IMHO - distrust in the establishment is not the cause, but a side effect of the real cause.

I used to be a journalist before my career in tech. In my opinion, the real culprit is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives.

When people still used to buy printed newspapers, you had to pay for your news so you better get well researched articles for your hard earned money. [1]

With the rise of internet news, that incentive is no longer in place. Yes there are paid news outlets on the Internet but the majority of people don't pay for a subscription. What gets you most views does rarely align with high journalistic standards. [2] In a way, everything is a tabloid now.

[1] If you are at least as old as me, you might remember that reading a certain newspaper rather than another was almost seen as a status symbol. I remember journalists saying things like "I love working at [newspaper X] because of our fine readership, they challenge me to write high quality articles".

[2] With a few obvious exceptions like Panama Papers etc.

Seems like it'd run a bit further than the invention of the internet then, right? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is scathing of the move to ad supported newspapers way back in the past, leading to the rise of companies like News Corp.

> is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives.

You know how one sausage is made. But every factory is filthy just like yours.

I work with "the establishment". It has the wrong incentives too, just different ones.

I think investigative journalism is still pretty good. It just takes a whole lot of time to produce.

It’s kind of interesting that this occurs that at the same time tech leaders are basically telling us, we don’t need institutions, look we have ai instead of universities, tech will solve all of your problems. I don’t actually think there’s a conspiracy here, but like, instead of journalists raising the standards of tech, tech lowered the standards of journalists, and made us all sensationalist microbloggers.

And yet I wonder with the acceptance of tech and the downfall of institutions… isn’t one of the things people are nostalgic for or made the past so great was basically institutions?

I read a good editorial recently by George Potter about how advertising is good because it allows news orgs "pay their own way" and helps keep the press free.

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