>>316293
For a point, the formation of the current opinion depends on simple information economics. A lot of opinion is formed by the use of the media.
Media now seems to be free. We no longer have to pay to read most of our news, strange isn't it? How then the market sustains itself? The client of the media is not you, is the advertisers. They pay for page views and the more page views they get the more they pay.
Now, how you get more page views to your news page? Making informed news take time and uses more space, which means that you get to publish less and you'll probably use a wall of text, and that get's paid by a single ad per viewer. What if you decide to instead publish a shorter story? Or maybe do it in more parts? Then one page might become 3 or 4. What if you do it before confirming your sources? If you think that using poor sources might affect the reputation of a site, look no further than Gawker. So i can make a story about something using just rumors, then another confirming the rumors or adding new info, then another one with somebody denying the info, then an opinion piece, another update of the original story, and so on. Suddenly i have lot of pages full of articles taken from a single story poorly researched and i get to display ads for each post.
If the reality factor of the story is not that important what makes an article successful? Outrage, emotional content. Something that motivates people to post, to share the article, to get angry, to laugh. You don't need critical thinkers, that's not where the money is. You need hordes of emotional readers affected by the thing you wrote that will act before reading the full story, some even before reading past the title. You pretend to catter to atheists? Scientists? Philosophers? Fuck them, too specific to get into it, too slow. forty something people? They have their own experience, and are not so internet savy. The key to promote your content is on that group of young millenials raised on a time of economic growth who are the primary users of the internet.
And that's where SJWs enter in the game. I present you the outraged horde of our time. You take something simple (racism, sexism, violence, things that most of us would be naturally against of) and you distort it, manage it, transform it to suit your needs. Of course, you are just a reporter, you are just making a report of the information you have. I think most bloggers won't be even aware of how they are manipulating the info they receive, and probably they think that whatever they are doing is for a good cause. The readers don't have the ability to go meta, check the facts or use critical thinking and most of them might consider enough to see a bunch of links on the bottom of the page to believe the story is fact-checked. The attention span is gone but the info adquired remains, and they "feel" like it's true.
The heuristics of the mind make the rest possible. Suddenly, a reporter gets lots of views for it's post. And therefore the topic of the writing, the way of reporting it seems the correct form of doing it. With a mass of reporters waiting to fill your position, you better keep showing that you are worth it. But you need to be quick to report, so anything remotely important on the political scale for the planet might not be worth it, gossip, on the other hand… The reader also gets outraged, suddenly more and more opinion pieces are thrown to him/her/zerg/bazinga. It's almost like there's an epidemic of these news. Shit, better share it, I MUST DO SOMETHING. But the harsh reality is that they are not making shit. They only shared some stupid post about a first world problem that confirmates their own acquired biases.