theteacher: But the news media, taken as a whole, is not living up to that responsibility. Frenzied competition for increasingly scarce attention incentivizes telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to know, and those incentives are increasingly winning out over fidelity to the principles of objectivity and impartiality.

That was the money quote for me, too. TFA is way too long and loaded down with a lot of academic citations that are more about the author's need to try and look clever, but I didn't read it as saying BSAB as much as observing that the financial incentives to make insane amounts of money have corrupted modern journalism to the point where the media environment is pushing disinformation and division just for the sake of profits.

There was never a so-called golden age of journalism but it's hard to argue that the 24/7 cable TV news cycle and revolutionary impact of the Internet haven't contributed to the problem in some respects. Especially when coupled with things like the deregulation of the communications industry during the Ray-gun years and the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine. The late Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian predicted this would happen back in the 80s, years before we even had the Internet. He also said that it would take a well-educated public with critical thinking skills to see through the bullshiat. Sadly, we don't have that now either.

The fact that even a libertarian writer admits the market is contributing to this situation is telling. Long overdue and probably pointless, but still kind of a surprise to me. And the connection to that "Day of the Dove" episode of Star Trek is one that hadn't occurred to me before. But it is almost like there's a malevolent force making things worse in terms of our ability to communicate in rational ways. And a society that packages information into silos where we can always find "content" to fit our pre-existing views, and that plays reality as infotainment to amuse instead of enlighten, is one where we are unlikely to find anything like objective facts, let alone truth.

\ of course, YMMV