There's a lot of shortsightedness here and I'm compelled to react to it (why didn't the article cover the origin and nuances of yellow journalism and draw some

There's a lot of shortsightedness here and I'm compelled to react to it (why didn't the article cover the origin and nuances of yellow journalism and draw some parallels?) But I'll pose a question to illustrate all these opinions in hopes of adding something useful to the discussion. How does a story get written? - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and paraphrases it (very often) - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and opines on it (often) - Someone reads a press release written by someone else and paraphrases it (often, esp in science) - Someone documents crowd behavior (trending reddit) and reports on it (very very often since it's an easy kill with assurance of results) - Citizen or a whistleblower calls a newsroom and provides a tip to be investigated (rare) - Agency reporter digs through a dataset (provided by a gubmit agency) and derives a story out of it (rare) - Agency reporter compiles a dataset (scrapes, etc) and derives a story out of it (rarer) - Gumshoe reporter, on their regular beat, catches a story and reports on it (takes time) Of all of those methods, only the last two have elements of first-hand fact collecting and checking, and that kind of original reporting costs a boatload of money to sustain. Like to the tune of $20 a story by some meter, which a reasonable reader would never pay for to read a single story. That mind-blowing cost was traditionally covered by print advertising - online advertising never became a significant fraction before brick and mortar news agencies started crumbling. If you consider what I have said, I think you'll find that tons of popular stories are cheaply produced but not cheaply broken. In other words, traditional news agencies and new-age ad-infested freelance cabbage leaf sites both regurgitate stories and story ideas from others. Sometimes a regurgitated story has supplemental reporting, but it's never that significant. When you run into a story ask yourself what the sources are and how they came to be written by those reporters and try to classify it in the crude pantheon I've constructed. I think you'll find that many stories that reach you weren't broken by the place you read them on.