I do understand fear and mistrust of the media - and I accept it's often justified. Some sources are more credible than others, some biases are consistent and can be accounted for.
What I don't get is how that drives you to believe some of the most bizarre and outlandish stuff from sources that are not just potentially unreliable - they are at best fantasists and at worst deliberately pressing emotive buttons for money.
This article goes a long way towards explaining the "slippery slope" that leads people to believe all sorts of rubbish.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...got-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia
I'm pretty sure there are many, many more "hardcore" conspiracy theorists out there than there were 20 years ago? Why? Because the Web's the perfect echo chamber. In the "olden days" if you held outlandish beliefs, you were pretty much on your own. You could easily be literally the only person with such views in your town!
But now, you can meet up in seconds with thousands of like-minded people from all over the world on forums and social media. That network effect strengthens the feeling that you must be "on to something" - after all, how could so many people be wrong? Everyone reinforces the same nonsense in a flurry of group-think, and suddenly you've "radicalised" conspiracy theory believers.
A complete fallacy, of course. Just because you get all the oddballs together in a single virtual room it doesn't do anything to make their views any less nutty...
One example of this: there are "plenty" of people out there who still believe the Earth is flat. Yes, in 2016! You'd think we were still in the middle ages, but no...
https://mic.com/articles/150833/flat-earth-theories-truthers-youtube#.ITccQDsxW
With 7 billion people on the planet, it only takes 1 in 100,000 to believe in something nonsensical and that's still 70,000 people, enough to fill a large football stadium and certainly much more than enough to create a self-perpetuating, self-sustaining online community of people patting each other on the back for sharing the same view.
Yet if you take a step back and look at the situation pragmatically, you'd have to admit that a 1/100,000 viewpoint is so far to the extreme edges of the "mainstream/fringe" curve as to be practically invisible in the distance.