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I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.

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TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change.

During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications.

The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.

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