Media Smear Tactics Versus Distributed Consensus

The Internet has decimated the MSM as a cultural institution. Its impact wasn't really manifest until the 2016 election where it became apparent that the MSM is a wing of the DNC. While the DNC is peculiar to the United States, it's also apparent that these people are the "globalists" too.

It took about a year for the MSM and NGOs--all these groups are obviously connected, maybe they're all first cousins--to try to fight back against the Internet. The typical tactic has been to call "prominent" alternative media people, like Alex Jones or Sargon names like "racist", which seems to be about as sophisticated as calling someone a "doodoohead". Now after a handful of years, they're also attempting to use automatic censorship machines to cleanse the Internet of opinions that don't match theirs. 

The net result has been to further erode the credibility of the MSM, which was already very low rather than impose their view on the audience. The post 9/11 wars, the bank bailouts, and the reaction of the media to the 2016 election torched all of their credibility. Now they're becoming simply contemptible. The smears don't work because the sentiment of the Internet audience is formed by a distributed process--it's really an ongoing conversation in comments sections, and on social media.

It'll be interesting to see if the Internet can become a consensus building machine for positive purposes, rather than consensus reaction to corruption. There are naturally divergent interests in the public that might make consensus impossible on many issues.