I was discussing this with my son on Sunday. My “sense” is that we used to be able to more-or-less believe that the media gave us facts, although they would frame the facts to represent the interest of the elite class. There has always been disinformation, but I used to believe that for the most part, we were given facts. The trick was to perceive the framing at work around those facts. Now, MSM makes shit up themselves. It used to be just the corps and the gov’t engaged in disinformation. Now the media is making shit up.
I disagree though not in a major way. Back when the invasion of Iraq was building up, it was possible to debunk major narratives justifying it, such as the claim the WMD were likely to exist in Iraq. The MSM was not pushing that counter-narrative. Yet we (quite correctly) deduced that the dominant narrative did not hold up and that the opposite was far more likely.
You can find things out, but you can’t do it alone and you need to know how to find sources that are not just in the media, meaning either the MSM or the “alternatives.” Sometimes it’s not a matter of finding “facts” but of finding which narratives stand up better to scrutiny.
Sometimes you don’t get enough to know. Sometimes you get enough to make analysis possible.
