Conspiracies and the media

Article in The Guardian by Steve Rose, 11/8./24

Headline:  “A reporter down the rabbit hole: Gabriel Gatehouse on edgelords, conspiracy theories and Trump’s America”

Subhead:  “The former BBC journalist has spent four years considering the misfits, misinformation and manipulation that are now central to US politics. In his new book, The Coming Storm, he weaves a terrifying narrative”

“. . . The parallels between media reporting and conspiracy theory manufacturing are uncomfortably close, especially now that “the media” is itself fragmented into different camps, each pushing its own conflicting version of reality. ‘If some people take this series as a sort of critique of establishment media, then we’ll be happy about that,’ he says. Bias is unavoidable: ‘You’re not just putting facts in there in a random order; you are crafting a narrative, so obviously you are choosing what to include and what to leave out.’ As a conspiracist, you can be more cavalier, but as a journalist, “You’ve got to do that in as honest a way as possible, but you can’t help but go into a story with some kind of preconceived idea of what the story is.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/nov/08/gabriel-gatehouse-coming-storm-conspiracy-theories-trump-america