If you feel you can't trust the news anymore, you have good reason.
Award-winning - and newly independent - journalist Matt Taibbi (of "vampire squid" fame) returns to Peak Prosperity to break down for us how the news media industry became corrupted by the profit motive and now intentionally produces content to "entertain" rather than "inform".
The five media behemoths who own more than 90% of all US media outlets (Comcast, Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, Newscorp) have discovered that its much more profitable to focus on discrete audience segments and give them the information they want to hear.
Which is why the former approach of "just the facts" reporting to a general audience has practically disappeared. There's less money in it.
So we're now served a steady diet of intentionally-biased outrage and pablum, with opinions replacing facts, and any intellectually "triggering" content put quickly down by today's trigger-happy censors.
It's no wonder that a recent Gallup poll revealed that the majority of Americans no longer trust the media to report accurately or fairly.
This is a huge social challenge. In such a world, where can one turn for objective information? And what are the consequences of creating such a poorly-informed populace?
While there are no easy solutions to this challenge, Taibbi shares how he and other respected investigative journalists are ejecting from the system and self-publishing their work, freeing them of the control and biases of corporate editors.
To understand just how broken our news media is, and to learn how to navigate your way to the few reporter and channel remaining dedicate to sourced, factual journalism, watch our interview with Matt Taibbi.
Adam Taggart is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the 'startup thing' (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he's a devoted husband and dad.