Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than ‘epidemic,’ insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when ‘an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.’
The ‘agent’ in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the ‘susceptible hosts’ are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like – well, like a virus.
It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Feb 8, 2017.
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