“Flooding the Zone” appears to be to be deliberate, and rampant across the whole of journalism.
I doubt it has anything to with “trying to satisfy a market generated by anxiety”; rather, it’s a case of “our ends are noble and good, justifying victory by any means necessary”.
High-Volume and Multichannel. Text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting.
Rapid, Continuous, and Repetitive. Propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives.
Makes No Commitment to Objective Reality. False statements are more likely to be accepted if backed by evidence, even if that evidence is false.
Not Committed to Consistency. Potential losses in credibility due to inconsistency are potentially offset by synergies with other characteristics of contemporary propaganda.
Pretty sure Vox ticks every one of those boxes just as thoroughly as Breitbart does.
As a small case-in-point: consider the Mass Shooting Tracker, which Vox cites regularly in articles, videos, and infographics.
Feel free to click around for yourself, read the linked articles, and estimate what percentage of those you would consider to be a “mass shooting”.
To give some idea of the statistical bankruptcy, according to the above site, there have been 120 “mass shootings” in the United States so far in 2020, with a median fatality rate of… zero.
High-volume fake evidence for multi-channel fake news.
“Flooding the Zone” appears to be to be deliberate, and rampant across the whole of journalism.
I doubt it has anything to with “trying to satisfy a market generated by anxiety”; rather, it’s a case of “our ends are noble and good, justifying victory by any means necessary”.
Looking at the above-linked publication on The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model, we see the following characteristics:
High-Volume and Multichannel. Text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting.
Rapid, Continuous, and Repetitive. Propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives.
Makes No Commitment to Objective Reality. False statements are more likely to be accepted if backed by evidence, even if that evidence is false.
Not Committed to Consistency. Potential losses in credibility due to inconsistency are potentially offset by synergies with other characteristics of contemporary propaganda.
Pretty sure Vox ticks every one of those boxes just as thoroughly as Breitbart does.
As a small case-in-point: consider the Mass Shooting Tracker, which Vox cites regularly in articles, videos, and infographics.
Feel free to click around for yourself, read the linked articles, and estimate what percentage of those you would consider to be a “mass shooting”.
To give some idea of the statistical bankruptcy, according to the above site, there have been 120 “mass shootings” in the United States so far in 2020, with a median fatality rate of… zero.
High-volume fake evidence for multi-channel fake news.
Sadly, I don’t see a way to fix this, either.