<
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/03/nobody-seems-to-have-an-answer-for-propaganda-posing-as-local-news/>
"While traditional local papers deserve no shortage of blame for their failure
to adapt, media scholars have long pointed out that media consolidation paved
the way for a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The end result of
consolidation was the gradual elbowing out of small local news outfits, leaving
the sector peppered with propaganda mills like Sinclair Broadcasting, or
hollowed out, hedge fund run papers.
A lack of local, quality news has created a vacuum that’s increasingly been
filled by political propagandists. Said propagandists have increasingly created
“pink slime” news outlets that look like local news, but exist exclusively to
spread bullshit and political propaganda.
And once again, they’re highly active ahead of the midterm elections. A new
report by NPR documented how residents around the country have been receiving
fake newspapers from fake news outlets, filling their heads with fake election
misinformation:
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out
of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against
greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the
state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities
with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to
find out out about developments in their communities.
NPR tried to contact story authors at the “papers,” and couldn’t find a single
real person. Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism at Columbia University (she just wrote a full report that’s worth a
read), told NPR that she had counted more than 1,200 bogus local news outlets
around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading
bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
