21–30 of 47 posts
I don't know how relevant this is to the american media, but here in small european countries, media corruption is rampant: government agencies (in particular ministries) bribe newspapers and magazines with expensive ads in order to avoid the (rightfully) bad press and possibly investigative journalism.
the American people, who want the media to rally around officials in times of crisis Bah. Speak for yourself, Atlantic Magazine. (Especially during manufactured crises...)
Of course he doesn't mean every single American - he's making a generalization. But kindly note that in the weeks after 9/11, fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists - even, explicitly, if thousands of innocent civilians of those countries would be killed.
It's not "American Media". It's "Media". The issue is worlwide.
I live in England. We have the BBC. BBC Radio Four news coverage is excellent, but even that is lousy when it comes to a lot of international news. The BBC World Service is better, for obvious reasons, and domestic BBC does make extensive use of their foreign correspondents. Just not so much in news bulletin coverage.
UK print media, especially newspapers, especially the lower end, is a cesspit of vile idiocy. I'm surprised there's no movie about it. It's disturbing how often the Daily Mail gets posted to HN.
I don't know how relevant this is to the american media, but here in small european countries, media corruption is rampant: government agencies (in particular ministries) bribe newspapers and magazines with expensive ads in order to avoid the (rightfully) bad press and possibly investigative journalism.
I live in a small European country (Denmark) and I'm not aware of this behaviour. Do you have more specifics?
It's not "American Media". It's "Media". The issue is worlwide.
Yes. But I guess if they had missed out the "American" we'd have people saying "The world is bigger than America". I live in England. We have the BBC. BBC Radio Four news coverage is excellent, but even that is lousy when it comes to a lot of international news. The BBC World Service is better, for obvious reasons, and domestic BBC does make extensive use of their foreign correspondents. Just not so much in news bull…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a small European country (Denmark) and I'm not aware of this behaviour. Do you have more specifics?
I would guess (based on wild and unsubstantiated assertions on my part) that parent is referring to eastward European countries such as the Balkans.
Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly. "When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can hav…
"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X. How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't. IT'S THE TRUTH. (btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid…
the American people, who want the media to rally around officials in times of crisis Bah. Speak for yourself, Atlantic Magazine. (Especially during manufactured crises...)
Of course he doesn't mean every single American - he's making a generalization. But kindly note that in the weeks after 9/11, fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists - even, explicitly, if thousands of innocent civilians of those countries would be killed.
Oh he was so close and yet so far. He means almost no Americans on a percentage basis of the total, not all of them. The linked article was an excellent study of the trees but missed the forest. The root of the problem is narrowcasting aka local maxima seeking.
Example. Lets say the country initially boots up with 10 million news consumers. Consumers, you know, like saprophytes, but I digress. Your individual media co. gets 10% of the consumers. Boss decides to boost his quarterly executive bonus by tabloid-ing it up a bit. So the "older" woman anchor gets fired and replaced by a perky college cheerleader, if it bleeds it leads, maybe some top ten lists (the equivalent of internet link bait). Hurray the exec got his bonus because your share increased to 20%. The bad news is the population, repelled by repulsive infotainment, shrunk to 5 million total.
Well, no problem, you've got 20% of the consumers, outta 5 million consumers. Well, gotta get a bonus somehow. We can blame the drop in total consumers on the internet or facebook or just guilt trip people or whatever... but we've gotta boost that 20% impact to a higher percentage. Maybe some B-list celebrity interviews, some lasagna recipes, some onsite "news" reporting about the state fair... Woooo Hoooo we're owning the market we went up to 25% of consumers hurray huge bonuses and backslapping for all... well, except for the repellant effect dropping total industry wide audience to only 2 million now.
Repeat this cycle a couple times and you end up with worthless American news media that almost no one watches. 95% of the population, literally, won't watch "the news" on TV for free, its such garbage.
The other "saw the trees, missed the forest" moment in the article is mass media is huge corporations owned by huge corporations. Total lack of diversity. Only five men in charge of five companies control about 99% of what Americans watch on TV. What a surprise that a big business propaganda conduit is boring and uninformative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(citation needed) Reporting is awful everywhere and at any scale. Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion. They're not mass informative media, they're mass propaganda tools. That's why they lack quality: their goal is fulfilled even if their quality as informative media is very low.
> (citation needed) I can recommend, despite the paywall, Michael Massing's 2009 piece, 'A New Horizon for News' on what happened to the US news business: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/a-new-h... As for the situation outside the US, I have close knowledge only of the UK (where there has been a decline in print news, but not comparable), and Germany (which is generally very healthy, not to say I…
It would probably look a lot like news.google.com. I extensively customize my sources and I get a lot of Reuters, BBC, stuff like that. When I see infotainment articles, I filter it out at the source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X. How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't. IT'S THE TRUTH. (btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid…
hmm it does feel stupid to ground oneself to absoluteness when everything around is relative.