[throwaway_dcnt]

I am alarmed that the media in its pursuit of clicks and eyeballs would amplify the divisions using such collusion. An example article put forward by a main stream news organization: https://abcnews.go.com/US/type-gun-us-homicides-ar-15/story?...

The topic is already quite sensitive and divisive. Was it really necessary to use the image with a gun covered in american flag? If this is not fanning the flames of divisions, what is? And now they want to collude?

[kodah]

I think you have a point, however, there's a fair amount of folks that think news coverage is just fine. I'm sure where you use the word collude those folks use the word "collaborate".

The way I understand it is this: if you have multiple companies covering the same topic using their own channels, then someone has to try to stick out in the variety. This could be good or this could be bad. There's a lot of ways I can think to interpret that image, but I'd say it's probably planted to agitate liberals. That's a company trying to stick out in a negative way.

If they work together, they can produce common narratives -- even if they're wrong, but especially under certain pervasive ideologies that may be trendy at the time. The whole Covington incident and the outpouring of blind rage was a fairly good example of this very thing. Entire reporting fueled off of a tweet and other companies speculative reports. This tells me there's something deeper wrong, or at least - this is not the place to institute a patch.

For those that need an update on Covington: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memoria...

[emodendroket]

Perhaps it's because gun owners love to festoon everything they own with American flags and not because of some nefarious plan to "sow division," a kind of paranoia that sounds to me like a mirror image of the liberals seeing Russians under the bed every night.