This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me. When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals pressure politicians to resign and scuttle election bids or knock millions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about “how the story unfolded”—unreality is the only word for it.

