The Media May Never Recover (Major Divestments in the Public's Right to Know)
Last weekend: A Crisis of Online Journalism | Press Complicity and Public Apathy All Along Enabled 14 Years of Illegal, Arbitrary Detention and Coercion Into Plea Bargain of Julian Assange on Brink of Death
Yesterday: Speaking to Sources (or People Outside One's Country) is Not Crime and Not Seditious
YESTERDAY was a very busy day and today - alas in a bitter-sweet but a good way of working out at the end - we'll will do a lot more articles. We'd rather see more articles than produce lots of articles, but that's not what's happening - less and less in the media over time and disinformation too. Bear in mind that today and tomorrow the media (what's left of it) will be relatively "calm" - a euphemism for dead or inactive (it was already quite dead yesterday). "Tomorrow is a major news-free holiday in the US and an election in the UK," an associate notes. "It'll be light on news probably until Tues, and even then there is no guarantee of the news recovering to last months (already low) levels. The fourth estate [is] being eliminated on purpose."
What happens in KH isn't a uniquely "Chinese issue". A lot of the same happens in the West, but at a slower place. Here in Europe many whole news sites are already being blocked (even at ISP level). So we're losing our argument or abandon the "moral high ground" regarding freedom of the press.
Our upcoming election aside, plus the US holiday, this isn't a "holiday issue". I noted that if news slows down, we have feasibility/prospects for catchup with old and unpublished, potential stories and we can engage in more activities like coding, seeing not much gets reported online, even if a lot is still happening (it's not 2004 anymore, it is 2024 and many newsrooms shut down for good). We shall be writing about press etc. and we'll explain the direction of the Web - albeit this topic is only indirectly related to Free software. In 2007 I worked as a freelance journalism (they paid up to $200 per article) and when I left I became more independent too. I also became pro bono, i.e. I did not get anything for what I wrote.
The lack of investment in media will simply doom the media. In turn, the general population will become less informed. It'll become more like China. █
Photo credit (Jimmy Lai Outside The Court of Final Appeal): This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Attribution: Pakkin Leung @Rice Post.