I think one of the root causes of this is the increasingly partisan behavior of the "mainstream" media. People are sick of having their opinions dictated to them, they're sick of media outlets that all push the same narratives 24/7 (Russiagate, anyone?), and they're desperately searching for any outlet that will objectively report "all the news that's fit to print" (as the NY Times likes to say).
In the past year we saw Andrew Sullivan leave New York Magazine[1], Bari Weiss leave The New York Times[2], Matthew Yglesias leave Vox (which he founded) [3], and Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept (which he founded) [4]. All of them had one thing in common that Greenwald summed up well: "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."
The mainstream media has created an information vacuum, and the spread of disinformation is a direct result of that.
In the past year we saw Andrew Sullivan leave New York Magazine[1], Bari Weiss leave The New York Times[2], Matthew Yglesias leave Vox (which he founded) [3], and Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept (which he founded) [4]. All of them had one thing in common that Greenwald summed up well: "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."
The mainstream media has created an information vacuum, and the spread of disinformation is a direct result of that.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-...
[2] https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/substack-a...
[4] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...