On the one hand, yeah, it's definitely more how the press likes a human interest story mixed with whatever is flavor of the month (the techno wow of "deep fakes").
But on the hand, the tone you take in that last sentence is really off-kilter. The press just works in a kind of hysterical fashion, moral panics (even conspiracy theories) aren't conspiracies but natural. Attributing stuff to a malicious effort to make the public more manipulable (as if that was necessary) should be dropped in favor of the natural incompetence of the press in framing issues reasonably.
Edit: "Mocking Bird" above is a phrase referencing CIA manipulation of the media. This is a bit of over the top for just some rather screechy but pretty ordinary story.
Except we've known for a long time that the mainstream press works, very intentionally, to manipulate public opinion.
We might talk about what form a society would have to have for the press to not have great influence - maybe "very strong education and civil institutions" or "directly democratic workers' councils" but if we're going have a modern capitalist society with multiple poles of elites and atomized consumers, the press, the corporations, the state and highest professional all will have disproportionate influence.
Which is to say, now, all the different press outlets manipulate, sometimes in distinct and opposite ways, sometimes in agreement with each other. And all the various economic and political institutions manipulate.
And the thing with this manipulation is it doesn't require crazy plan like the ggp/op insinuates. They don't need to intentionally create "deep fake" as vague threat, human psychology just naturally drifts that way, including the psychology of the reporters themselves. And manipulation for a specific purpose just requires the poor framing of ideas that can leveraged whenever you need it. So yeah, the press certainly manipulate but it doesn't generally have a "master plan" of manipulation. That wouldn't help (not that it hasn't been tried).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
> So yeah, the press certainly manipulate but it doesn't generally have a "master plan" of manipulation.
Ah, the master plan - code name 'red herring'?
All of this can be confirmed by a responsible news consumer and everything I can find here checks out. So this is legit investigative news and precisely the kind of thing we should encourage more of.
I am aware of Project Mockingbird [2] but I cannot see any relation between it and this report. It makes no sense whatsoever that the CIA would care about some squabble over unknown cheerleaders. It makes no sense to believe that everything is or isn't a deepfake without examining the facts. And this article, unlike so many I have seen, is an example of news done right. Given how disinformation works, this is the opposite of it. This article was written to inform, not to inflame our passions.
In short, it's the polar opposite of what I would expect from disinformation and this is the kind of good reporting that should be rewarded.
[1] It should've actually linked it, IMHO, but I won't complain because it wasn't hard to find this video @0:49 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5I1RfxehT4
Can you please not. It's hard to take someone's argument seriously when this kind of name-calling is intermingled with it. It's similar to someone writing m$ft or unironically referring to Zuckerberg as a robot.
> Even more troublesome, it seems that no media outlets attempted to verify that the vaping footage was actually a deepfake before broadcasting the claim to millions of Americans.
> The possible misstep by the media, and the chance that the criminal justice system could misapply laws against videos mischaracterized as deepfakes, is what worries experts the most.
“That wasn’t me on camera. Must be a deepfake!”