Media Self-Destruct

It's amusing to watch a bunch of mainstream media narcissists self-destruct. In fact, it's downright hilarious.

Rachel Maddow got played like a Stradivarius, but was so arrogantly naive she sill claims she wasn't. Don Lemon's been caught lying so often, he makes Dan Rather look honorable.

CNN got caught - on video (!) - creating a news story. So you could watch their story, and then watch the "making" of their fake story right afterward.

And of course, in front of 50 million millennials, who saw the original story with their own eyes, The Wall Street Journal lied, thereby setting the adpocalypse in motion.

And of course, 10s of millions of viewers have watched live-streaming of a bunch of prominent events, only to watch CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post heavily edit their reports of the events to the point where their stories had no relationship to the actual events.

You have to be a special - I mean an arrogantly special - kind of stupid to believe that you can get away with taking an event witnessed by upwards of 100 million people, and turn it into a propaganda story without being caught.

It's this kind of truly narcissistic attitude that is causing the mainstream media to self-destruct.

Of course, for a while it looked like comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and a few specialty outlets such as M-TV and Buzzfeed, would inherit much of the mainstream media's younger audience. But their biases were even more blatant.

And that has caused a lot of people, especially younger people like Millenials, GenZ, and the like, to turn to independents such as Tim Pool, Phil DeFranco, and Brittany Pettibone for news.

Of course the mainstream media has been fighting back by labeling the independents as Fake News. Now, I love good irony, but this takes it into the realm of the belly laugh.

What I find to be the most astounding, and I mean REALLY astounding, is that after the Megyn Kelly debacle, even the likes of Alex Jones now has more credibility than does NBC!

So I have to ask, who does the mainstream media think they are fooling? Older people? I worked in a nursing home and saw lots of elderly residents using smart phones and laptops to keep in contact with the outside world through their FaceBook pages. They are NOT out of the loop Then again, perhaps the mainstream media is just playing to people who wish to live in their own echo chamber bubble - a small crowd, but a reliable one who will believe what they are told to believe.

The upshot is that the mainstream media is destroying itself, and although it seemed at first that a bunch of comedians on TV would become the source of news for the younger generations, and a group of propaganda sites on the web did try to capture that audience, most people are turning to independents who are not connected to any corporate-owned "news" organizations, but are instead being crowd-funded.

What makes these independents believable to so many viewers is that they don't pretend to be unbiased. They let their politics be known from the start. And they are not corporate puppets. But each one of them is trying to live up to the old - some would say antiquated - concept that a reporter reports. A reporter reports ALL the facts, and ALL sides of a story.

I don't have a big ending for this. It's just an observation of how corporate-owned mainstream news sources have needlessly frittered away their credibility, how even the news sources owned by non-media corporations couldn't fill the gap, and how crowd-funded independents have become the most credible sources of news.