The Fall of Corporate Media Controlled by Oligarchs Who Boost (or Are Compelled to Boost) Reckless Lies About the Poor While Normalising Rich People's Crimes
Oligarchs are a big problem when we rely on media that's independent and/or accountable to "the public interest" (which includes truth). Oligarchs love buying the media, or simply destroying it (sometimes by buying it). Oligarchy does that. About a decade ago a notorious oligarch bought a large news outlet just to attack the judge who had ruled against him. Oligarchs do that. Any lessons learned since then?
Earlier this month and last month [1, 2] we wrote about the Jeff Bezos-owned "journal of record" (Washington Post or "WaPo") doing awful journalism to push the personal and business agenda of Mr. Bezos. An associate tells us that now there's this new example which speaks of "a crime he says he [some poor person] didn't commit" (notice the word "says"). As the associate puts it, the Bezos-owned "WaPo takes the side against the courts which cleared him, by doing more stenography. Stenography becomes a way of life for the mainstream media. That is harmful."
No wonder they have layoffs, as does NPR. "I dropped NPR from coverage," the associate says. "I no longer trust it after its recent changes" (they're taking bribes from Bill Gates and Microsoft and now there's also a republication panel that censors it and can spike stories).
NPR - despite its name - isn't some national or public thing (the "N" and "P"). The same goes for PBS, which takes bribes from Bill Gates. They're moreover saddled with Trumpian censors now... They cannot easily criticise the corrupt dictator. It might be a Herculean task in some cases, due to new hurdles (censors in the ranks).
Then there are CNN layoffs and NBC layoffs (the news from Friday says it "cuts about 40 staffers as layoffs hit news media"; it's vastly worse at CNN).
It is not a uniquely US issue*.
American news companies are dying when people need media more than ever, especially media that can scrutinise a dictatorship.
Ryan (in IRC) points out "that press freedom in the US gets worse every year despite that being in the Constitution. Wikipedia cites Reporters Without Borders. The US has gotten MUCH worse, and is now so much worse that it's worse than other English speaking countries without a Constitution, much less a "First Amendment". It got worse under both Trump and Biden for different reasons. Trump is worse. He threatens broadcast licenses now, like Filipino dictators. And he does other bullshit to threaten them into saying nice things about him or saying nothing at all. He gets money out of them and says he puts it in his "Presidential Library". They pay him off like everyone ends up doing, for the privilege of even being allowed to remain on the air at all. I think "Presidential Library" is like "Inauguration" with the tech billionaire money. You know, euphemism. Graft, bribes, corruption. They don't hide it anymore. They used to hide it better. Fox News has even gotten worse."
In the case of CNN, the Web site became unreliable bloatware. They must be increasing the cost of running CNN.
For us, especially in Geminispace, running things is very cheap. All the requests are moderate in size and the overall complexity is low enough to leave us focusing on stories, not the technical things behind the scenes. Yesterday gemini.techrights.org served 128,224 Gemini requests and gemini.tuxmachines.org served 43,172 Gemini requests. Compared to two years ago, the site is no longer expensive to run (not much hardware needed) and it is vastly faster. █
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* Here in the UK there have been sales and closures lately, so the situation is so bad that even the Press Gazette is again promoting SLOP [1, 2]. Here's the latest among more promotion of SLOP. Then they wonder why media is dying...
Unbelievable!
