like, it was one newspaper that you liked politically or journalisticly.

News used to be opt-in and you chose your affiliation. The angle of the publisher was known.

Nowadays it is a joke. A washed out joke. You need to go for the more radical political papers to get what most papers used to be in the 90s.