Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right? What process lets even the most outlandish conspiracy notions survive and flourish in the right’s echo-chamber ecosystem, in a way they don’t come close to doing elsewhere?
"It’s very hard to exist in a media environment where you're considered neutral, where you see your role as being neutral and apolitical, to continuously come out with stories that say, 'one side is lying, the other side is not,'" says Yochai Benkler in this interview with the LA Times, stemming from his book Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. "The problem is when the reality is that one side is lying vastly more than another, neutrality becomes complicity."
