CHUTZPAH ALERT: Atlantic VP Hayley Romer on fake news and living in a media bubble:

“Let’s say for a second I understood what your political views were and I were to only send you things that validate that view, or I say, ‘I understand that you believe in this, I’m just gonna keep sending you things that validate your opinion.’ Is that a good thing? I’m not sure,” she said. “I think that assumption is one that sort of lies on the edge of something worth debating, hence the nature of this conversations. Let’s take a step back and look at the news. It used to be that every night in order to get the news, you had one trusted voice come into your home. You’d turn on your TV, you’d sit down at the end of the day, and somebody would show up and tell you everything that you needed to know, and you believed what they said.”

“Once cable news came around, you had choices, you had more ways to gain access to information, you didn’t necessarily have to listen to things so broadly, and you had the opportunity at that point through cable news to gain access to different opinions, different perspectives, different sets of news information, if you will,” she continued.

“But then came the Internet where everyone had a voice, and the thing about the Internet was that it was going to be the total democratization of all humanity,” Romer stated. “We would create a global free open exchange of ideas. Everyone had access to everything, and this was going to be the ultimate dream because you no longer had to wait for someone to come into your home at a certain time of day.”

“But reality, as we know, is much more complicated than that,” she said. “Everyone flocked to the Internet a lot faster than we could have predicted, which left us saying, ‘What do we do now, how do we figure this out?’ Pretty soon we were overwhelmed with information of course.”

In 2007, in the worst trade since the Boston Red Sox offloaded Babe Ruth, desperate for Andrew Sullivan’s blog traffic, the Atlantic swapped out Mark Steyn for Sullivan. The Excitable One then proceeded – under the Atlantic’s once-proud imprimatur — to first compare President Bush to Paul von Hindenburg, and then go off in search of Sarah Palin’s uterus. Publisher, heal thy self.