Adam Curtis, a documentary film-maker and journalist, has a brilliant aptitude at analysis in this area. His work in general, at the intersection of reporting and politics, is pretty excellent.
It is some malice, more than you might expect; with with a great dollop of ineptitude, far more than you might expect; that allows this climate of total disorientation to exist.
Take some of his thoughts:
> "Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.
> "But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
> "And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.
> "Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained."
It is some malice, more than you might expect; with with a great dollop of ineptitude, far more than you might expect; that allows this climate of total disorientation to exist.
Take some of his thoughts:
> "Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.
> "But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
> "And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.
> "Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained."
The rest of that article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/ae14be85-3104-...
And the documentary-film that he's referring to in that post, Bitter Lake, is available on iPlayer (for British viewers...or people on a VPN...), here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bi...