While seen as a hindrance, newspapers had the hidden advantage of coming out once every day. This delay gave journalists time to fully process an event, but instead encouraged the value of page-filling "scoops" over patience. So when cable TV showed up, everyone was thrilled to embrace 24-hour news networks while letting papers die in isolation like a discarded Tamagotchi.

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Only there was a problem: It turned out that there simply isn't that much pertinent news to fill the time. And so stations had to find new and time-consuming ways to "inform" their viewers.

CBS

"Wu-Tang Clan: Who they are, and why they are not to be fucked with. Tonight at 6."

And right when it seemed like everyone was scrambling to be the fastest, most reactionary source of ratings, the internet became a thing. Suddenly media bullshit broke the physical realm like a thizzing Neo -- and the time between an event happening and someone reporting on it got wafer-thin. In the peak of internet news, the need to be first quickly became infinitely more dire than the need to be right. Sites began clumsily ejecting every lead like a diarrheal horse on a high-speed treadmill.

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And thus a new form of "journalism" was birthed in the foggy moor between facts and opinion, one that required zero ethics or experience. We called such journalists bloggers, and they ruined everything. It didn't take long for CNN to incorporate this with "iReport" -- a section of their website devoted to "citizen journalism."