In case it wasn’t already obvious, I don’t hold the news media in high regard:

Why the News Is Still Mostly Pointless

The Financial Media: It’s Still Useless

Right now the left is losing their collective minds over so-called ‘fake news’, blaming it (along with fraud and racism) for Hillary losing and demanding that Facebook and Google do something to stop it.

The reality is, as the links above show, almost all news sucks and is pointless.

The left elevates ‘the news’ as somehow being an incorruptible, unimpeachable institution that answers to a higher calling in the pursuit of the truth, when in reality the news media is just another for-profit venture, like selling shoes or running a casino. Without advertising, the news media would have no reason to exist. The purpose of ‘news’ is to fill the spaces between the ads, but the only difference between ‘real’ news and ‘fake’ news is that the former supposedly has more ‘integrity’, but even that is suspect…remember, ‘real’ news gave the world rape hoaxes, ‘rape culture’, and an imaginary ‘college rape epidemic’. ‘Real’ news said that the US economy and stock market would implode if Trump won (stocks are now at 52-week highs two weeks after Trump’s win), or, between 2009-2015, that there would be ‘dollar collapse’, hyperinflation’, ‘stock market crisis’ and ‘recession’, none of which have happened. Or the WMDs in Iraq, that apparently didn’t exist but the New York Times said they did. One can argue that real news, through spreading lies and sensationalism wrapped in a veneer of ‘credibility’ and ‘respectability’, is far more destructive than fake news can ever be.

Also, fake news is fun, whimsical…real news is depressing (terrorism, death, murder, etc.)…fake news may be an escape for some people from the drudgery and monotony of day-to-day life. There is also a social element to it: conservatives may share fake news on Facebook, not because they always believe it, but to ‘signal’ a political position to their followers, in much the same ways liberals share Onion articles to their friends.

Third, the ‘left’ doesn’t hold their own fabulists and satirists to the same standards that they hold the ‘right’. How is fake news different than Colbert or The Onion, yet not a peep of outrage by the left over those. So really, it’s about censorship of websites and views that threaten the left’s pursuit of political power and media dominance, than promoting ‘journalistic integrity’.

A retort is that The Onion is an obvious satire and fake news is not…or is it? Nowhere on theonion.com is the word ‘satire’ or ‘fake’ mentioned. I guess the left, in a usual display of insularity and lack of awareness, just assumes ‘everyone’ knows what The Onion is, and that anyone who could possibly misconstrue it as ‘real’ is an idiot, but those ‘fake’ news sites, on the other hand, are apparently so convincing that they threaten the institution of democracy and something must be done about these sites, urgently.