Nice thesis, especially since I agree with it :) A few other things the author failed to note. 1. News delivery requires emotional engagement by the audience

Nice thesis, especially since I agree with it :) A few other things the author failed to note. 1. News delivery requires emotional engagement by the audience to keep them consuming and coming back. That means fear or people arguing. If you can get people arguing about things people are afraid of? Even better. 2. Investigative and beat reporters are being eliminated wholesale. Political reporters are the ones left. This means news outlets tend to tell stories in political terms -- even stories that may be technical in nature. Everything becomes politics. (Which we can then slot up people to fight about!) 3. Best form of journalism? Opinion pieces. That's because opinion pieces are required to show bias up front, have a thesis and some kind of logical structure to support that thesis, and provide contextual details from news and history as part of the argument. These details provide the context completely absent from most msm news sources. 4. Anything that can be used to drive engagement _will_ be used to drive engagement. Disgusting pictures, sexual titillation, mesmerizing graphics, misleading headlines... it's all fair game. This means that "fake news" is a sliding scale. On one end we have people admitting their bias and trying to report anyway, even if what they have to say is boring. On the other end we have people who have a bias and motives that are completely unknown to us trying to create any kind of content required to get us clicking. Quitting news is probably the easiest thing to do to get a boost in mental health, and as long as you love reading, ironically you'll actually end up much more informed than before you quit.