Cable news and social media don't show the average person who votes differently. They blast the loudest, most cartoonish "professional lunatics" from the opposing side. This creates a false impression that the entire opposition is extreme, making tribalism seem rational.

Mainstream media outlets often function as propaganda arms for political factions, not sources of objective truth. Consumers should treat them as such, using outlets like CNN for the left's narrative and Fox for the right's, simply to understand the official talking points of each side.

Society is splitting into two groups: "post-headline" people who rely on official media for validation, and "pre-headline" people (like Elon Musk) who synthesize raw, real-time data to act before the consensus forms. This information asymmetry is becoming a primary driver of wealth and power.

The primary challenge for journalism today isn't its own decline, but the audience's evolution. People now consume media from many sources, often knowingly biased ones, piecing together their own version of reality. They've shifted from being passive information recipients to active curators of their own truth.

In a polarized media environment, audiences increasingly judge news as biased if it doesn't reflect their own opinions. This creates a fundamental challenge for public media outlets aiming for objectivity, as their down-the-middle approach can be cast as politically hostile by partisans who expect their views to be validated.

Conspiracy theories are often logically fragile because they require believing in a group of conspirators who exhibit perfect psychopathy, flawless competence, and complete information control over long periods—an impossibly stable combination in the real world.

Journalism's inherent bias toward sudden, negative events creates a pessimistic worldview. It overlooks slow, incremental improvements that compound over time, which data analysis reveals. This explains why data-oriented fields like economics are often more optimistic.

The common mantra 'go woke, go broke' is backward. US media revenue cratered 75% due to the internet's rise. This financial brokenness forced extreme message discipline ('wokeness') as a desperate survival strategy to retain jobs and a shrinking audience base. Financial collapse preceded the ideological shift.

The promise of new media was to foster deep, nuanced conversations that legacy outlets abandoned. However, it is increasingly falling into the same traps: becoming predictable, obsessed with personality feuds, and chasing clicks with inflammatory content instead of pursuing truth.