Gosh if only the corporate media hadn’t helped get him back into office…
The biggest problem is that people aren’t paying attention to the news at all, and get their “news” via social media. The informed populace went for Harris
That’s the fault of traditional media, sadly.
I worked in local news from 2000-2008 and plenty of us in News Production were making clear that we had to move away from Over-the-Air distribution to digital distribution.
Like when NASA came nearby to test lunar rovers and our reporters said “isn’t that outside of our coverage area?” Still photos of the rover would go on to be the top story on Wired.com for over a week, drawing hits from all over the planet who wanted to see it. That could have been our tiny stations traffic if we had sufficient video of the event.
Here’s an article from 2009:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html
As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.
“Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.
That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.
“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”
A year after me and my coworkers had been screaming from the bottom of the rungs that “Hey, we’re gonna be cooked if we don’t change how we distribute news now!” the president of Disney-ABC Television was threatening to nail a television to her child’s wall and talked about that at an industry event like it wasn’t backwards and stupid.
It was backwards and stupid and that attitude dominated the traditional news industry until probably about 2015 when Facebook started eating their lunch and dictating where the voters went. Facebooks “pivot to video” happened in 2015, and that killed a lot of small publishers. Facebook should have been put out of business, but instead they got a paltry fine and changed the media landscape forever.
The traditional news industry did this to themselves.
What you describe is a big part of it, but it’s only part. The other big thing that happened is the near-total loss of ad revenue. Facebook built really good microtargeting, so that it became more cost-effective to advertise on their product to reach a local audience than to advertise on local news outlets, and Craigslist did the same for classifieds.
The result looks like this for most outlets:
Subscriptions are only a partial workaround for some news outlets; you can’t actually charge a subscription for most local news — not enough people can pay it to result in a viable publication.
In any case, this loss of revenue means that the typical local outlet can’t afford anything like the level of reporting they had 20 years ago.
The capitalist model is failing the journalism industry. Is there a way to build a mutual aid network for good journalism?
I’m not even sure it’s the capitalist model that failed it. Whether capitalist communist or whatever, we have plenty of evidence is that this is what happens to Institutions in general.
An institute of some kind is created, let’s say the New York Times, for example. Over time, the Institution grows and excels at the goals it was originally created for (quality journalism, for the NYT). Eventually, all the people who originally created it die off and they are replaced by new people with no connection to the creation or ideals of the Institution. This happens several more times, each time the group of leaders becoming more and more distanced from the original goals of the institution and becoming more or less “enablers of the status quo.” When the institution no longer servers its initial purpose, it does not shut down, it simply moves into protecting itself and it’s purpose becomes extending it’s own existence for the sake of extending it’s own existence. The people who now work there view it as a job and if the place they work shuts down they won’t have a job but they’re so far away from the reasons it was created to begin with, they’re making all the wrong choices to try to save it because they’re just trying to save it instead of finding a new reason for it to exist and throw away the original framework that is no longer working.
This is the path of institutions, no matter the political or economic style being used. They start amazing, grow large and useful, then slowly become behemoths disconnected from their original goals and ideals and start existing simply for the sake of existing because nobody would know what to do without them, even though they’re currently failing their goals miserably.
Traditional news media has been this behemoth that exists simply for the sake of existing for a long, long time. They’ve been unwilling to adapt for decades now.
It’s the path of strongly hierarchical institutions. The hierarchy itself skews bullshitters and sociopaths into power over time, and it becomes self-justifying and drops the core goals as you point out.
Flatter hierarchy institutions seem to have some immunity to this if the central goals are sufficiently motivating. The Quakers manage a fairly enduring fidelity to their original principles, for instance, and I admire their organizational methods and commitment to good works, if not their mythology. At a much smaller scale, nonprofits and cooperatives I have been involved with also have more or leas success avoiding institutional rot based on that combination of clear goals and power sharing.
I’m interested/hesitant to see what becomes of Linux after Linus Torvalds retires/dies. I think the Linux Kernel Mailing List fits the kind of flat structure you’re speaking of, and I do wonder if it will retain that structure without Torvalds.
These flatter structureware more resistant to it yes, but it takes a lot of cohesive philosophy. Quakers have such a depth of philosophy behind their loose organization that you even have Non-theist Quakers who don’t believe in a Christian God but still believe in the power of the fundamental values of community. The Friends are some cool people for sure and are still going strong despite being a minority in the larger US Christian population.
I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)
I’ve heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don’t really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.
If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.
If the leadership (and there’s always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.
I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.
I’m reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.
The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, “this festival celebrate music in our community” or “all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!”
By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of “party people” is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.
There’s now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.
Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go “man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!” and the cycle begins again.
thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet
Flattering, but I want to make clear I’m just regurgitating half-understood ideas from much smarter and clever people than me. So not smart I can’t even dig up the proper sources because I’m an idiot. Which is why I’m merely a Snot Flickerman.
Also the notes on festivals are spot on.
This is a related but distinct phenomenon. What you’re missing is that while change from turnover is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be a bad change. However private ownership (or other types of top down organizational methods) and profit seeking is what drives this change in a specifically negative direction.
If the right incentive structure was in place, it could just as easily be that turnover leads to evolution in a positive direction. But our current corporate structures mean the political dominance by leadership and delivering shareholder value trump all other considerations, including ethics.
These problems are not unique to legacy outlets like NYT. New media outlets are also mostly failing in their duties to do proper journalism and provide a public service. The exact manifestation differs slightly because their medium tends to differ slightly. But they still have the same toxic incentives.
What caused the failure was everyone thinking everything should be free
That is the cycle of enshittification: give things away free at first, find ways to get indirect revenue from that by selling your users once the network effects kick in, and then in the end, raid the whole company for the primary shareholders.
It’s a new economic model peculiar to late stage capitalism, and it’s like an engine that drives loligarchy. Chucklefuck rich white boys who don’t realize a little learning is the most dangerous thing of all.
EDIT:https://whattheythink.com/news/22401-2004-marks-strongest-close-magazine-advertising-since/
In the mid-2000’s traditional advertising was still doing gangbusters. They absolutely had options to invest in other revenue streams, and they chose not to for over a decade. They could have been invested in this stuff by the mid-90’s but they didn’t want to. We can stop making excuses for why they lost all that revenue when it’s their own shitty decisions and unwillingness to change with the times.
Facebook launched their first ad offerings in 2004. This was a choice by traditional media to let new media eat their lunch. We can stop making excuses for their bad business decisions. The iPhone wouldn’t exist for three more years.
Being unwilling to change your business model for twenty years is a huge part of it yeah.
Yep, you’ll keep losing fucking money if you’re too dumb to think of a new way to make money.
What you described is the same as I described, with a lot of handwaving away of the endless shitty decisions of management at these industry groups and an almost outright refusal to pursue new revenue streams until it was too late.
They could have been the first to market with things like that, but they never invested in them, opting to “nail a TV to the wall” than hire engineers to compete on the internet.
What was stopping these groups from developing better ad targeting? They didn’t want to have to, they thought they could just use the money and muscle of their position to keep it.
They literally at one point had the money to poach engineers from Facebook, Google, Apple, et. al. but it was never something they cared to invest in until they no longer had money to be able to invest in it.
When my companies CEO flew in to our town on his private jet in 2004 to tell us nobody was getting raises until the industry was doing better, I knew traditional media was cooked. The people who run the show were too fucking stupid, slow, and self-interested to look ahead.
They literally had 25 years to figure this out.
Same thing is happening to auto manufacturers. Their C-suites kept kicking the EV can down the road and now its too late.
By a grand total of 6 points? That’s basically nothing
You forgot about the Faux News soul poison.
It’s totally possible to be well-informed from news on social media but it requires effort and a high degree of media literacy, which the vast majority of people don’t have.
It’s not even just a skill issue, it can be a time issue as well. And researching and confirming facts gets even more challenging and time consuming with the enshittification of search engines.
Imagine believing that the “news” is more informative than social media.
I would argue the exact opposite. People who get news from social media are far more informed about issues like the ongoing genocide in palestine, than those who are indoctrinated by the phony narratives of capitalist/imperialist media. Ofc brainwashed NPR listeners and NYTimes readers are going to believe in kamalacaust. That’s the actual problem.
Also that graph doesn’t actually show anything about what “news” is being “consumed” or how the study was done, etc. It’s probably just more lib BS.
You’re cherry-picking one issue, and ignoring the absolute FLOOD of misinformation and propaganda that is filling those social platforms. Not to mention that those honest critiques of the US’s complicity in genocide are picked up and weaponized by bad actors across the spectrum. Most people have not been taught to critically consume news, they just go on vibes. Corporate news, social media, it’s all broken, and none of it is serving people’s best interests. I would argue that informed voters were stuck between a rock and a hard place; we knew that the Harris campaign was just more neoliberal bullshit, but the Trump vision of the world is so much worse. Social media is causing so much more harm than good, and the people in charge of those platforms absolutely do not have your best interests in mind. All they care about is engagement metrics, and nothing drives that more then anger and fear
Not at all, people who get their news in short form video format all lean rightward or are completely captured by the far right. People who get their news from social media posts on Facebook and Instagram are far more likely to lean right. We’re in this mess because the only.ones looking to jump on new avenues of information distribution were those that were cut out of the traditional ones, fascists and other right wing extremists. The kind of social media you consume matters. Here, a lot of us read articles with citations.
This mirrors how I’ve been thinking about the broader world trends. The neo-liberal world order is dying. It has solved all the problems it has the capacity to solve, and the people have run out of patience with the problems it can’t.
The groups that have been best positioned to fill the gaps created by these retreating institutions are the ones that had always been excluded; nationalists, authoritarians, xenophobes of all kinds, et al. The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.
IMHO if we’re going to avoid a century of oppression, the left needs to abandon the neo-liberal coalition, and get into the fight for what comes next. We’re already two steps behind.
The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.
The left were deliberately targeted, suppressed, and even outright killed by that system in a way that the right weren’t. Think the Red Scare, COINTELPRO, etc.
The groups that have been best positioned to fill the gaps created by these retreating institutions are the ones that had always been excluded; nationalists, authoritarians, xenophobes of all kinds, et al. The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.
Damn this one is insightful as hell. Honestly deserves a thread of it’s own.
My advice to Opinion Column Writers:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
-Karl Rove
I hate to say it, but listen to Karl Rove. We have to do way more than just study what these people do after the fact with “rational takedowns of their delusions.” Our rational takedowns have done fuck-all in ten years. We’re fighting a misinformation war, and information like this, while true, doesn’t sell or speak to the fucking jabroni brownshirts that back Trump.
We’re way way way way way way way way past being able to just reason a third of the country back into being decent people.
Like we’re watching Project 2025 in Shock and Awe action. Maybe we should have done more about that before he was President again, yeah? Instead of waiting to write rational takedowns after they’ve already succeeded.
Years ago I had a coworker fall down the online rabbit hole of denying the moon landing happened. I told him that in college I used the astronomy department’s large telescope to look at the moon landing site myself, so I could guarantee that the landing actually happened. He knew me and trusted me, so he believed what I told him and stopped trusting the online conspiracists.
Of course you can’t actually see the moon landing site through a telescope. I was lying. My lie countered their lie, so my friend believed the truth. The left needs to understand how this works and use it. The average person will believe an easily understood lie over a complicated truth.
We need to tell people fossil fuels cause autism. We need to tell people the covid vaccine makes it so aliens can’t track you. We need to tell people that Trump is secretly sending out ICE to confiscate all guns from American citizens.
We need to fight liars with liars.
Just like we always needed to fight Republicans breaking the law to fuck everyone with breaking the law right back to fuck them. They always accused the left of doing it anyway, why not fucking just do it then?
Like Merrick Fucking Garland should have never been given the AG position as a consolation prize. Too much trying to gladhand these fuckers who are literally stabbing you in the back every time you shake their hand.
You’re a hundred percent correct. It’s a misinformation war, not an information war.
Exactly. People and media need to realize what looking glass we have just traveled through.
My advice to opinion writers at the NYTimes: You are the genocidal avant-garde of delusions and misinformation.
Genocidal imperial media is simply SHOCKED by the current genocidal emperor. \s
