Check out this article published by the UK Independent last February. It’s written by an alleged comedian named Liam Evans who criticizes other comedians for telling jokes he thinks should be considered hate crimes. Now, after you’ve read it, go through the article again and look at the fourth letter of every sentence. It spells out: TITANIA MCGRATH WROTE THIS YOU GULLIBLE HACKS.
Titania McGrath is a parody twitter account of a 24-year-old "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest". McGrath is the pseudonym of formerly gay comedian Andrew Doyle; formerly, because the woke community has since declared him a straight white conservative for his antics. Months after this article was published, Doyle cryptically revealed his stunt to prove “that a major publication is happy to publish any old nonsense so long as it is sufficiently ‘woke.’ The social justice ideology has infected our mainstream media and irrevocably degraded its standards. That’s what theses hoaxes reveal."
I want to emphasize “irrevocably degraded its standards.” I have to take a lot of editing and proofreading gigs to support my lavish lifestyle, and every time I find work with a new company, I have to edit a test sample. The point of these is that they slip in intentional errors because they want editors and proofreaders with enough sense to google unfamiliar information as they work. The fact that the “Titania McGrath wrote this you gullible hacks” line is preserved tells us they didn’t even do so much as fix for style, flow, and repetition. Just ctrl+c, ctrl+v, and finished!
The information ecosystem is evolving towards an equilibrium between information, misinformation, and disinformation. It’s survival of the wittiest out there. These elite publications are pushing for crackdowns on disinformation yet can’t spot it as it goes across their desks. The reason for how this is able to happen so often has to do with how primal disinformation is. Venomous snakes and camouflaged animals disinform each other every day. If you misread a venomous snake as one of its benign cousins and it strikes you, that’s your problem bruh.
Yep, the journalism is dying and thinking for yourself too. I've had a few publications about my projects and each time it was disappointing. It's like every body is in such a hurry to get something out the door that they have no time to check and verify information or even confirm with the source that the information is even correct. As you said: ctrl+c, ctrl+v - next!