> The problem lay in the reason the error spread, which happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. These include everything from wrong reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, to tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, to the pee tape, to Julie Swetnick’s rape accusation, to the Covington high school fiasco, to Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, to Bountygate, to the “mass hysterectomies” story, and dozens beyond: the media business has become a machine for generating error-ridden moral panics.

This is a predictable result of combining declining profitability of media companies, cut-throat competition in the industry, and the political orientation of your average national media reporter. No big conspiracy—just harried people working under lowered standards confirming their priors and manifesting their personal biases.

I wonder how much of the resentment is driven by elite overproduction—I.e. people who got a college degree and think that should lead to some particular standard of living, but who are faced with writing clickbait articles by the word on a freelance basis. Then put those people in NYC or SF, where all the money and social status goes to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.