Fears that ‘pink slime’ sites could be as harmful to political discourse as foreign disinformation in 2016 and 2020
Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election.
Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”
even actual local papers are now suspect because your local news is owned by a national news megacorporation that sponsors our elections
so between fake news and local national news propaganda there is no news
This-is very-dangerous-to-our-democracy.mp4
Local news is often the highest quality. The incentives are too different and the stakes are lower. Of course this means local news reporting on local stories. National stories are, as you mentioned, likely written based on a press release authored by who knows.
no more local news just articles about the latest restaurant in the more gentrified area and about how great it is to live here plus lots of sports
I see they got the little both sides thing in there, but I’d like to see a breakdown of just how “both” it is.
both sides have campaign funding coming in from the big megocorp news
As with so many things, you can blame Ronald Reagan.
Prior to Reagan, there was a thing called "the Fairness Doctrine.’ A company could only own two local radio stations [AM and FM] and one VHF television station. If a station ran an editorial, they had to allow the opposition equal time for rebuttal. And half hour commercials like “The Transformers” and “GI Joe” were not allowed.
The problem with that is some topics don’t deserve equal time. For example, should we allow Dow Chemical to dump their toxic waste into the environment? No, absolutely not, no question. We shouldn’t give them a platform to misinform people.
And yet we give Dow all the platforms to misinform people now because they have more money.
