It goes even further nowadays. Get into niche media journalism, and you see groups of journalists who collude to purposely create emotional impressions which be

It goes even further nowadays. Get into niche media journalism, and you see groups of journalists who collude to purposely create emotional impressions which bend the "truth" in whichever direction they've agreed on. Niche media journalism also acts as a filter for mainstream media's coverage of their niche, which amplifies their narrative. I see this as an extension of post 2000's web forum culture, which was often censorious and authoritarian in nature. You toe the line, or you get the banhammer, two orders of magnitude faster than the cold war eastern bloc secret police even dreamed. Posts that go against the mods were deleted in a brazen fashion that would've made Pravda blush. It's the generations who were kids and high school students when exposed to those modes of behavior, awash in online mini-regimes of instant totalitarian power, who are now getting into their 30's and are rising in power. Freewheeling obnoxiousness has its downside online. There were parts of that chaotic side of the internet that I absolutely hated. However, I now see that the fakeness of the totalitarian version is ultimately worse. In future years, we'll look back on these years like we looked back on the 50's. The cultural milieu that bought all that "Midcentury Modern" furniture thought themselves fantastically "progressive."