Is it Journalism, or Just “Copy Pasta”?

I thought journalists dug for facts and chased the truth?

Well, a massive chunk of what passes for “news” today is just churnalism, and it’s a sickness in the industry. It’s the business of “copy pasta.” Scouring other sites and the RSS feed pops up in their inbox, and minutes later, it’s repackaged as an “article.”

Enter the Echo Chamber

A single wire story bounces around dozens of sites. What this creates is a hollow echo chamber, where repetition starts to feel like confirmation.

Clicks Over Truth: The Financial Motive

Let’s be honest: this is content farming, plain and simple. It’s about feeding the machine, getting clicks, not about finding the truth.

It happens because newsrooms are under a crushing financial burden. Real reporting is expensive. Rewriting someone else’s press release takes almost no time at all. While this happens, the actual truth is far too complicated a story; one has to work for it; thus, it is ignored.

When Errors Spread Like a Virus

The danger here is glaringly apparent. When an “error” slips into that first, single version, it doesn’t get corrected; it spreads like a virus. Perhaps on purpose?

Gone are the internet sleuths, and it gets amplified by every outlet that repeats it. Lies travel fast, facts get trampled, and the supposed watchdog just ends up barking whatever tune it was handed.

The Real Cost: A Crisis of Trust

The crisis is real, and the real cost here is trust. The public already questions the media’s motives, and feeding them a steady diet of thin, repurposed stories proves their point.

Journalism stops being a tool to understand the world and simply becomes part of the static that numbs us to reality.

Drowning in Static, Starving for Facts

Suppose we continue to prioritise convenience over truth. In that case, we will have a society that is utterly saturated with “news” but desperately seeking a single fact. The press exists to hold power accountable, not to act as a stenographer for the slickest PR team.