“Distracting headlines” as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.
When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of “distracting headlines” was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.
This isn’t a “Trump” problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.
This. Media consolidation has been going on for the last 40 years, with the numbers of owners going from around 40 in the 1980s to only 5 today. And if those 5 billionaires get together and decide something isn’t going to be talked about, then it’s NOT getting talked about.
This is also why the so-called “mainstream news media” is all lies, sanewashing and WrestleMania rage bait. It’s why the news loves to say, “things suck” but NONE of them want to talk about WHY things suck. This is by design. It’s a distraction so the owners can keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they, the rich, run off with all the farking money.
“Distracting headlines” is basically the symptom of the populace having the attention span of a gnat with ADHD using meth as a cure. We don’t focus on anything long enough to generate enough traffic and therefore money for these media companies. So the media end up producing a constant barrage of shit and drivel while ignoring the stuff that likely matters.
I don’t disagree this blame lies on the people producing the news but it’s also due to the consumers sliding into a character from Idiocracy.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches.
People don’t want to pay for something they don’t think is quality.
It’s not like these companies would clean up their act if they got another viable revenue stream. We can see that because when companies do, they regularly just keep the extra cash.
What you’d need is a boot strapped organization that actually had standards people cared about and didn’t bend. Its an impossibly hard situation, yes, but that does not make your snark prescient or clever. More than that, it doesnt at all back up your conclusion that people don’t want to pay for quality journalism. It just doesnt exist, because it gets bought out by billionaires.
anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.
Yet the only ones you listed are the billionaire backed ones. Curious.
Almost as if your argument is in bad faith because you yourself don’t have any great examples of the sort of thing people would want to support that are also news outlets with reporters, and so you are forced to use bad examples.
Ill give you an example though, just like the other person pointed out, there are smaller sources popping up everywhere. Even youtube journalism such as HowTown are pockets of not yet corporate information sources that people are fine with supporting.
I listed ones that are not random newspapers, what the other commenter suggested. I don’t have examples of the sort of thing people would want to support, because people don’t want to support anything. Not with ads, not with money, just everything must be free to them.
Cracked has an article that points how Trump does know some things to a very high level. One of those things is how media attention works and also a complete and absolute lack of shame.
Him admitting that he tore down part of the white house because he just didn’t like it and could have built around it is exactly those two things. He wanted to distract people and he legit does not give a damn.
He wanted to make distracting headlines, and he got them.
“Distracting headlines” as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#United_States
When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of “distracting headlines” was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.
This isn’t a “Trump” problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.
This. Media consolidation has been going on for the last 40 years, with the numbers of owners going from around 40 in the 1980s to only 5 today. And if those 5 billionaires get together and decide something isn’t going to be talked about, then it’s NOT getting talked about.
This is also why the so-called “mainstream news media” is all lies, sanewashing and WrestleMania rage bait. It’s why the news loves to say, “things suck” but NONE of them want to talk about WHY things suck. This is by design. It’s a distraction so the owners can keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they, the rich, run off with all the farking money.
“Distracting headlines” is basically the symptom of the populace having the attention span of a gnat with ADHD using meth as a cure. We don’t focus on anything long enough to generate enough traffic and therefore money for these media companies. So the media end up producing a constant barrage of shit and drivel while ignoring the stuff that likely matters.
I don’t disagree this blame lies on the people producing the news but it’s also due to the consumers sliding into a character from Idiocracy.
I’ve seen more intelligence from consumers in the modern landscape of bullshit and scams than the Reagan Era landscape we hold to such high esteem.
As someone who actually is old enough to remember the Reagan era, I’m not sure it deserves that much nostalgia.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
I never thought about it this way but it makes total sense. We get fed what rich people buy for us to consume… <cough… cough … fox news>
People don’t want to pay for something they don’t think is quality.
It’s not like these companies would clean up their act if they got another viable revenue stream. We can see that because when companies do, they regularly just keep the extra cash.
What you’d need is a boot strapped organization that actually had standards people cared about and didn’t bend. Its an impossibly hard situation, yes, but that does not make your snark prescient or clever. More than that, it doesnt at all back up your conclusion that people don’t want to pay for quality journalism. It just doesnt exist, because it gets bought out by billionaires.
It was bought by billionaires after people stopped paying.
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
I don’t thing the likes of wsj, nyt or similar are “random newspapers”, and they still get hate for asking for money. Bezos finds that useful.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.
Yet the only ones you listed are the billionaire backed ones. Curious.
Almost as if your argument is in bad faith because you yourself don’t have any great examples of the sort of thing people would want to support that are also news outlets with reporters, and so you are forced to use bad examples.
Ill give you an example though, just like the other person pointed out, there are smaller sources popping up everywhere. Even youtube journalism such as HowTown are pockets of not yet corporate information sources that people are fine with supporting.
I listed ones that are not random newspapers, what the other commenter suggested. I don’t have examples of the sort of thing people would want to support, because people don’t want to support anything. Not with ads, not with money, just everything must be free to them.
Cracked has an article that points how Trump does know some things to a very high level. One of those things is how media attention works and also a complete and absolute lack of shame.
Him admitting that he tore down part of the white house because he just didn’t like it and could have built around it is exactly those two things. He wanted to distract people and he legit does not give a damn.