Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news. If it’s all just ad supported you’re going to get click bait that just generates clicks for ad views. Google destroyed good print news. The combination of consumer attitudes changing in the digital age to being less willing or expecting print journalism to be free, and Google monopolizing of display ad space really messed things up. Also, the shift from nightly news being mostly an operational cost or non revenue generating program to 24/7 cable news didn’t help the tv side of things.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news.
On the contrary: “If it bleeds, it leads.” All too often, news presents the world as much scarier than it actually is, and in ways that you can’t do anything about.
Today I almost clicked on the article posted on Lemmy about a gang-rape and murder in India. What the fuck would I benefit from reading that? I don’t have any control over what people do in India! I live in California. I can’t punish those criminals; I can’t protect the next person they would have targeted. I can’t vote the Modi-fascists out of office.
The only thing that me reading about that could have done is fuck up my day, and send ad revenue to the site hosting the article. It would be me rewarding someone for making my life worse, at no benefit to anyone.
People regularly pay for “news” whose only possible effect on them is to make them into worse people: more scared, more angry, more hateful.
You’re missing the forest for the trees, mate. Ad supported doesn’t necessarily mean bad journalism. There might always be a conflict of interest there, but that model worked decently fine for many,any decades.
You need to learn about the Fairness Doctrine.
This was a broadcast rule that essentially forced news outlets in the US to air both sides of a story in as unbiased as a way as reasonably possible. If you know your history, you won’t be surprised that the Fairness Doctrine was thrown out in the 80s under the Reagan administration.
People complain about Citizens United being an awful decision that was greatly impacted the way government works, and I agree, but the end of the Fairness Doctrine was also a huge step in the fascist future that Republicans have been pushing toward for decades now.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news.
Unfortunately, partisan propaganda and outright disinformation is free, while factual and informative news tends to be behind paywalls
This has a way of segregating people that don’t have discretionary money to subscribe to news services into epistemic bubbles, and the bubble dwellers’ votes count for just as much as everybody else’s. In a democracy, you really do need voters in general to be informed and unfortunately, not everybody in the media/politics sphere wants everybody to be informed and some folks in there just want people indoctrinated into their way of thinking.
