> Another article that purports to passively observe a phenomenon while actually doing everything to perpetuate it. And this is the major problem with the mass

> Another article that purports to passively observe a phenomenon while actually doing everything to perpetuate it. And this is the major problem with the mass media today. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge their own effect on the political landscape we face today. The routine use of click/outrage bait headlines and context-free quotes is one of many common practices that warrant criticism of the media, to say nothing of biased editorializing (what articles to run, what quotes to print, where in the article to print dissenting opinions etc.) and the pile-on of seemingly verbatim headlines, stories, and opinions distributed among major outlets whenever any political "event" of note happens. Yet the push-back against it is sometimes surreal. Hyperbolic accusations of "attacking the free press" or "destroying trust in the media" (as if trust should just be guaranteed) are often lobbed. Issuing the occasional retraction does not absolve them (a common lawyers trick, saying something in court that they know will rightfully be objected to, and the jurors commanded to disregard, as if people can just be told to forget things). This same media is quick to criticize alternative outlets and ideological opponents (eg Fox News and vice versa). At least with "new media", they generally don't righteously hold themselves up as unbiased arbiters of truth. An institution which criticizes anything and everything is completely unable to take any criticism of its own. That is the very definition of thin skinned. Now, the media benefits from being _big_, ie they run a lot of stories and have a lot of different contributors. So it won't be all bad all the time, and there will always be articles to point to that are decent examples of journalistic integrity (and this point is often used in their defense, while being ignored when criticizing their opponents). But the trends, especially in political content, are undeniable. An acknowledgement that they often use and profit from biased and misleading clickbait headlines, that they have an overall editorial slant etc. would be a start. But that is as likely to happen as employees of some SV startup publicly admitting that the "game-changing" product they are selling is actually a cobbled together pile of shit that probably does not exist. Or they could just admit that, regardless of all else, they are not just innocent flies on the wall, their reporting has a real effect on what they are reporting on. Take a lesson from what we've learned in Quantum Physics over the past 100 years; there's no such thing as passive observation, there's just interaction.