What an effort! This is spectacular.
Just heard about it and watched it on the national CBS Evening news.
That is an interesting article. Yet another example of a huge problem problem online and in the media. I get the profit motive, but it is so far out of balance right now.
The media has always had that problem, they were just better at pretending they didn't. In my relatively short career as a PR hack I spent a subjective lifetime at media gatherings. Time passes slowly at a gathering of self-congratulatory drunks, and "party" is far too joyful a word. Inevitably the conversation would turn to how deep their journalistic ethics were. Their position was that they were soldiers in the battle for truth. My position was that they existed to sell readers to advertisers and their choices of coverage, angle and emphasis reflected that. We rarely approached agreement.
That is probably true although there seemed to be a much stronger desire to mask that with more balanced content and less drivel. There were whole categories of now common news stories that were never heard in my youth. I do think that 24 hour news and the internet has changed this for the worse. A salacious tidbit and a talk panel and you have a few hours of high ranking garbage. It really is a race for the bottom at this point.
It's also a matter of access. TV and Radio time was insanely expensive when it was the only electronic game in town and three channels were all you got. Paper and ink are expensive. Really, we didn't know what we didn't know. Now some thug with an instagram account is competing with a pulitzer prize winning journo, and they both have an audience. Everyone is connected to the web, and that means there is a huge audience for crap.
I don't expect things to improve. Stupid is as stupid does (is that a Gumpism?). I spend time on Facebook for specific reasons but it's like driving down a highway and seeing a squashed Opossum. You can't help but look. And in Facebook there's possum guts on every page. If anyone ever beams me "thoughts and prayers" I'm going to track them down and piss in their soup.
Thankfully I've found a remarkable news and information source in Quartz, especially in the subscriber mode. Unprecedented access to serious thinkers and well-curated and managed deep dives. Their Brexit analysis was excellent, though overwhelming in the amount of detail available. There isn't a lot of opportunity for the mean bias of general media--they deliver too much information and detail for that. On the science side, Quanta is amazing, as is simply wandering around in arxiv.org--which Quanta keeps sending me too in their sources.