Great posts, Marc and Tom.
I could quibble around the edges but only microscopically and that only due to personal experience and bias.
Reality is always such a drag... :wry:
Any actual journalists here?
The post that started this thread is conservative propaganda and not worth the attention of SWJ readers. The discussion it generated is more interesting.
That said, are there any actual journalists commenting here?
Much of it is in the economics of the business...
Originally posted by marct:
Quote:
Part of the problem, I suspect, is the idealistic nature of a chunk of your (US) assumptions, especially those related to the idea of an invisible hand operating in the information/political economy. Personally, I think it is naive to assume that the media will not be co-opted by political and economic factions with specific agendas. Their entire livelihood is based on their ability to compete in the (supposedly) "free market" of information reporting. But where does the money come from?
Actually, the "But where does the money come from?" is interesting. It's not "new money" at issue here, because there really isn't any, but it is all about stagnating/declining revenues, and even tougher, new outlets competing for existing revenues.
The news media has over the long-term, cast themselves as the "Information Middleman", but they got both greedy and stupid about doing it, and they overdid it. If you want to be a successful middleman, honesty and integrity are EVERYTHING. And when you are in the middle and you find that you are "shaping" the news (even if only by appearance, and even if only to part of the audience), you have just started on that slippery slope down to the bottom.
And then you have the Internet.
Quote:
The theme of disintermediation -- of eliminating middlemen -- has been a driving force in the Internet for as long as commerce has been allowed on the web. But what happens when the middleman you just eliminated had as one of his or her jobs the task of keeping us from being ripped off?
Link to Column
Now, that's an argument that could be made by the newspapers (and television), except for the fact that it's become apparent that they were the very ones ripping "We The People" off over all this time - for example, see the effects of craigslist.org on newspapers classified advertising, and other types of advertising. So making the watchdog argument is falling on mostly deaf ears.
There's a reality here that the print media (and I'm not just talking newspapers, and certainly not just the WaPo and/or NYTimes) is having to deal with, which is their news media "Leadership" (such as it is) has been, and still is trying desperately to make information / POV outlets like the Internet and the blogs subservient to their existing empires. Basically, they are trying the same approach circa 1997-2004 that Microsoft tried to do with the Internet, which was run the Internet through the desktop, which MS just happened to control. Didn't work for them, no reason it's going to change this second time around.
It's almost like their media empires work on the basis that because they have all this tradition, and a business plan that worked reasonably well pre-Internet, and all this sunk capital already deployed in their empires, that's enough of a reason that they should be pre-eminent going forward into the Internet/digital future.
But that's unlikely to be, IMO. Just pay close attention to the troubles and travails of The Tribune Company over the last year or so. And just wait for the whole STNG (Chicago Sun-Times News Group) to fail, because there's a slow-motion train wreck in process. There will be others.
Finally, just as an observation, it seems to an outsider that the mainstream media seems to spend an inordinate amount of time picking at the US military, but the end result is that the military is much better for it (certainly in terms of the measure of public respect), while the news media seems to keep sinking even further into the depths of public disrespect. You think they'd figure it out after a while that they got the formula backwards.:rolleyes:
Consider Alfred E. Newman-Oldman, Rank amateur.
A resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -- who unlike his namesake Uncle A. E. Newman, does worry.
Alfred has been known to say:
"Football is not a game, it is a physical contest between persons of low intellect who, if they do possess Degrees, received them only because they played football for four years for some podunk college."
"Football players are vastly overpayed; it's a travesty."
"No son of mine will ever play football if I have anything to do with it."
"I would never pay a penny to watch a football game."
"They built that big expensive Stadium and just think how useful that money could have been in improving downtown schools and alleviating poverty."
Alfred also says "But I support the Steelers..."
I agree with Alfred on most of those issues. The difference between us is that I make absolutely no pretense of supporting the Steelers or any other Football team.