The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.

Lunatics in bedrooms have been distributing pamphlets since the invention of the printing press.

"Back in my day Walter Cronkite told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident"

(never mind the fact that he didn't even have the full truth available to him but you get the point)

But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.

Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.

People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.

"Quantity is/has a quality all of/on its own."

Jill Fields at Cal State Fresno have actually narrowed it down to a (temporarily successful, but not in the long term, obviously) effort by the corset-making industry seeking to stay relevant after WWI during which corsets basically disappeared and there was an organized campaign that was organized both in person and through trade magazines. Women's silhouettes basically took a quick 180 right between 1900 and the start of the war only to turn very very retro in 1919 and while the first was organic and resembled how styles change in the century prior, albeit much quicker, the 1919 switch was openly plotted out in writing that was published but in such a niche publication that I get the sense that people not in the industry didn't even know that it existed. The cite to her paper on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17641417785638413...

You might have to shadow library this one, but it's a good read. Interestingly it seemed to be something entirely separate from Bernays whose observations were based on a derivation of what began as a homebrewed effort in a corner of the market. Valerie Steele wrote extensively about the trends and the after life but the source seems to originate in corsetry and ended up being copied by the garmet industry generally in the 20s.