The analogy of food nicely shows that some sort of race-to-the-bottom does not necessarily occur: there’s still organic or other high quality fresh food even though McDonald’s has been around for a while.

Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0].

What we’ve seen is a breakdown in trust of institutions, largely disconnected from actual mistakes on their part. People will quickly demand proof and invoke conspiracy theories when, for example, the there-letter agencies accuse Eussia of interfering in elections. They have learned to invoke “appeal to authority fallacy”too well, without offering an alternative. Because you cannot evaluate a new story without in some way deferring to the reputation of the publisher.

The breakdown in trust of news institutions has many sources, so correcting factual faults is just addressing one part. Omission and selective use of facts, misleading context, and misleading language seem to carry a higher penalty for trust in todays environment where it is very easy to provide the original source when ever a slightly biased news article is published. A factually error is very binary, true or false, while omission and selective use of facts gives room for much more outrage and distrust of otherwise well establish news institutions.

The Economist and the New York Times may have good practices in regard to errors, but there is a clear difference in their reporting to independent fact checking sites. To make matters worse, even those examples of "excellent" news papers tend to have a clear and open political alignment. With increased political polarization this then result in a rather natural distrust of news institutions, even those that are vigilant in correcting errors after they have occurred.

I disagree with the fast food analogy because that has obvious and direct personal costs, while infotainment negatives are subtle and externalized.

Re: trust and appeal to authority; your example made me realize people are drawn to grand conspiracies because unverifiable theories are infallible... Luring in people unfamiliar with probabilistic reasoning and consilience.

Organic food is not higher quality. Organic just means they cannot use some arbitrary list of farming practices, (some good some bad).

Sure McDonalds is not good, but there is also plenty of organic that equally bad (or worse).

> Organic food is not higher quality.

That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to the limitations of organic farming may well be irrelevant to its goodness, but there is a strong enough correlation with quality to guide consumers, and it was likely chosen by your supermarket as an alternative to the Chinese imported product precisely because they wanted to cover the organic segment.

That is not a property of organic though. Non-organic farmers are able to produce at least as high a quality as organic (nothing an organic farmer does is prohibited for the non-organic farmer, while there are a number of things the conventional farmer can do to increase quality that is prohibited to organic farmers). Of course just because they can doens't mean they do.

At the same time, I feel like we are seeing a breakdown of trust in institutions because of actual mistakes that, in years past, would have gone unnoticed.

Although this distrust does have negative impacts to our society, I view this distrust as an overall good thing.