Nobody Seems to Have an Answer for Propaganda Posing as Local News
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
edit: oh, also confirming that they were extremely right-wing.
Ask each person on the receiving end of propaganda if they are seeking to be lied to. The number that say yes is the amount of demand.
Those markets used to be broken. They are often still broken until the law catches up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal
Turns out if a market isnt well regulated scammers will absolutely run amok. Look at any posting about Amazon here and how much of the comments are just saying it is just fraudulent garbage. When a expert actually does look at something, that's often what they find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508494
The big difference is that it's not illegal to spout whatever propoganda you want, and more than that, it sometimes even has government backing and I can't refute you. If you sell me a fucked up car it's obvious to me after a while, if you lie to me about what's going on in say, Ukraine politics, how can I know you are lying to me? I've barely even heard of the place before the war happened. I just have to take your word on why it's important we need to send these guys billions of aid as opposed to all the other countries currently being invaded.
Unfortunately this is not reality. There are many reasons why statements that are untruthful, or at least tangential to the truth like rage-bait, are paid to be distributed.
Sometimes domestic political parties seek to spread misinformation because it will drive their core voters to the polls, or convert on-the-fence voters to their side.
Sometimes nation-state actors seek to spread misinformation to cause chaos and disrupt national unity.
Maybe an industrial lobby is seeking to obfuscate or misinform about products and their benefits (see the sugar industry's public campaigns for 'low-fat' foods packed with sugar as beneficial to your health).
In all three of these examples, the parties supplying the information have vastly more resources to spend on spreading the information than anyone does to combat it, even if it is a net-negative on society, because there is money to be made or power to be had. Business interests can sustain their propaganda as long as they are making money, possibly indefinitely. National political parties can sustain their propaganda as long as there are major interests that benefit from the party's actions, typically also indefinitely. And we all know the kind of resources a nation-state can deploy.
But, what do I know outside of Civic 101.
Content is still going to be beholden to the master of bias; but we would then know whose bias is beholden to.
Good ol' days would have two, three or more competing newspapers of which different folks can buy from: now it is just one newspaper (or none) which is THE problem (of a different kind than what OP is asserting about).
Thankfully, we usually have at least two local broadcast newscasters (of different affiliates) in nearly all local communities.
This is a separate definition from ones in national broadcast news and one who pretend to be a national broadcast newscaster, which is a mute point when it comes to freedom of press.
Back to "pink slime", it is critically important to organically raise local newscasters as a local business.
As a proud member of Gen X, we are definitely the only sane ones :)
For being miseducated, propagandized, and impoverished, I think they turned out relatively well.
Obviously "submarine" is an overused term on this board but check out basically any crime / police related articles from your local "real" news site and see how many of them only source police in virtually every article. Sometimes I wonder if there is even a human at the news org tasked with rewriting the police press releases or if they are just touched up via an AI writing service.