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THE 2008 ZEITGEIST….According to Google, here are the search terms that increased the most since 2007. Pretty weird group, isn’t it?

Obama and Palin? No surprise there. David Cook? He’s the latest American Idol winner, so no surprise there either.

Beijing 2008, Facebook, and iPhone? I wouldn’t have guessed them, but OK. Makes sense.

But Fox News? YouTube? Those seem like they would have been massively popular well before 2008. What happened?

And ATT? Huh? I assume this is a search for AT&T, the telecommunications giant. Why on earth did they suddenly get trainloads of Google fu?

And finally, there’s Surf The Channel, clearly a Zeitgeist choice designed solely to make me feel old. I’ve never heard of it. Googling it, I find that it’s a “website for TV enthusiasts. We go out into the internet, find the shows we love on other sites and then list them here on our paqes.” And it is the tenth fastest growing Google search in the United States. We are all doomed.

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We were built for times like these

Russian bots are impersonating us. Trump and his allies want to silence us. AI wants to (and does!) steal our content. The list goes on. But with 50 years of experience, we know we were built for this moment: We’re ready to keep diving deep and uncovering the truth, then getting that to you right here, completely accessible and never behind a paywall.

While our work is free to read, watch, and listen to online, it’s incredibly costly to make. Court documents, travel, research: It all adds up. Because we’re a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on reader support to fund our investigations. Will you stand with us in these extraordinary times, as headlines clamour for our attention and disinformation is rampant? We can’t get the truth out without you.

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