It can be hard to tell.
The news industry’s traditional business model has collapsed, and newsrooms are going away.
Newspapers used to be supported by advertising, local TV news by commercials. But shopping and advertising moved to the internet, greatly reducing financial support for unbiased news coverage.
Gone are tens of thousands of editor and reporter jobs, and with them much of America’s objective news (see story here).
Taking their place are politically-funded websites masquerading as independent news outlets (read story here). This website, by the way, isn’t one of them (I’ll get to that below).
MSNBC says, “The misinformation watchdog NewsGuard has recently identified over 1,260 websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets but are instead funded by partisan groups.” Many are in battleground states, most are rightwing, and some promote Russian AI disinformation (second link above).
The MSNBC article says:
“It isn’t inherently bad for organizations with political agendas to create platforms for gathering or sharing information, including information that approximates what’s conventionally understood as ‘news.’ The issue is when organizations use the aesthetics of classic newspapers to mislead the public into thinking they’re something they’re not, or obscure the nature of their funding and organizational links and how that could shape the way they present information.”
Now let’s talk about this blog. It was created by Dr. Steve Schwartz, a faculty member of the University of Washington School of Medicine. He recruited me as a contributor. I’ve been a newspaper reporter and lawyer, was trained to be rigorous with facts and think logically, and I’m guided by intellectual honesty.
This blog is not a news site; I take stories from sources I consider reliable and comment on them. This website appears to have free hosting; there are no expenses, and no income. There are no paid promotions, and I’m not paid for my work here.
Getting back to the point of the MSNBC article, we’re drowning in lies, disinformation, and propaganda. There has never been a greater need for critical thinking by the American public. Cutting through noise has never been harder, and having lost journalists as information gatekeepers, we’re now on our own.