The author approaches but doen’t quite touch on the truth. This pollution of the media was not, very likely, accidental. Sometimes bad things, and especially real bad things, happen because someone wants it to happen and has the wherewithal to make it happen. In this case, that would be something as simple as money, and lots of it.
The media is first of all, a business. What kind of a businessman would hire the mush-minded, socialist charlatans that seem to produce the world’s news. Is it in the best interest of the businessman to have his message be one of vehement anti-business propaganda? It is extremely difficult to imagine that the cesspool that is the media, got that way strictly by the process of devolution.
The mainstream print and network news media has been losing viewers and readers for years but their world view has not been altered. They are structured to be a business that makes money but their primary mission is to perform a “public service” that moves public policy and public debate in the right direction.
Cultural rot and decay is what it is. Societies decay over time.
I like to think it as the immutable second law of thermodynamics manifesting itself within cultures and societies. They always progress towards ever higher states of entropy (i.e. disorder).
I think the book “Manufacturing Consent” by the revolting Noam Chomsky is actually an important book for understanding the role of media in the contemporary world: If we understand what this book really is.
Its a blueprint not a critique. Its a manifesto declaring the importance of mass propaganda as the critical tool for controlling modern society: The first shot in the left’s systematic conquest of the western media machine.
The left has understood the importance of propaganda for generations. We still do not and pay the price. The Nazi or communists were masters in their day but are far surpassed by today’s application of Madison Avenue marketing technology to the realm of politics.