"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" was published in 1988.
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
I generally agree, but I don't think foreign agitation can be completely dismissed. I've heard there's evidence that Russia was contributing to the rise of both the BLM and Blue Lives movements. The media can exasperate the issue, and may even be a necessary part of that agitation.
It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
USA is not the world. There are other countries that have social media as well as struggling local media yet distrust in media is not skyrocketing.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others.
"How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
Coverage (let's say) of left-wing bias in the media has been a major part of right-wing media since at least the early 90s. Limbaugh, for instance, talked about it a lot back then (and I doubt he ever stopped—don't know why he would have), and if he wasn't receiving payment from the advertising department of Fox News, when they started up, he sure should have been (there was a lot of, "well, except Fox News" in his, ah, coverage of left-wing bias). The "the media hates conservatives" thing got his treatment where he acted like it was just a fact that he and his listeners, of course, knew to be true, sometimes calling out what he perceived as examples, but more often just stating it on the way to some other point. From what I've seen, the rest of right-wing punditry (I suppose you'd call it) picked up on this and took a similar approach to it.
*Disclaimer: working on a news startup to combat some of these issues*
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
Local news stations get their agenda for their parent companies. They are told what to cover, what not to cover, and how to cover things to fit the overarching narrative from executives/producers.
I have lived in places where I had a lower opinion of my congressperson than of the rest of congress, and where the majority voted the opposite direction from myself on laws and ballot measures.
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
The article mentions a higher level of trust in local news. My local news in Detroit is very matter of fact, here’s an event that happened, here’s visual proof, and with a few exemptions free of opinion. National news, in my experience, is more pundits talking about the events and extracting larger meaning from it. I personally have a very hard time consuming news outside of the local because of this.
I think one issue that has emerged with the 'free' internet is that more people than ever are reading news, but very few people are paying for it. This statistic is often cited by failing newspaper companies about why they are worth investing in. The issue is qualitative more than quantitative. The engagement that most people used to have with news was casual and occasional. There were a minority of cable TV news viewers but for most other people it was limited to short summary programs on network TV.
The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond.
Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube.
When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture.
Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.
For comparison, a 2019 survey of 33 European countries ranked countries by their trust in the written press [1]. The UK ranked last (75% do not trust the written press, just 15% trust the press, 10% don't know).
Unlike newspapers, TV and radio in the UK is regulated by a government-funded body called OFCOM (Office of Communications) where broadcasters are required to follow rules around impartial news coverage. These rules exclude opinion-based shows e.g. talk radio shows.
These impartiality rules apply to all broadcasters i.e. public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC and Channel 4, and commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky News. People often criticise PSBs for their news coverage (justified in some cases), but there is no editorial standard or code of ethics for national newspapers in the UK.
Most of the national newspapers in the UK lean to the right, and a few to the left. But they are all awful. The Financial Times is the only half-decent national newspaper in the UK and even they have their biases.
I have long held the belief that the national press in the UK has poisoned political discourse in the UK for decades. Despite declining newspaper circulation, they continue to exert outsized influence on public discourse (and on politicians). The relationship between journalists and politicians is uncomfortably close and unhealthy. (Journalists often move to positions of influence into political parties).
Interesting tidbit about UK newspaper columnists: attendence at private schools makes up just 7% of the general population. Yet, in UK national newspapers, the proportion of news columnist who were privately educated is disproportionately high: 44%. [2]
[1] EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Media Intelligence Service – Trust in Media 2020 Report
I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.
Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.
The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.
What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me.
> I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.
> I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself
What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.
I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.
> I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.
This will only continue to get worse. Journalism can never be truly objective. But as we move more and more along this line, where journalists seem content with moving away from the facts, and more towards yellow journalism, and see themselves more and more as activists changing the world, and less as people bringing the truth out. this will only accelerate. As the old guard retires and leaves the news room, we will have completely lost any sense of journalistic integrity.
I did my masters in journalism in 2015... you have no idea how right you are. It was more or less a masters in blogging about your feelings on a topic you just heard about.
While journalism was/is the fourth estate, the watchdog of the government, the people as the watchdog of journalists is becoming the rising fifth estate. This fifth estate isn't so organized or always of much quality, but observable signal is emerging. Truly, I've noticed a more substantial signal coming from HN comments questioning the veracity of the fourth estate. It's great to see.
I don’t think there such a thing as objective journalism—- there is only who is honest about the lens from which they view the world.
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
I think maybe you're attributing to malice what can more easily be attributed to the fact that most journalists these days wanted/want to become creative writers, but that doesn't pay consistently so they became journos with the intent to write their novel in their spare time, but then realized they can just scratch the creative writing itch as part of their day job.
That describes it exactly. I think it will have to completely fail, and then a new generation (tragically, probably not the present one, or even then next) will have to rebuild it from the ashes. Maybe the positive way to see the present is as being that prelude to a better day for your grandchildren.
I guess maybe I don't understand why one would go into journalism, but if your goal isn't to effect change why be a journalist? Were the journalists working on stories detailing the Catholic Church's pedo problem just doing it for kicks or a book deal?
The silver lining: people recognize that the move from traditional to online journalism has created echo chambers that leave the public unsatisfied. Even though we're being fed what reinforces our view we realize it's not what we want, the article states that this is true for partisans as well.
Hopefully at least some news organizations will figure out a better path, I'm sure we won't go back to the old days but the fact that the younger demographic has pretty much left news media behind means that that generation will have to figure out something more balanced.
I think that rather than creating the echo chamber, it has just made them more visible and more niche. In the old days, most of the country was part of the echo chamber that Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, et. al. led. Since we were (mostly) all in it, it didn't seem like a bubble, just reality. Now internet tech is letting us inflate our own bespoke bubbles, and easily peer into the the other bubbles.
Yes this causes conflict. But in the end multiple echo chambers are an improvement over one big one, plus a few small alternatives that only weirdos like me were in.
In this respect the U.S. is ahead of the rest of the world by a few years. It isn't as though media is siloed geographically. Wherever there's the internet, there's media that is locked in a ratlike struggle for survival, cannibalizing its reputation and standards to stay alive. That pressure is already evenly distributed, even if the dawning realization that it exists is not.
I'm looking forward to the media Kino of the anniversary of the January 6th Insurrection. The show will be spectacular. I'm buying popcorn, inviting friends and turning on CNN. Expecting North Korea level of wailing and Jim Acosta tears. Will take shots to every "insurrection" bellowed.
That France ranks so bad is much more newsworthy than the US. News in the US is terrible, and everybody knows this. In France, it is not so bad, yet, people equally distrust the industry.
Social media conveyed news took over the country like crazy. People are so misinformed, it's beyond scary.
The thing that has most shocked me throughout the years is how lockstep the media is on foreign policy, no matter what 'side' they are ostensibly on. Theres no war the media doesn't like! Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc.
One particularly shameful episode I remember was Trump being described as finally 'presidential' when he fired missiles at Syria. I genuinely think if he had started some disastrous war it would have rehabilitated him with the MSM.
[+] [-] carapace|4 years ago|reply
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
Both mainline ideologies constantly and pathologically deceive and withhold information to make things one sided increasing polarization.
MSNBC argues that its audience knows that its news isn’t actually news...(!)
[+] [-] freshpots|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brsg|4 years ago|reply
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
[+] [-] titzer|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...
[+] [-] helen___keller|4 years ago|reply
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
[+] [-] boublepop|4 years ago|reply
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
[+] [-] dfxm12|4 years ago|reply
This is interesting given how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
I guess it doesn't help when they run segments like this, sowing more distrust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
[+] [-] rscoots|4 years ago|reply
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others. "How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredwiener|4 years ago|reply
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
I (previously) wrote some thoughts here: https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
[+] [-] kyle_martin1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unishark|4 years ago|reply
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
[+] [-] werber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mountainb|4 years ago|reply
The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond.
Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube.
When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture.
Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.
[+] [-] snarfy|4 years ago|reply
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
[+] [-] raxxorrax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cirrus-clouds|4 years ago|reply
Unlike newspapers, TV and radio in the UK is regulated by a government-funded body called OFCOM (Office of Communications) where broadcasters are required to follow rules around impartial news coverage. These rules exclude opinion-based shows e.g. talk radio shows.
These impartiality rules apply to all broadcasters i.e. public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC and Channel 4, and commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky News. People often criticise PSBs for their news coverage (justified in some cases), but there is no editorial standard or code of ethics for national newspapers in the UK.
Most of the national newspapers in the UK lean to the right, and a few to the left. But they are all awful. The Financial Times is the only half-decent national newspaper in the UK and even they have their biases.
I have long held the belief that the national press in the UK has poisoned political discourse in the UK for decades. Despite declining newspaper circulation, they continue to exert outsized influence on public discourse (and on politicians). The relationship between journalists and politicians is uncomfortably close and unhealthy. (Journalists often move to positions of influence into political parties).
Interesting tidbit about UK newspaper columnists: attendence at private schools makes up just 7% of the general population. Yet, in UK national newspapers, the proportion of news columnist who were privately educated is disproportionately high: 44%. [2]
[1] EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Media Intelligence Service – Trust in Media 2020 Report
[2] The Sutton Trust: Elitist Britain 2019
[+] [-] asjdflakjsdf|4 years ago|reply
I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.
Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.
The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.
[+] [-] crmd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] read_if_gay_|4 years ago|reply
Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|4 years ago|reply
What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.
I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.
[+] [-] disabled|4 years ago|reply
A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.
[+] [-] ecshafer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
That is the main problem.
They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events.
Like laughtracks for situational comedies, they see themselves as having a responsibility to tell people how to think of an event.
It’s like Pravda but worse. Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself.
[+] [-] i_haz_rabies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] two2two|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingsuper20|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyle_martin1|4 years ago|reply
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|4 years ago|reply
The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work.
Interesting times ahead!
[+] [-] fastball|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eplanit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BigGreenTurtle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] murbard2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|4 years ago|reply
Hopefully at least some news organizations will figure out a better path, I'm sure we won't go back to the old days but the fact that the younger demographic has pretty much left news media behind means that that generation will have to figure out something more balanced.
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
Yes this causes conflict. But in the end multiple echo chambers are an improvement over one big one, plus a few small alternatives that only weirdos like me were in.
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
That path seems to be pretty clear: charging for a subscription. But that's probably only a path open to global brands and popular niches.
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|4 years ago|reply
― Mark Twain
[+] [-] d--b|4 years ago|reply
Social media conveyed news took over the country like crazy. People are so misinformed, it's beyond scary.
[+] [-] ctrlp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pram|4 years ago|reply
One particularly shameful episode I remember was Trump being described as finally 'presidential' when he fired missiles at Syria. I genuinely think if he had started some disastrous war it would have rehabilitated him with the MSM.