Comment corporations and profit... (Score 1) 181
to understand the problem you need to analyze who you get your information from and what their interests ultimately are. i'm not talking about conspiracy theories, i'm talking about common sense. all major media outlets are corporations which have shareholders and thus a prime directive of their own: profit. the reason we see distortions is because they make the stories more interesting... at least to most of the people who never miss the 5 o'clock news.
it's more interesting to tell people that the banks will fall apart next year, that hackers have taken over a satellite, that dennis rodman's hair is green this week. none of it is news--it's pacification... and unfortunately most americans eat it up and love it.
journalism is dead in the mainstream... the public can't appreciate real journalism and would rather hear about kiko the whale's dramatic rescue by sea world. everything is human interest now and each night there's a story about the dangers of such-and-such product and "what you should do now to protect your kids". crap... complete crap.
did you know any author who appears on oprah to promote a book is instantly a bestseller?!? nobody reads the good ones anymore.
anyhow, i do have some hope that new information channels will be facilitated by the internet and people's ability to disseminate information easily without a super-watt antenna. slashdot is one example, even though it's not the traditional format. but you do need advertisers to pay for your existence... right now i'm looking at one for hermanmillerstore.com, will they some day convince slashdot to run a favorable article about their product? i doubt it. but read the latimes and you realize they have an agenda, just like the nytimes, cnn, abc, cbs, every one of them. it's subtle sometimes and overt at other times... but it's naive to think they don't pick and choose their stories and then distort the ones that could sell a few more papers or push up the ratings.
there seems to be a melding of the sitcoms and the newsshows lately--news anchors are celebrities for reading words off a screen and looking like plastic with makeup.
this just signals the end of the world to me. corporations play the public like pawns and unfortunalely most americans enjoy being played.
hernan@well.com
it's more interesting to tell people that the banks will fall apart next year, that hackers have taken over a satellite, that dennis rodman's hair is green this week. none of it is news--it's pacification... and unfortunately most americans eat it up and love it.
journalism is dead in the mainstream... the public can't appreciate real journalism and would rather hear about kiko the whale's dramatic rescue by sea world. everything is human interest now and each night there's a story about the dangers of such-and-such product and "what you should do now to protect your kids". crap... complete crap.
did you know any author who appears on oprah to promote a book is instantly a bestseller?!? nobody reads the good ones anymore.
anyhow, i do have some hope that new information channels will be facilitated by the internet and people's ability to disseminate information easily without a super-watt antenna. slashdot is one example, even though it's not the traditional format. but you do need advertisers to pay for your existence... right now i'm looking at one for hermanmillerstore.com, will they some day convince slashdot to run a favorable article about their product? i doubt it. but read the latimes and you realize they have an agenda, just like the nytimes, cnn, abc, cbs, every one of them. it's subtle sometimes and overt at other times... but it's naive to think they don't pick and choose their stories and then distort the ones that could sell a few more papers or push up the ratings.
there seems to be a melding of the sitcoms and the newsshows lately--news anchors are celebrities for reading words off a screen and looking like plastic with makeup.
this just signals the end of the world to me. corporations play the public like pawns and unfortunalely most americans enjoy being played.
hernan@well.com
