Cable news has ruined journalism forever

People will believe random internet dudes over credentialed journalists and it’s ruining us.

Anyone who knows me has probably heard my rants about misinformation in the digital age. Whether it’s the President of the United States using false allegations of voter fraud to attempt to win the U.S. election or some dude telling random people that MyPillows are stuffed with used aprons from Coronavirus victims, all of the above tend to irritate me.

I try to avoid conspiracy theories as much as I can since publicizing them tends to lead more people to believe them, even people arguing against them.

What I never understood was this summer’s Wayfair child-trafficking conspiracy (which everyone has stopped thinking about apparently). Some random guy on the internet apparently thought that a bookshelf’s high price on Wayfair somehow equated to the company selling children online, publicly, through their official website.

I’m not even going to dive in on that subject, but it uncovers a rather unsettling truth: people would rather believe Joe from Twitter than any journalist ever.

Cable news is the key identifier on this story.