The only brake on this kind of behavior in the past was the potential that another news outlet might call BS. This rarely happened, since even rival news agencies tended to collectively benefit from any scare. But the possibility at least existed. Today, in a politically cleaved media landscape, reporters know there is less danger than ever that their target audiences will be exposed to dispositive information. Rival publications do not reach rival audiences. MSNBC viewers do not read the Daily Caller and vice versa. Moral panics therefore rage on, essentially unchallenged, in every corner of
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