No, Mr. "Journalist", You Might be Corrupt (But Denying It to Yourself and to Others to Pacify Your Consciousness)
Corporate "passengers" aren't hands-on pilots, they're zombies in a vessel that calls itself "the press" (immersed in corporate money they're mistaking for legitimacy)
HAVING been a "journalist" before (they paid me up to $200 per article almost 20 years ago; not bad for a couple of hours' work; that's more than Google would offer at the time), I know more or less how that "industry" works and why it doesn't - at least in practice rather than in theory - work. I focused on GNU/Linux and Software Freedom because I understood these topics very well. I told these 'trench' stories many times before. I had done many types of jobs for nearly 3 decades, though being a "journalist" wasn't fun until I actually fully controlled my output (no editor to appease). For independence's sake, that meant no income either (no ads). For nearly 12 years I had a totally separate source of income, which I deemed ethical until my colleagues and I discovered we had been robbed (resulting in many resignations). As a former "journalist", I was the one who discovered and exposed the robbery at the company. Colleagues were advised by lawyers that there was no point suing the company because no money would get recovered (upon "administration" money would go mostly to lenders, not to victims of a real crime). It was too late already. But at least "journalism" about that company effectively put an end to it. Nobody would work for these people anymore. They're finished. In return, all I got from the company's CEO was threats. Yes, threats. I was threatened by the criminal who had robbed my colleagues and I.
Apparently this is considered normal for "investigative journalists" (which simple means real journalists; all journalism must be investigating something as anything else is unoriginal and likely inaccurate cruft); some days ago in respectable Turkish media they said: "Study reveals journalists in Turkey living at hunger threshold"
Value to society and monetary gain lack a sensible correlation. Cheaters and online spammers get ahead. Honest and nice guys finish last. It's made that way for a reason and the further away we drift from democracy, the worst it'll get. When oligarchs are done controlling the government (politicians and pertinent government agencies, even regulators) they'll go after the press, either with bribes or SLAPP.
Real journalism is about truth and there's not much money in that; the Big Money is in lying (especially for Robber Barons like Bill Gates). Before Sam Varghese sort of vanished half a year ago they made him publish company and product spam - totally not real articles - under his name. Maybe he had enough and decided to move on. ZDNet made Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) do the same and he's still there. They had done the same to his colleague Jack Wallen (not so much lately though).
"Journalists" like the label because it makes the job sound like an honourable profession and they're presumed objective. But each and every person has biases. So do publishers, which moreover have "sponsors" or "advertisers" (just another form of sponsors). So many hands are metaphorically tied. Money controls narratives. The "storytelling" gets shaped by those with the leash at hand; those with the leash (or collar) around the neck are just instruments or enablers; many proudly call themselves "journalists" and they conflate payments with "evidence" of their supposed "value".
Value to who? Jeff Bezos?
I am increasingly sickened by sites that turn to LLMs and wrongly assume readers would 1) not notice and 2) would stick around regardless. They bury themselves or dig their own graves.
One thing even worse is people who publish fake articles for a fee. The Linux Foundation does this all the time for money (and yet it pays Linux less than ever!) and Spamnil (Swapnil Bhartiya) is also running the same swindle - usually via the Linux Foundation as "fixer" or "arranger" or "referrer" - with companies paying money for Spamnil to pretend to do an "article" or "interview" with them, bolstered by the "Linux Foundation" as the channel or the backchannel for bribes. We showed the mechanisms last night and we even showed the Linux Foundation admitting so in public. We need to call out this fake journalism that's actually spam. We need to put an end to this. 'Bribed journalism' isn't journalism. This week we see a puff piece about Microsoft, with a bribed "journalist" taking money from Microsoft via the company that it "sponsors" (Red Hat) in exchange for fake coverage from a "media partner". This isn't acceptable and we intend to also write about the role of "advertising" in such bribery pipelines.
Some editor told me a week ago that the money paid in advertising does not in any way impact the publication or its writers.
I heard this logical fallacy before and I reject it also based on personal experience from my time as a paid journalist. Advertisers also buy leverage over editors and can threaten to stop paying unless articles get "corrected" (censored), sanitised of criticism under the guise of lacking relevance or sufficient proof (by their own criteria). It also impacts writers' selection criteria (recruitment) and topic choices.
I intend to cover this again some time soon. It's bad enough that the glorified "Wikipedia" site became a pool of Public Relations placements ("articles"); even "news sites" are becoming more and more (growing in proportion) like that. █