Journal shanen's Journal: Yellowest of so-called journalism
[Comment on article about accusations of Facebook supporting terrorism. Journal entry due to the transience factor...]
More complete Subject: Eyeballs, censorship, media pollution, and stuffing your eyeballs and earholes with garbage (and you can see why I feel threatened by the so-called long-comment penalty, but I'll try to keep it brief).
Facebook needs eyeballs to sell and appeals to freedom of speech to reduce their operating costs for censorship, even when it is richly deserved. However, this is just one aspect of broader media pollution driven by the quest for more eyeballs, best typified by the collapse of CNN's pretenses to be a media organization dedicated to the public interest. While CNN is just following their business model into the toilet, the terrorists do love the free publicity of such disaster porn. To my way of thinking that kind of ratings-driven free publicity is clearly related to the rise of the Donald, too.
However, the REAL damage is from people who use the Internet to gorge themselves on poisonous lies. Whatever insane thing you prefer to believe, you can get as much "evidence" as you want on today's Web. Again, the eyeball-driven model actually encourages pandering to such narrow-minded people, and in the google's case, they could risk losing their favored-search-engine status if they showed people too much stuff that offended them, no matter how true it was. (Remember, "All your attention are belong to us, the [google|facebook|TLC].")
Solution? As regards the mass media, stop doing what the terrorists want. Agree NOT to compete for eyeballs by supporting terrorists. Actually, that should apply broadly to ANY news involving events that were motivated by the quest for free publicity. Not censorship, but a kind of negotiated settlement. Report the news, but don't exaggerate or emphasize publicity-seeking stories to get more eyeballs. STOP feeding the monsters.
Yellowest of so-called journalism More Login
Yellowest of so-called journalism
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