The Jones Effect

How Profitable Lunacy Is Quietly Killing Real Journalism

We have, what I would call, a rather elegant piece of sabotage happening in plain sight, and most people are too busy arguing about chemtrails to notice it.

Here’s the setup. Somewhere between a legitimate investigative journalist spending six months untangling a web of offshore accounts that connect a pharmaceutical company to a dozen government contracts, and a man in a studio shouting about frogs and selling you iodine supplements, something went very, very wrong. Not just culturally. Structurally. Deliberately, some would argue. And I’m starting to lean that way myself.

The mechanism is almost beautiful in its cynicism, which is why I’ve started calling it the Jones Effect, though the principle extends well beyond any single character in this particular theatre. The idea is simple: if you can make all alternative scrutiny look unhinged, you never have to answer for the things that are actually true.

First, A Bit of Intellectual Honesty

I want to be careful here, because I’m writing about a thing that is easy to get wrong, and getting it wrong is, ironically, precisely what the people who benefit from this dynamic are counting on.

I am not saying that all conspiracy theories are secretly true. I am not suggesting that every establishment-critical voice is a valiant truth-teller being suppressed by shadowy forces. Some people who describe themselves as “independent journalists” are, to put it charitably, making things up for clicks. Some are genuinely delusional. Some are just bored and found an audience.

What I am saying is something considerably more uncomfortable than that: the line between genuine investigative journalism and profitable disinformation has been deliberately smeared, and the smearing has not happened by accident.

The Business Model Nobody Talks About

Let’s start with the money, because it always makes more sense when you start with the money.

A sensationalist conspiracy platform is, at its core, a marketing operation wearing a journalism costume. The content is not the product. The content is the funnel. The product is the supplements, the survival gear, the water filters, the memberships, the books with ominous covers. The wilder the claim, the more urgent the fear. The more urgent the fear, the more units you shift. It is, structurally, not that different from a tabloid newspaper telling you that a certain celebrity’s dietary choices are literally killing them, except the celebrity has been replaced with the global elite and the diet tips have been replaced with colloidal silver.

What these platforms have learned, with admirable thoroughness, is that the aesthetics of independent journalism convert extremely well. The grainy footage. The whistleblower framing. The “they don’t want you to know this” cadence. The pointed refusal to trust official sources. All of it is borrowed, faithfully, from the playbook of actual investigative work, right down to the document overlays and the hushed, conspiratorial voiceover.

And here is where the damage starts, before a single claim has even been assessed for accuracy.

The Contamination Problem

When mainstream media outlets turn their attention to debunking high-profile conspiracy content, which they do regularly and with considerable self-satisfaction, they operate with a certain bluntness that creates collateral damage.

The format is familiar. You’ve seen it. A journalist from a respected publication catalogues the claims, traces the inconsistencies, interviews a few experts, and concludes that the platform in question is a hotbed of dangerous misinformation. This is, often, accurate. The claims frequently are dangerous, the inconsistencies frequently are glaring, and the experts frequently are not impressed.

But the framing that surrounds this debunking rarely makes distinctions. It talks about “conspiracy theories” as a category. It talks about “alternative media” as a genre. It draws a circle around a broad set of behaviours, the distrust of official narratives, the elevation of independent voices, the scepticism toward institutional sources, and labels the entire circle suspect.

Which means that somewhere in the background noise of that debunking, a journalist who has spent the better part of a year documenting the revolving door between a regulatory body and the industry it’s supposed to regulate has just been quietly swept into the same conceptual bin as someone who thinks the moon landing was filmed in a car park in Hertfordshire.

That journalist’s work doesn’t get debunked, precisely. It just gets… adjacent to things that do. And adjacency, in the attention economy, is essentially guilt by proximity.

How the Algorithm Became an Accomplice

This is where it gets genuinely interesting, and by interesting I mean grim in a way that keeps me up at night more than it probably should.

Algorithmic content distribution does not evaluate truth. It evaluates engagement. It measures time-on-page, shares, comments, watch duration, and the ratio of emotional response to scroll-past. Sensationalism, by design, outperforms nuance on every single one of those metrics. A forty-minute video about how a specific government official has financial ties to a company that received a suspicious contract award is, frankly, a difficult watch. It requires sustained attention. It demands that you hold several threads simultaneously. It does not resolve into a satisfying narrative of good versus evil.

A forty-minute video about how that same official is part of a centuries-old occult bloodline that controls the weather? That’s considerably more watchable, in the same way that a car crash is considerably more watchable than a traffic management seminar.

So the algorithm, with its complete moral indifference, surfaces the occult bloodline video to roughly seventeen times the audience. The serious journalism sits at twelve thousand views. The sensationalist content sits at twelve million. Both describe themselves as “independent.” Both present themselves as “what the mainstream won’t tell you.” Both are, from the outside looking in, doing roughly the same thing.

Except one of them is true, and one of them is selling you a detox kit.

The Short-Circuit in Public Discourse

What this creates, over time, is a kind of immunisation effect. Not against lies, which is what we’d want. Against scrutiny, which is exactly the opposite.

Here is how it works in practice. An investigative journalist publishes a genuinely well-sourced piece examining the financial relationship between a major media conglomerate and a government communications contract. The piece is careful, the sourcing is solid, the implications are worth discussing publicly.

But the people who would ordinarily engage with that piece, the ones predisposed to distrust institutional power, have spent the last three years marinating in content that makes exactly the same rhetorical gestures while selling them things. They’ve been primed to feel that scepticism, and then betrayed by the thing that weaponised their scepticism for profit. So some of them have retreated back to establishment sources, burned and chastened. The ones who haven’t retreated are, frankly, so deep in the more baroque end of the discourse that they’ve stopped distinguishing between evidence and assertion altogether.

And the people who would never have engaged with alternative scrutiny in the first place? They’re pointing at the chaos and saying: “See. This is what happens when you start questioning things.” They’re not wrong that chaos has ensued. They are, however, drawing the wrong conclusion about what caused it.

Meanwhile, the corporation with the suspicious contract continues to hold the contract.

The People Caught in the Middle

I want to spend a moment on the independent journalists and researchers who are navigating this particular landscape right now, because I think they are arguably the most underappreciated people in the information ecosystem, and they are having a profoundly miserable time.

These are people who made a deliberate choice not to work within institutional frameworks, sometimes because those frameworks wouldn’t have them, sometimes because those frameworks demonstrably compromised the work, sometimes simply because the work they wanted to do didn’t fit the templates that institutional journalism offers. They have traded job security and editorial support for independence, which sounds romantic until you factor in the part where they are now doing the work of an entire newsroom from a flat in Bristol while being regularly lumped in with people who think the Earth is hollow and governed by lizards.

The tools available to them are the same tools available to the sensationalists: podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, Substack, the occasional book. The aesthetics are similar because the constraints are similar. You work alone or in small teams, you self-publish, you build an audience through social media, and you depend on the trust of that audience to survive economically.

But that shared aesthetic becomes a liability the moment someone runs a piece about “alternative media,” which happens with depressing regularity and almost always reaches for the broadest possible brush.

What these journalists lack, and what the sensationalist platforms never needed, is the institutional credibility that would allow a reader to distinguish them at a glance. That credibility takes years to build and can be destroyed overnight by association with the wrong discourse.

What the Watchdogs Get Wrong

Media literacy organisations have, with the best of intentions, contributed to this problem in ways that deserve honest examination.

The focus of media literacy work, particularly in its more publicly visible forms, has been overwhelmingly on the most spectacular end of the disinformation spectrum. Flat Earth. Crisis actor theories. The most baroque and debunkable claims. This is understandable, because those claims are easy to disprove and the debunking of them is satisfying and legible. It produces a clean narrative: here is the lie, here is the truth, here is the correction.

What it doesn’t produce is any guidance for navigating the genuinely difficult middle ground, where the claims are more plausible, the evidence is more ambiguous, and the institutions being scrutinised have actual incentive to discredit the scrutiny. In that middle ground, “be sceptical of alternative sources” is not a neutral position. It is, functionally, a position that protects institutional power from examination.

The honest version of media literacy would have to acknowledge that institutional sources have track records of their own, and those track records include significant, documented failures. It would have to acknowledge that the consolidation of media ownership creates structural incentives that don’t always align with the public interest. It would have to acknowledge that the same tools used to spread disinformation can be used to spread genuine, well-sourced journalism, and that the label “alternative media” does absolutely nothing to tell you which one you’re looking at.

That’s a more difficult conversation. It doesn’t produce the same clean debunking narrative. It doesn’t go viral.

The Accountability Gap

The end result of all this, and I think it’s worth stating it plainly, is that institutional power in all its forms, corporate, governmental, regulatory, has acquired a remarkably effective shield against serious scrutiny. Not because it built the shield deliberately (though some of it did), but because the information ecosystem has, through a combination of profit motives, algorithmic incentives, and intellectual laziness, constructed it on their behalf.

When every attempt to examine corporate malfeasance or state overreach can be replied to with “oh, you’ve been watching too many conspiracy videos,” the actual examination doesn’t have to be addressed. The pattern of donations doesn’t have to be explained. The revolving door doesn’t have to be justified. The contract doesn’t have to be accounted for. You just gesture vaguely at the discourse and let the contamination do the work.

It is, I’ll say again, an almost beautiful piece of sabotage. And the most beautiful part is that most of the people executing it don’t even know they’re doing it. The algorithm doesn’t know. The media literacy organisations don’t know. The mainstream journalists filing the debunking pieces don’t know. They’re all operating rationally within their own incentive structures, and the sum of all that rational behaviour is a public discourse that is, in very practical terms, protecting the things it should be examining.

What Would Actually Help

I’m going to resist the temptation to end with a tidy list of solutions, partly because I don’t think the problem is amenable to tidy solutions, and partly because lists at the end of long essays are usually where the thinking stops and the gesture toward usefulness begins.

What I will say is this: the distinction that matters is not between “mainstream” and “alternative.” It is not between “institutional” and “independent.” It is not even, entirely, between “credentialed” and “uncredentialed,” though that has some bearing. The distinction that matters is methodological. It is about whether claims are supported by evidence that can be examined, whether sources can be verified, whether reasoning is explicit enough to be challenged, whether the person making the argument has updated their position when the evidence required it.

Those distinctions are harder to make than the institutional ones. They require more of the reader. They don’t resolve into a simple mental model that tells you which sources to trust and which to dismiss.

But they’re the right ones. And until we start making them with some consistency, the people who are doing genuine work in the space between institutional journalism and profitable madness are going to keep getting caught in the crossfire.

Which is, of course, exactly where certain interests would prefer them to remain.

Some questions are not answered by the mainstream. Some questions are not answered by the alternative end of the spectrum either. The work of figuring out which is which is inconvenient, time-consuming, and does not produce the satisfying dopamine hit of a clean debunk.

It is also, as far as I can tell, the only approach that stands a chance of actually working.

Until Next Time