The division between news and opinion at news organizations is something no one outside of journalism understands or cares about, and journalists do a very poor job of explaining it, because it’s something that would have to be explained every minute and every article. https://twitter.com/raymondmollica/status/1198638627825356800

This problem is massively amplified by defining journalism as “objective” instead of “truth finding”, which leads to no material difference between “this is my propaganda” and “this is propaganda from two sides I select using arbitrary, unexplained criteria, presented as is”.

Journalism isn’t the only industry that expects customers to understand its internal organization - in fact, it’s the norm (dealerships are not Toyota, for a while it was the norm for retail stores and .coms to be completely separate entities, etc)...

... but “news organizations” benefit from special protection and status due to the halo effect from their “news orgs”. If society understood this and the policies of the new orgs themselves, these propaganda consortiums would be seen as the clear and present danger they are.

In the meantime there are lots of truth seeking journalists in the best sense of the word, many working for these orgs that exploit their credibility, out there doing important work. But they are fighting against their profession and industry, not being aided by it.

This is also a universal truth: inside every terrifying leviathan, there are countless smart people struggling to do the right thing against incentive structures and de facto rules that are forcing them and everyone around them to do the things you dislike.