But in the summer of 2015 something began to distract me, something odd was happening, something didn’t seem right: the mainstream news that I had read and mostly trusted my entire adult life, legacy institutions like The New York Times and CNN, wasn’t tracking what seemed to me a shifting reality. The disparity between what I saw happening on the ground—through social media and other news sites and simply with my own eyes and ears—and what mainstream organizations were reporting became glaringly obvious in a way that it never had before.
