how los angeles became the place where news went to die

Coverage of the fires and ICE protests in Los Angeles this year has been vicious and wildly hyperbolic. It's just a matter of time until your city is next.

Three weeks ago, I had the experience of living in a sort of Twilight Zone. In the news and on social media, I was told that Los Angeles was burning to the ground, National Guard officers and the LAPD fighting for control of the city against a crazed horde of rioters. My eyes, on the other hand, didn’t see as much as a traffic jam, and according to local reporters and videos posted by people who were actually downtown, most of the protests were peaceful and generally limited to three or four blocks, max.

Angelenos with family out of state were bombarded with calls and texts from worried family and friends asking them if they were okay in the unfolding carnage while they were picking up ice cream at Trader Joe’s or going about their normal days.

You see, on their feeds and TVs, the same images of the Waymo carbeque, the same two groups of protesters tear gassed by the LAPD, and random videos from unverified sources — along with gratuitously and deliberately misleadingly recycled videos from 2020 — were running on repeat so they could go viral and gain clout and followers for their partisan rage-baiting accounts on Twitter’s swastika tattooed zombie corpse.

The official news narrative was “city in chaos,” while the reality was that aside from a few incidents, including ones in which the LAPD shot at reporters, the Great LA Riots of 2025 were about five days of people gathered around a federal courthouse in the dozens, holding signs rightfully calling out ICE for conducting an ethnic cleansing of Los Angeles, praying, and playing music, while LAPD officers in full riot gear scowled at them and National Guard soldiers tried to find a place to sleep.

Here’s the problem though. As journalist and essayist Charlie Warzel points out in his piece for The Atlantic, this isn’t supposed to happen if you have a healthy media and working internet. The majority of us are supposed to end up in the same reality, even though we may disagree on the implications and how to interpret the events.

News outlets are supposed to take the rabid hyperbole from an administration that openly salivated at using the military against protesters at the slightest opportunity, compare it against live streams and videos of the events from people who are there, and double check anything inflammatory from a random social media account rather than take their word for it, or have their editors say “YOLO, shit’s gonna get clicks.”

Now, at this point, I think it’s important to point out that the national media in the U.S. absolutely despises California. The coverage of the fires was filled with malicious and gleeful misinformation, and could be best summed up as watching news anchors and right wing social media personalities cackling “burn lib-turds, burn!” as you eyed your phone because the next alert meant you might have to jump in your packed and ready car and leave your home while a new fire swept towards you.

It was inevitable that the narrative about the protests was going to be bad as well. But what was astounding is how impervious people seemed to even the notion that no, LA was not on fire from the protests and that maybe, just maybe, accounts widely known for lies and hoaxes on social media were — gasp! — lying. You know, the thing they did all the time, were specifically known for doing, and had every incentive to do again?

The catastrophe and vitriol tens of millions saw dominating their feeds was there not because it was true or even remotely reflected reality, but because that was what they wanted to see and AI-driven algorithms of social media are designed to allow them to stay in a boutique, custom-made reality, complete with lies and deepfakes to scratch their confirmation bias itch. And if they tried to leave, the algorithms bring them back, continually serving up their preferred content with their preferred slants on reality. All that’s needed to set them off is a slightly differently worded search query.

And this is the real danger of AI propaganda in today’s age. Not that it’s used for lies and hoaxes at an unstoppable pace. People have lied to each other for millennia, and in the first golden age of yellow journalism, entire wars were started just to drive sales of newspapers. Fake images are also nothing new. Camera tricks sold spiritualism to the masses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Photoshop has been used in politics since it was released. The only difference is speed.

Futurists worried about the web and AI trying to brainwash the public envisioned it as another tool of mass media, with trusted anchors and pundits of established legacy outlets using it to lie to the public more convincingly while web crawlers stamped out and censored dissent automatically, tracking the authors in the process.

What they too rarely considered was the idea that we could just split billions of people into their own custom realities shaped by confirmation bias in video after video, meme after meme, article and after article generated and shared at almost the speed of light all day, every day, instantly available with a swipe of the finger, beckoning them back if they strayed, letting our brains’ propensity for mental comfort do all the hard work.

That’s what’s happening now with every news story. A million custom-tailored worlds in which whatever you want to happen happens, your preferred good guys are saving the day, and your chosen bad guys are being bad because that’s just who they are, as the last vestiges of old media completely check out or willfully refuse to do their job in return for views, clicks, and an audience they placate instead of informing. What really took place in LA during the fires and now doesn’t matter to both journalists and social media. The only thing they care about is who liked, reposted, and subscribed.