To be a media skeptic these days is to be a person with common sense, but you need to be skeptical across the board.
Power Over Profits: Here’s The Dirty Little Secret Behind The Media’s True Business Model
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“Major media companies are not about profits, but influence — there is no “marketplace of ideas” that functions in the way people might imagine.”
Why did anyone ever start a newspaper throughout our history?
1) A business that can make money.
2) A voice of opinion about the government and private power. Of course the idea is to influence the readers.
It is the second reason that is the reason for the 1st Amendment.
With the internet, it is possible to reach every major and minor media sites and draw conclusions depending upon one’s tolerance of discerning what is true and what is false.
So maybe some billionaires, like Murdoch, will use the media to lie a lot and see what sticks. Not necessarily throught its actual news gathering, but through its opinions. Influence. in other words.
Yes, the news filters will tend to support the opinion, but then I refer you to my paragraph about the internet.
I don’t think the article makes any startling exposés. Biased news has been a mainstay of American media since the founding. Buying ink by the barrel is a phrase that nails the power of the press, for good or bad.
What may be different today is that we can so easily compare, fact check and cross reference compared to our history.
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RE: “I don’t think the article makes any startling exposés.”
It makes an argument I’ve never seen before: That if the news industry were an efficient marketplace where profits drive competition, we’d see some evidence of that in the products and behavior of the participants. We don’t. We see, instead, a “kept” industry that loses money, rarely innovates and almost never inspires.
The question is, Why?
The writer seems to think the owners and investors get something for their trouble: political power. That’s a bit vague, but it makes sense to me.
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Is Revolver media?
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