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With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy
(www.inquirer.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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News
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News has been neutered.
They're too concerned with stepping on people's toes to show people what matters.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen articles reporting on footage without showing the actual footage.
Most annoying thing: talking heads talking about a video instead of actually showing it.
They waste so much money on these roles that do nothing to help the audience.
Most of them are owned by the very same companies they would speak out against. It's a propaganda machine at best Ryight now.
The 3 independent Pillars of Democracy are the Press Pillar, the Judicial Pillar and the Political Pillar.
They're supposed to watch over each other because there is a pragmatic expectation even in Democracy that some amongst those holding power will be crooked or become crooker (after all "power corrupts"), hence the 3 independent pillars to solve the whole "who watches the watchers" problem.
(If you look at even the supposedly most well intentioned implementations of ideologies other than Democracy, you see all of them failing because power becomes concentrated in a single nexus, then naturally corrupted and then the crooks just entrench themselves and make sure they're immune to the Law and will never lose Power)
If you have lots of money and want to subvert the mechanics of how citizens have some control over the highest powers of the land in a Democracy, the easiest way by far is to buy the Press. Once the Press is bought, the politicians can be bought all the while electors are blissfully unware of it because the Press won't report it. If the Judicial Pillar is not independent of the Political Pillar (for example, because judges are positions of political nomination and/or politicians control the purse strings of the Judiciary Pillar), then you end up with a system were Democracy is but theatre.
The Power Of Citizens having been neutred through these mechanics, the highest power of the land becomes the Power Of Money.
Welcome the the US of A!
(Far from the only one, I might add, but probably the most further ahead in terms of the Power Of Citizens having been nullified)
I think it's more that their incentives are perverse.
When you are ad supported it means you rely on clicks, views, and viewers. So you are incentivized to maximize views which in some cases means making people very angry and scared, sometimes means not showing them stuff they don't want to see or hear, and sometimes means fabricating bullshit (fox News) because they real story wouldn't get you as many clicks.
Us, as citizens and consumers of news, have abdicated our responsibility to be skeptical though. We've leaned on trustworthy news media over the years to be that filter, skeptic that's impartial and honest. We trusted them to speak truth to power, dig into the nuance and explain it to us.
They aren't doing that anymore and we haven't shifted our approach to the news. A lot of people still just trust the news(the news they like) as if it's still honest and impartial.
Another thing that shifted was the "don't believe everything you read on the Internet" to people believing anything theyve read on the Internet.
I like when they talk about what people tweet, rather than doing any actual investigative journalism. "Well Cumnugget78 said XYZ, so we'll discuss like that's true."
they were the prototypical reaction video youtubers
The reaction video youtubers at least show you the damn video.
So they are doing a BETTER job than traditional media.