Every outlet has noticed the popularity that comes with telling people what they want to hear. It’s legal to give “opinion” that has no backing evidence, as opposed to journalism, where people reasonably expect some due diligence.
That’s why Hannity, for instance, is quick to point out that he is not a journalist, but in fact an opinion show host. That distinction is meant to limit his liability.
Political speech is protected, you don’t have to be tethered to reality in order to participate.
But there’s limits, for example slander and defamation.
X has Community Notes. This is a beautiful feature. They target both regular posts and, most importantly, ads. False advertisement is a problem for all social media platforms out there, except X. As a quick example, I regularly see ads about a certain type of game that in reality does not exist. These ads are running everywhere. However, on X, the community notes add a banner right next to the ad saying that this is a fake game, so don't bother buying it. From the financial perspective, such banners do harm the platform. But from the user's perspective, it's amazing.
Social media like Facebook might be worse to some degree, though, because media outlets don’t have hooks that are as strong and universal as those of social media — there are those with a disposition towards watching shows like Hannity, but the appeal is somewhat constrained, with those who hadn’t been watching unlikely to start watching without outside influence.
By comparison, people from all walks of like come to social media for a wide variety of reasons, meaning the top of the funnel is much larger. Social media also lends an air of legitimacy to posted headlines with the way it attaches familiar, trusted names to them (posters and commenters), which over time trains users to disregard legitimacy of sources. It can also nudge users away from intellectual engagement and toward emotional engagement, with how ragebait headlines tend to be the ones that get posted most often.
Of course, that’s not to downplay the dangers of “news entertainment” on traditional media, but I think social media is its own special brand of insidious.
Journalism is just as protected as political speech. Obviously - since opinion, propaganda and journalism has been intermingled since the very invention of the printing press or even since the first people learned to speak.
The closest you can get to reality is open source journalism, where the outlet also links to their full source documents and tapes, along with the digested news article. Then each and every member of their audience could fact check them. But no news outlet does this, instead they obscure and hide source documents, even though they generally are within the public domain. Even public broadcasters do this, although they shouldn't have any financial interest.
I actually think hiding behind “journalism” gives you more freedom to say what you want. In theory, you couldn’t blatantly make stuff up, because you risk getting sued. However, if the last decade has taught me anything, even then, the burden of proof is on the victim.
I think these high profile media folks volunteer that what they say is opinion, not out of freedom, but more so to frame their talking points in a more persuasive way. Humans will naturally put up their bullshit detectors if they think something is reported as fact, and expect to see evidence. Opinion on the other hand, means your guard is down and you will hear the same message, but consider it.
Historically, people trusted something reported as fact and were naturally skeptical of opinion. It seems that many people are realigning to an environment where the "facts" were presented to create a limited, specific perspective of the world (which is closer to opinion) and the majority of "opinion" producers were challenged to be, and in some cases became, more evidence-based (which is closer to fact). In effect, the system is self-correcting to reflect the natural state of the world: truth exists, and the task is on you to discover it.
Every outlet has noticed the popularity that comes with telling people what they want to hear. It’s legal to give “opinion” that has no backing evidence, as opposed to journalism, where people reasonably expect some due diligence.
That’s why Hannity, for instance, is quick to point out that he is not a journalist, but in fact an opinion show host. That distinction is meant to limit his liability.
Political speech is protected, you don’t have to be tethered to reality in order to participate.
But there’s limits, for example slander and defamation.