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Mandarins - Here We Go Again


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3 hours ago, critter said:

I will agree with you. Satire and irony are doing well. It's quality journalism that has died.

The absolute biggest problem with journalism today, by far, is that there's too little of it. It's not even close.

Particularly at the local level.

A few big newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal are flourishing.

But across the U.S., the local papers have been destroyed by the internet, and have shut down utterly or are bare shells of what they need to be and used to be. From the 1970s through the 1990s, local newspapers were bringing in so much advertising and subscription revenue that owning one was practically a license to print money. Accordingly, lots of local newspapers were bought up by national corporations, who often paid more than they should have, believing that their expenditures would be more than paid back in the long run.

And then the internet happened, and there goes the advertising revenue (e.g., who needs to pay your paper for a classified ad if you've got Craigslist?), and also the public found they could get the content they wanted for "free," so there goes subscriptions. (But if a company is giving you something for free, that means you're the commodity.)

On top of that, in the past decade, Google, Facebook, and a few other tech companies took over the advertising for those media companies that had found a way to survive on the internet. And then they began to squeeze those media companies.

Facebook in particular destroyed a number of outlets by flat out lying to them. Facebook told media companies that their print work wasn't generating enough ad revenue and that customers were only interested in attaching ads to video content. So about five years ago, you saw a whole bunch of companies fire their print teams and announce that they were "pivoting to video," which is much more expensive to produce. As a result, not only did a lot of good reporters lose their jobs, but a number of companies went under or were permanently damaged. And then a few years later, Facebook admitted that wasn't true. The numbers were bogus. (Facebook is evil, the worst single force in public life in America and abroad.)

As I've noted before, Cleveland's major newspaper, the Plain Dealer, went from having hundreds of reporters and editors in the 1990s to having a couple dozen today, and none of them actually work for the paper itself, which earlier this year eliminated all of its writing positions, and shifted all local content generation to cleveland.com, the online brand that their parent company set up about twenty years ago. Because the former were union employees and the latter were not. God forbid they have to pay someone a decent wage.

What does all that mean? It means across this country, there's very few people to hold local wrongdoers to account, be they politicians or corporations or anyone else. You want to get away with a crime? Pay off your local mayor and sheriff and have at it, and no one will ever know. Thus my signature:

"First they came for the journalists. ... We don't know what happened after that."

That huge scandal that recently broke in Ohio, in which it turns out that the speaker of the state house was part of a $600 million bribery scheme? It would have been much harder to pull off with a robust local media. And I guarantee you that there are other schemes like that in other states.

Yeah, there's still TV news. But local TV news has always been bad. There's never been any depth. It takes too much effort. The national outlets are better, but still superficial compared to what gets done in print. And notice how many stories on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC/MSNBC, etc. (all of whom do some original reporting and all of whom have some good reporters and anchors) are really just reports about news that was broken in print, followed by an interview with the print reporter who broke the story and a roundtable discussion with some commentators.

- - - - - - - - - -

It's a complete disaster, and anyone who complains that the real problem is some sort of new bias in the press is deluded. (So I assume you weren't doing that.)

The press has been biased for as long as it's existed. The earliest newspapers, staring in the late 1600s, were nothing but bias. There was an overlap between news gathering and government intelligence gathering. An early word for "spy" was "intelligencer". There are still some newspapers called "The Intelligencer." Rival parties had rival papers. There are still traces of that today (New York Post vs. New York Daily News, to an extent), but it's nothing like it used to be. More than a century ago, publisher William Randolph Heart supposedly told a reporter, "You provide the stories; I'll provide the war." The most egregious work these days is the "catch and kill" stuff done by tabloids like the National Enquirer, in which they alert someone famous to a potentially damaging story, get that person to pay them off, and then use some of those extorted funds to arrange for the source's silence with a hush money payment and a non-disclosure agreement (this got them in trouble with the Dept. of Justice a couple years ago; there's also something odd about the Enquirer parent company's relationship with Saudi Arabia), but fortunately, that's mostly limited to "soft" news (with, it seems, one major exception).

And the primary bias of journalism, now and always, is toward power. That's the whole point of The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie of a couple years back about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that showed that the government, meaning administrations from both parties, had been covering up the truth about the Vietnam War -- and journalists had been letting them do it. Because who wants to risk losing all that juicy access? Plus the parties are swell. (As long as the powerful keep their crimes relatively discreet, the press often doesn't want to know. Plus those stories tend to be a lot of hard work to cover, and it's much easier to do a story about a poor person whose crimes are more straightforward.) The whole movie starts with the Post being told they won't be allowed into the White House because they published unflattering coverage of the president's daughter's wedding: you have to keep the important people happy. Over the course of the (mostly true but simplified) story, Hanks' character, the editor Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep's character, the paper's owner Katharine Graham, have to own up to their part in the cover-up and betray their powerful friends to bring the truth to light. Similarly Spotlight, in which one of the main characters is Bradlee's son, portrays the same dynamic thirty years later, except in that case, the powerful friends that nobody wants to betray are the leaders of the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic church.

That's the bias we should always be suspecting. All the other biases that people complain about are as nothing compared to that.

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39 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

The absolute biggest problem with journalism today, by far, is that there's too little of it. It's not even close.

Particularly at the local level.

A few big newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal are flourishing.

But across the U.S., the local papers have been destroyed by the internet, and have shut down utterly or are bare shells of what they need to be and used to be. From the 1970s through the 1990s, local newspapers were bringing in so much advertising and subscription revenue that owning one was practically a license to print money. Accordingly, lots of local newspapers were bought up by national corporations, who often paid more than they should have, believing that their expenditures would be more than paid back in the long run.

And then the internet happened, and there goes the advertising revenue (e.g., who needs to pay your paper for a classified ad if you've got Craigslist?), and also the public found they could get the content they wanted for "free," so there goes subscriptions. (But if a company is giving you something for free, that means you're the commodity.)

On top of that, in the past decade, Google, Facebook, and a few other tech companies took over the advertising for those media companies that had found a way to survive on the internet. And then they began to squeeze those media companies.

Facebook in particular destroyed a number of outlets by flat out lying to them. Facebook told media companies that their print work wasn't generating enough ad revenue and that customers were only interested in attaching ads to video content. So about five years ago, you saw a whole bunch of companies fire their print teams and announce that they were "pivoting to video," which is much more expensive to produce. As a result, not only did a lot of good reporters lose their jobs, but a number of companies went under or were permanently damaged. And then a few years later, Facebook admitted that wasn't true. The numbers were bogus. (Facebook is evil, the worst single force in public life in America and abroad.)

As I've noted before, Cleveland's major newspaper, the Plain Dealer, went from having hundreds of reporters and editors in the 1990s to having a couple dozen today, and none of them actually work for the paper itself, which earlier this year eliminated all of its writing positions, and shifted all local content generation to cleveland.com, the online brand that their parent company set up about twenty years ago. Because the former were union employees and the latter were not. God forbid they have to pay someone a decent wage.

What does all that mean? It means across this country, there's very few people to hold local wrongdoers to account, be they politicians or corporations or anyone else. You want to get away with a crime? Pay off your local mayor and sheriff and have at it, and no one will ever know. Thus my signature:

"First they came for the journalists. ... We don't know what happened after that."

That huge scandal that recently broke in Ohio, in which it turns out that the speaker of the state house was part of a $600 million bribery scheme? It would have been much harder to pull off with a robust local media. And I guarantee you that there are other schemes like that in other states.

Yeah, there's still TV news. But local TV news has always been bad. There's never been any depth. It takes too much effort. The national outlets are better, but still superficial compared to what gets done in print. And notice how many stories on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC/MSNBC, etc. (all of whom do some original reporting and all of whom have some good reporters and anchors) are really just reports about news that was broken in print, followed by an interview with the print reporter who broke the story and a roundtable discussion with some commentators.

- - - - - - - - - -

It's a complete disaster, and anyone who complains that the real problem is some sort of new bias in the press is deluded. (So I assume you weren't doing that.)

The press has been biased for as long as it's existed. The earliest newspapers, staring in the late 1600s, were nothing but bias. There was an overlap between news gathering and government intelligence gathering. An early word for "spy" was "intelligencer". There are still some newspapers called "The Intelligencer." Rival parties had rival papers. There are still traces of that today (New York Post vs. New York Daily News, to an extent), but it's nothing like it used to be. More than a century ago, publisher William Randolph Heart supposedly told a reporter, "You provide the stories; I'll provide the war." The most egregious work these days is the "catch and kill" stuff done by tabloids like the National Enquirer, in which they alert someone famous to a potentially damaging story, get that person to pay them off, and then use some of those extorted funds to arrange for the source's silence with a hush money payment and a non-disclosure agreement (this got them in trouble with the Dept. of Justice a couple years ago; there's also something odd about the Enquirer parent company's relationship with Saudi Arabia), but fortunately, that's mostly limited to "soft" news (with, it seems, one major exception).

And the primary bias of journalism, now and always, is toward power. That's the whole point of The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie of a couple years back about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that showed that the government, meaning administrations from both parties, had been covering up the truth about the Vietnam War -- and journalists had been letting them do it. Because who wants to risk losing all that juicy access? Plus the parties are swell. (As long as the powerful keep their crimes relatively discreet, the press often doesn't want to know. Plus those stories tend to be a lot of hard work to cover, and it's much easier to do a story about a poor person whose crimes are more straightforward.) The whole movie starts with the Post being told they won't be allowed into the White House because they published unflattering coverage of the president's daughter's wedding: you have to keep the important people happy. Over the course of the (mostly true but simplified) story, Hanks' character, the editor Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep's character, the paper's owner Katharine Graham, have to own up to their part in the cover-up and betray their powerful friends to bring the truth to light. Similarly Spotlight, in which one of the main characters is Bradlee's son, portrays the same dynamic thirty years later, except in that case, the powerful friends that nobody wants to betray are the leaders of the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic church.

That's the bias we should always be suspecting. All the other biases that people complain about are as nothing compared to that.

Bravo!

👏 👏 👏 

Box 5!

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People, please.   Can you stick to the topic,  which is the allegations against Ike Jackson?   You are wasting a lot of other people's time who are trying to find the actual topic info, with this nonsense.

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3 minutes ago, 27Socal said:

People, please.   Can you stick to the topic,  which is the allegations against Ike Jackson?   You are wasting a lot of other people's time who are trying to find the actual topic info, with this nonsense.

So what was the rumor?

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3 hours ago, N.E. Brigand said:

Facebook in particular destroyed a number of outlets by flat out lying to them. Facebook told media companies that their print work wasn't generating enough ad revenue and that customers were only interested in attaching ads to video content. So about five years ago, you saw a whole bunch of companies fire their print teams and announce that they were "pivoting to video," which is much more expensive to produce. As a result, not only did a lot of good reporters lose their jobs, but a number of companies went under or were permanently damaged.

So they took the word of one source about a matter of great importance without exercising any critical thinking, considering opposing viewpoints, or doing any investigation.  Yeah, that sounds like the characteristics of journalists we can't do without.

Edited by skevinp
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2 hours ago, skevinp said:

So they took the word of one source about a matter of great importance without exercising any critical thinking, considering opposing viewpoints, or doing any investigation.  Yeah, that sounds like the characteristics of journalists we can't do without.

Never mind. I’m going into deep hibernation. 

Edited by Jurassic Lancer
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2 hours ago, skevinp said:

So they took the word of one source about a matter of great importance without exercising any critical thinking, considering opposing viewpoints, or doing any investigation.  Yeah, that sounds like the characteristics of journalists we can't do without.

Don't confuse journalists with publishers.

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2 hours ago, skevinp said:

So they took the word of one source about a matter of great importance without exercising any critical thinking, considering opposing viewpoints, or doing any investigation.  Yeah, that sounds like the characteristics of journalists we can't do without.

Also, it's not exactly an easy thing to fact check one of the world's most powerful companies about the data they control.

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