While lacking in kindness, this comment does point the dropping trust in the institution of journalism.

AI feels like a red herring as I've always considered the root of the problem to be cultural, ie. journalists adding story (ala New Journalism) because that gets attention but often results in sloppy arguments or subpar investigative work.

If you don't trust the Atlantic, don't read the Atlantic. Do you honestly believe every journalist is out here lying to you? Who do you trust to provide information to you, if not journalists, and what about the people you do trust makes them different from journalists?

Additionally, I'd say this argument doesn't really address the point that chatbots, AI news farms, and rapid copycat books being generated by LLMs flooding the market cause confusion in every conceivable market.

How very generic.

Look, it is incredibly easy to say "all journalist are lying"

The problem is, normally that opinion is pushed by a specific group who will benefit from those journalists being discredited.

Now, with genai getting really rather good, there isn't really much between us and fully automatic bullshit as a service. Bad twitter, reddit & bluesky are very good examples of that. There are legions of people who are convinced that x is y, because someone spend some money to spread shit.

Sure, bad journalists need to be called out, as do bad networks (doesn't help that monopolies are fucking US journalism now)

but writing everyone off, without cause? thats just gonna let the grifters win.