The Media’s Political Suicide, by Daniel Greenfield.
Earlier this year, Warren Buffett … dumped 30 newspapers that he had bought for $344 million for $140 million. …
There’s too much content chasing too few advertisers and subscribers. The internet took away the death grip that local papers had on certain kinds of advertising and made other kinds irrelevant. And people have a lot more options for breakfast reading material than just subscribing to the local rag. …
The [New York] Times and the [Washington] Post can drive conversation, dominate the news cycle with an anti-Trump conspiracy theory, or turn historical revisionism like the 1619 Project into a curriculum, a TV show, and a movie. But that’s not a realistic option for the Sacramento Bee or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Advertisers will flock to the Times and the Post because they have affluent readers and drive the conversation. But local papers will go on bleeding older and more conservative readers while the hedge funds that own them slash jobs, eliminate entire papers, and eventually give up on the whole media venture as a bad idea. …
Local papers are dying. Formerly influential national news magazines are irrelevant. When was the last time you heard anything from Time except around its annual Cause of the Year publicity stunt?
And it’s not just the dead tree media that’s in trouble. Digital darlings like the Huffington Post, Vice and Vox have been cutting jobs because clickbait doesn’t win over subscribers who will pay for content.
Journalism doesn’t sell enough advertising any more, so media is evolving into political advocacy — because people pushing their agendas will pay.
After advertising left them, the mainstream media sold out to the next highest bidder:
What we think of as the media, a series of private companies reporting the news to customers willing to pay for their services, is evolving into a political movement that views its platforms as a public service.
The for-profit media is still around, but not for long. The non-profit media is the rising model …
The media has redefined journalism as advocating for left-wing policies and the advantage of this is that in the age of the internet, political activism has a better business model than journalism. …
Non-profit journalism has redefined the purpose of investing in the media from profits to politics. As a political non-profit, the media can be more viable than it has in years. …
Our roles as consumers has changed too. We used to be informed, but now we are indoctrinated:
The reader and the viewer are no longer consumers, they are the product that is being sold to the media’s political backers.
Even as the non-profit media claims that it’s now free to pursue journalism as a public service, it’s not providing a service to the public, it’s serving a small class of donors by trying to influence the public. …
Truth? Lip service only. Now it’s all about the cause.
The media still insists that it’s objective, trustworthy and seeking the truth. But those slogans are the leftovers of an older generation that at least believed in hypocritically mouthing such pieties. The new generation, the one leading the purge at the New York Times, doesn’t even believe in the pieties.
The campaigns, like those that hijacked the Times, are coordinated by political allies from different media outlets across social media. The participants in this new collegiality view journalism as a form of advocacy for their political agenda. They have no commitment to the organization they work for, only to the larger movement of which they are operatives, coordinating to undermine their own organizations.
In the leftist non-profit realm, organizations are just shells for an agenda and they can be jettisoned, renamed, or swapped out at the right time. As the media falls into that category, publications become mere brands to be tied to a fake news narrative, and tossed aside when they’re no longer getting clicks. …
The end result is State News, a product that closely resembles the government news networks in China or Russia, but which is still distributed across a variety of organizations and which is controlled by social media narratives coordinated across social networks rather than by a central government agency. …
Why bother with long stories, if all we need to keep up with the Party are the slogans on Twitter?
The only reason to read long form articles is to find out the details of a story or experience new ideas, but when writing exists to reinforce what readers already believe, then it doesn’t need to be read.
Hardly anyone bothered reading Soviet papers because everyone already knew what was in them.
A media that exists to tweet articles about Trump’s terribleness and a story about an oppressed person whose plight proves the need to have open borders, no police, and free everything is unreadable. Not just to conservatives, but to everyone who isn’t looking for a righteousness or rage fix in the morning.
The media envisions its own transformation into public service non-profits subsidized by dot com tycoons and then eventually the benevolent socialist state that will pay its members to put out propaganda that nobody reads.
Sad but true. Great incisive piece by Greenfield.
