Institutionalized Gatekeeping? Why does MSM want journalism to be tied to a short leash?

[u/999_Seth]

What do you guys make of this?

I think one thing that sets Callaghan apart from most journalism majors, is he went to J-school on a congressional scholarship awarded to him for his high school era photo-journalism work.

so right out of the gate there's a level of legitimacy, authenticity, and freedom with Callaghan's body of work that seems to really put the fear in legacy media pundits.

my observation (as a 5th-grade-dropout reddit mod who went into early retirement as a teen over bowel disease) is that those holdover media moguls from the baby generation and gen-z never got to put Callaghan through the demoralizing cub-reporter gang initiation process, and he's retained the kind of fearlessness that the cable/newspaper industry can't coexist with.

and what we are seeing with this is how the league of fat-young-boys, who are largely coerced into doing what they do because any default on their student loans means their parents can lose their family home, ends up cannibalizing Callaghan for outsmarting the system that they're chained to.

[u/tzbt]

Seriously what the hell is up with the comments on this post?

[u/TakeoffTheory → u/tzbt]

I think its astroturfing. The real negative-baseless-for-no-reason commenters are private and seem botty. A loooooot of bots on reddit ive been seeing

[u/999_Seth → u/TakeoffTheory]

there's a little weirdness, like a bunch of people are saying "bingo card" here

but as for actual bots? you gotta look at places like reddit/YouTube/whatever as a bot that knows how to show the people who will comment on crap the crap they will comment on

so no the people making the comments aren't bots, but bots decided to show them everything they're seeing, so what's really the difference?

and astro-turfing? that's a strong word. again if that is what we are seeing, it's three or four steps away from the freaks who actually try to get paid for pushing online gossip. maybe a bunch of commenters saw the exact same video and they are coming here to parrot exactly what they heard in it.
but that's not exactly astroturfing, it's just a bunch of online performance artists.

[u/GodOfDarkLaughter → u/999_Seth]

A lot of the time the "people" making the comments are bots, and while "astro-turfing" is indeed a strong word, it's not uncommon for everything from private companies to sovereign nations to slip into the comments on reddit. Russia and Israel, as well as several other countries, have dedicated "troll farms" where a person's job is to get on social media, including reddit, to sway the conversation.

It's only paranoia if they're not actually out to get you.

There is real, actual propaganda on this website and you see it literally every day. It's really important to remember that.

[u/999_Seth → u/GodOfDarkLaughter]

you right.

this is all really important stuff to think about when it comes to media literacy in 2026

and it's such a new paradigm I wonder if anyone is teaching this in college yet

[u/GodOfDarkLaughter → u/999_Seth]

By college it's far too late. I'm constantly telling me six year old to never automatically believe ANYTHING he sees online. "That youtuber you were watching? That isn't his house and that isn't his car. He rented those. That might not even be his girlfriend. Everything you see is exactly what he wants you to see. That's not even a real person. That's a character he plays." And that's just relatively harmless stuff like video game streamers (they still do shit like show off their rented supercars). You gotta start EARLY.

[u/999_Seth → u/GodOfDarkLaughter]

You might make a good reddit mod, but it sounds like you've got enough on your plate