[ExI] why do we still need mainstream news media?

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:27 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>  A 23 yr old amateur found what the mainstream news media would never
> talk about.
>
>  Note this video was has 121 million views in four days:
>
> https://x.com/i/status/2004642794862961123
>
>  So why do we still need mainstream news?
>
... to measure their spin as a point of reference for other streams?

Not suggesting they'd need "bail out" money to subsidize their existence,
but cultural norms are useful so we have some way to consider
delta-from-norm as surrogate for relative-weird, yeah?

Or wait, didja mean production of mainstream media? That's how I read it.
If there were no MSM, there would still be mainstream 'views' as in +/- 1
STDEV from the distribution of all views available.. but I guess it's still
easier to track the fewer MSM programming channels and assume individual
'views' are some distance from the chocolate/vanilla/strawberry choices
promoted as normative.

We might one day have an accurate map of the 'views' but we'll be so deep
into the hive mind that the map will likely be a probability heatmap
superposition- so fuzzy that individual views are lost in the noise or
managed by bucketing and filtering anyway. ��‍♂️

>
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