The necessary ingredient for news and a story is conflict and tension, and I think a conspiracy theory brings conflict to something where there might not be one

The necessary ingredient for news and a story is conflict and tension, and I think a conspiracy theory brings conflict to something where there might not be one, and that's what makes it interesting, compelling, but often wrong. What makes mainstream news so unwatchable is that it's not the events themselves that are fake, but the conflict and tension contrived to make them into a story itself is an artifact of ideology, and that's what makes the news seem fake. That talking head tone of, "well, this is out of the ordinary!" with a wink at the audience is the expression of an ordinary that few people seriously have. What they mean is, "well, well, this is counter to the official narrative, let's find out if these people are freaks and barbarians!" It's not reporting, it's carnival barking. Ideology (the logic of an idea) creates narrative tension against real events where there may be none. If you already have a sense of persecution and believe there is a cabal of people who are working to undermine you, applying the logic of that idea to incoming events produces conspiracy theories. Some are more accurate than others. The logic of the idea that police, corporate executives, doctors, politicians and billionaires want to kill you because you are the representative of a group will cause you to hypothesize and test whether an encounter with them could be an attempt on your life. Similarly, if you believe a category of people has conspired to subordinate you, you're likely going to interpret interactions with them through that lens. In this sense, conspiracy theories are rationality driven askew by being anchored to iterating the logic of an existing belief. Technically, a competing ideology that gets in the way of reconciling our experiences with truth. Merely being against conspiracy theories doesn't make anyone any smarter or likely to be in posession of truth. It's like saying being "against-bad" is sufficient to make you "good."