The only reason people look to those independent journalists is because they notice the manipulation in the mainstream media.
Some people are personally involved in a news event, and they read/watch about it and notice that the report is completely different from what happened, cause and effect are reversed, and the journalist is obviously pushing a narrative that was pre-decided before doing any research.
Other people read news articles and then look at a more primary source and notice that the news was completely wrong. This is easy to do with science articles. But it also happens with video news - I remember when CNN ran a clip of a black woman addressing a riot related to a police shooting. They labeled it as a call for peace. Go on YouTube, and see the next 20 seconds of the clip that they edited out, and she's calling for violence - she's calling for the black rioters to stop trashing their own neighborhood and instead 'take that shit to the suburbs' and trash white neighborhoods. CNN flatly lied and edited in the most blatant way.
Or perhaps you know someone like Jordan Peterson from his work, and then he makes an argument about pronoun usage, and suddenly he's on the news juxtaposed with a word cloud of 'Nazi', 'alt-right', 'sexist', all framed as a question, and designed to create the association below the level of conscious thought.
Others notice obvious selective reporting. E.g. BBC sings to the heavens a story about some Viking warriors found buried 1000 years ago, because scientists thought they were women, but they were buried with weapons. Oh, it demonstrates that women were warriors, hooray feminism! Not much later, the scientists check more closely (DNA or whatever) and realize the warriors were all men. There is no story about this, or absolutely minimal corrections. They didn't lie, they just selectively report.
Or you just look at the poll numbers and note that in all these organizations, the employees poll and donate to Democrates 90-100% of the time. Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
Or you just see the subtle conflation of concepts to create a false impression when you know better. "10 million native Americans were killed by genocide and disease..." When you know 95%+ of them were killed by the disease, you know whoever wrote this intended to create a false impression. It's "In WW2, 6 million Jews died of disease and chemical poisoning" level lying.
Eventually this happens over and over and it because overwhelmingly obvious that this is happening all the time. You can learn about so many things that ought to be reports but aren't, and see so many reports that are twisted in obvious ways.
So where do you go when it's incredibly obvious the mainstream are manipulating you - and are not owning up to their biases? You have no choice; you go find independent journalists with acknowledged biases and try to peice together the truth that way. The media forced you to do it.
I don't have time to reply to this in-depth, but I think that your comment actually elucidated the biggest issue, which is that this demonization and distrust of the mainstream media has conflated commercialized TV news like CNN (which, I'll freely admit, has embraced terrible framing) with actual news outlets (WashPo, Atlantic, NYTimes, etc). There is a difference between what CNN does and what WashPo does.
Also, having worked in a newsroom myself, I can attest to the fact that the firewall between sales/business and the journalists is real and strong. Not perfect, but it does a hell of a job, and is much, much better than the wild west of financing currently in the indie reporting space.
I think you greatly underestimate how much damage even one bad reporter in news organization can be to the entire outfit. During 2016-2018 things were especially bad in the MSM. Even "trustworthy" papers like the ones you listed were "taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay". And I'm supposed to believe they don't have a vested interest in the narrative of their story?
Meanwhile the official OIG report[1] investigated the relationship between our intelligence agencies and reporters. Here's something awful from that report:
> In addition, we identified instances where FBI
employees improperly received benefits from reporters,
including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings,
drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social
events.
Anyone with a critical mind can see that these things stink. They stink from a mile away.
Just another note on your last paragraph - I'm honestly not as concerned about financial corruption from the sales side. That's fairly predictable and orthogonal to most issues that really matter. It's the ideological bent of the reporters and staff themselves that worries me. No different than if the entire media institution was taken over by Scientologists.
I don't see any major difference between NYT, for example, and CNN et al.
Don't have time to list all the eye-poppingly blatant misconstruals I've seen in NYT.
Big recent one that comes to mind is the Covington Catholic story, where the reporters spent several days blaming the children, even though there were multi-hour videos of the whole event that refuted them available from the first day of the controversy.
> Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
This jumped out to me as a statistic so extreme that it couldn't possibly be true: Google has far too many employees to have literally zero dollars donated to the Trump campaign, no matter what you think of the corporate culture. Sure enough, the example is simple because it is false:
I didn't look up the Clinton donations under the same parameters, but I'm sure it's not even close to an even split. Regardless, it's simultaneously ironic and fitting for a comment on a post about disinformation to contain such an easily-falsified statement.
The "zero" statement seems to really be making the rounds, used by Ted Cruz in a hearing, by various media outlets making the case for regulating Google because of their bias... I guess "zero" is just punchier.
It's certainly possible Cruz was wrong or using an unfair interpretation. I feel safe saying that the donations would be skewed at least 90/10 and probably much more.
Some people are personally involved in a news event, and they read/watch about it and notice that the report is completely different from what happened, cause and effect are reversed, and the journalist is obviously pushing a narrative that was pre-decided before doing any research.
Other people read news articles and then look at a more primary source and notice that the news was completely wrong. This is easy to do with science articles. But it also happens with video news - I remember when CNN ran a clip of a black woman addressing a riot related to a police shooting. They labeled it as a call for peace. Go on YouTube, and see the next 20 seconds of the clip that they edited out, and she's calling for violence - she's calling for the black rioters to stop trashing their own neighborhood and instead 'take that shit to the suburbs' and trash white neighborhoods. CNN flatly lied and edited in the most blatant way.
Or perhaps you know someone like Jordan Peterson from his work, and then he makes an argument about pronoun usage, and suddenly he's on the news juxtaposed with a word cloud of 'Nazi', 'alt-right', 'sexist', all framed as a question, and designed to create the association below the level of conscious thought.
Others notice obvious selective reporting. E.g. BBC sings to the heavens a story about some Viking warriors found buried 1000 years ago, because scientists thought they were women, but they were buried with weapons. Oh, it demonstrates that women were warriors, hooray feminism! Not much later, the scientists check more closely (DNA or whatever) and realize the warriors were all men. There is no story about this, or absolutely minimal corrections. They didn't lie, they just selectively report.
Or you just look at the poll numbers and note that in all these organizations, the employees poll and donate to Democrates 90-100% of the time. Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
Or you just see the subtle conflation of concepts to create a false impression when you know better. "10 million native Americans were killed by genocide and disease..." When you know 95%+ of them were killed by the disease, you know whoever wrote this intended to create a false impression. It's "In WW2, 6 million Jews died of disease and chemical poisoning" level lying.
Eventually this happens over and over and it because overwhelmingly obvious that this is happening all the time. You can learn about so many things that ought to be reports but aren't, and see so many reports that are twisted in obvious ways.
So where do you go when it's incredibly obvious the mainstream are manipulating you - and are not owning up to their biases? You have no choice; you go find independent journalists with acknowledged biases and try to peice together the truth that way. The media forced you to do it.