How do you define or measure consensus? I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they

How do you define or measure consensus? I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they should probably be unbundled. We rely on them to report immediate, factual events, like a fire in a hotel or an impending storm. We rely on them to do longer form reporting on social trends, new scientific findings, business and governmental activities, etc. We rely on them to locate and expose corruption and malpractice amongst the powerful. We rely on them for book and film reviews. And sometimes we rely on them to engage in analysis and generally telling us what to think, because figuring out our own opinions on complex topics is hard work. We'd like them to do it for us and then boil things down to an executive summary that we can then adopt wholesale as if it were our own opinions. It's not clear to me that it makes sense to bundle so many things together, or if this is a useful combination or just an artifact of an earlier era when distributing the written word required lots of equipment and big agent networks. Now the internet exists should we be defending these agglomerations or breaking them apart?