Second only to glib equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).

The diatribe, “The Cause of This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping. Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media. A superficially catchy hook but one that, upon further examination, makes little sense:

I am talking, of course, about our media system. A system in which tens of thousands of reporters—bloggers—chasing online traffic bonuses produce sensational, inflammatory and outright dangerous “news” at the expense of the public they are supposed to be serving. A system in which speculative, high-valence news—whether it starts as a tweet or a rumor—is packaged, dissected, repacked and passed along from outlet to outlet until a thinking person can hardly follow what is real and what is fake.

Those damned “bloggers” (gasp!) are “chasing online traffic.” This is opposed to sometime in the past when ratings, newspaper sales and the ad revenue they generated didn’t matter. But never mind that; this new breed of vague “media system” has created a monster: