I hate to get involved in politics here at HN, but maybe I can contribute a comment that really isn't politics but is business and news strategy?

First, I try to stay up on the news, that is, the facts about what has been happening. Well, there's a lot of news on the Internet, so I can get a lot of input on some version of what has been happening.

At this point, to me, the news doesn't make any sense. The news doesn't look like it is trying to give me facts about what has been happening. Or, the collection of supposed facts are self-contradictory, don't add up. And the news looks like something other than facts about what is happening.

In particular, nearly all the supposed news looks like made-up, cooked-up, stirred-up, faked-up, gang-up, pile-on something other than facts about what is going on. Or the real fact about what is going on looks like the news has become some propaganda Goebbels style with "If you tell a lie often enough, then people will believe it.".

Or, maybe easier to swallow, it looks like the news is expert in high school in-group gossip where they fight with gossip. Then, with enough bad gossip about person A, lots of other persons, e.g., some person B, even if they don't believe the gossip don't want to fight all the people who do or pretend to believe the gossip so go along with the gossip, the mob, and also reject A. So, the gossip is not true but has much the same effect as if it were true. I'm guessing that the news is really good at such high school in-group gossip. In high school I was a math nerd and no good at gossip!

So, a question, then, is what the heck is going on in the news business, industry, etc.?

Guesses:

(1) The old news business is very short on revenue. Why? The Internet has cut off much of the revenue they got from (A) classified ads, (B) other ads, (C) revenue per copy on paper, (D) audience size. Also maybe significant is that maybe the local shopping mall stores no longer nearly as often run big ads in the newspapers because Amazon has such mall stores nearly out of business.

So, such news operations, really short on money, have gone to whatever shocking, astounding, content they could find to try to increase their audience. There they have moved up a step: The stories and headlines are not just shocking but are planned as part of a larger narrative that the media outlet hopes will catch on, like big gossip, and yield more stories over the horizon, where the narrative helps the credibility of each story and each story adds to the narrative. So, in simple terms, they cook up an issue, make it a narrative, pile-on, gang-up, and push it, over and over. The issue is just made up and not true, but all the news media sees the opportunity right away so just piles on, goes with the narrative, and hopes for revenue.

(2) Some of the advertisers and other people, companies, etc. are behind the scenes, have long been there, have big bucks, influence the content of the news, and cases of such influence go way back in the news business.

In particular, now some of the issues in the news are really efforts for some of the people with big bucks to try to get their way, and there is big money involved.

E.g., there was the recent Sharyl Attkisson remark that essentially everything in the news is put there, paid to be there, by someone out to influence your opinion.

(3) The election of 11/8/2016 was in many ways darned close. In particular, the election for POTUS was so close that one candidate won the popular vote by some and the other candidate won the vote in the Electoral College by some.

Well, for the news, take the Trump voters over here and the Hillary voters over there.

The media wants a big audience. Soooo, they can go for the Hillary voters. There are still lots of them out there who still like Hillary, Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, etc. The news can fire up the Hillery voters and get audience, eyeballs, and ad revenue. And there are claims that the news rooms were 90+% for Hillary anyway.

Then for the Trump voters, or just the Republicans, they are not uniform and tend to split. So, there are "never-Trump" Republicans. There's John McCain who seems to hate Trump going way back at least to an early Trump campaign speech in Phoenix that McCain quickly described as "firing up the crazies", and that spat has continued through the Iowa event a few days later to the present. And Paul Ryan, VP with Romney, is no Trump buddy. And Romney hates Trump. Soooo, the news can get more audience by playing on, playing up to parts of, the divisions of the Republicans.

And likely could find more such motivations for the news.

So, the news is no longer about giving me facts about what is going on.

And it looks like the news is no longer interested in facts at all and, instead, is in some attention getting but also very bitter, center ring, mud wrestling, gossip, cage match.

So, I've given up on nearly all the news -- their people are getting no attention, eyeballs, clicks, or ad revenue from me. I still want facts about what is happening. Well apparently for now the main fact is just that mud wrestling cage match.

So, the OP was about the CEO of Intel resigning. Why? Maybe he was influenced by the gossip; maybe be believes a lot of the gossip; maybe he just wants to keep himself and Intel away from the mud wrestling. My guess is the last, he just wants to stay the heck away from the mud wrestling and away from the gossip.

So, now we see, as in high school, that enough gossip can have a lot of influence with some actual, tangible results. Some people are really good at gossip and now are the center of a big gang-up and pile-on of news media business and maybe political, strategy. Curious.

My view is that the news people are throwing away their credibility, but my guess is that the news is so short on revenue that they no longer care about their credibility and want to go with the gossip. Maybe, apparently, they believe that if with enough gossip they can actually get Trump out of the White House, then they will get back their credibility -- that even with total BS gossip they can make their claims have the practical effects that might happen if the gossip were true.

IMHO, that self-fulfilling gossip strategy will flop: The media will shrink back to some Internet Web sites and YouTube video clips with only about 10% of the revenue they were long used to. Why? Well, really, the credibility of the news has long been a really bad and ugly joke. E.g., there's an old 1930s Andy Hardy movie, maybe still shown occasionally on TV, if we still have TV (do we?), where Andy is laughing at the credibility of newspapers -- the audience in the 1930s was fully prepared to laugh at the news. But going back to Thomas Jefferson, the credibility of the news was even worse, much worse, as in Jefferson's

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...

with in part

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen
in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes
suspicious by being put into that polluted
vehicle. The real extent of this state of
misinformation is known only to those who
are in situations to confront facts within
their knolege with the lies of the day."

So, apparently since Jefferson, the news has been, really, just dramatic fiction, light entertainment. Well, really, a lot of people know this. Too bad the CEO of Intel didn't and, instead, took the gossip seriously.