An Interesting Take on the Newspaper Business
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It has gotten to the point where Mr. A takes away the sharp objects at the table when someone brings up "the terrible times facing newspapers these days" or "isn't it just awful how no one reads anymore." Newspapers make plenty of money. PLENTY of money. They are wildly successful businesses. If you or I owned them we'd be jumping for joy.
They just don't make enough money to satisfy the greedy, rapacious assholes who own and run them. This isn't a death, you know. It's a homicide. Newspapers aren't dying. They're being murdered. And until somebody convenes an academic conference on how to overthrow these fuckers and raise funds for employee buyouts of every last one of these newspapers you cannot pay me in solid gold ingots to listen to one more stupid lecture about the Internet.
From First Draft, in response to the report that Gannett is making double digit profits. Even while enforcing massive layoffs at papers all around the country.
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Media cutbacks have nothing to do with profit
and everything to do with expanding control of the propaganda network.
The "budgetary" layoffs are never targeted at gossip or feel-good segments but rather at staff and resources that support real journalism, investigative reports and longer thought and analysis pieces that take time and money to generate and attract the wrong kind of attention to the company's sponsors and controlling interests. Once all of American news and information outlets are made uniform, a combination of People Magazine and USAToday and FOX and Limbaugh with a soupcon of E! and a dollop of Rachael Ray that entertains the masses without discomfiting Those Who Matter, 30% profit margins will be perfectly acceptable.
Take this phenomenon and tie it to your other fine post on the corruption of our educational system where a whole Dumb Is Cool elitist culture has developed, one where getting through without being informed is the highest aspiration and the art of cut-and-paste repetition to meet deadline is becoming finely honed. Now you have the perfect media takeover storm, a whole generation of young people eager to take entry-level pay to replace mature journalists, an army of drones just happy to be there, blissfully unaware that in another 20 years they will be replaced entirely by a media generation computer program that will write the "news" automatically from some central propaganda generation source (AP, for instance) with an add-on for regional flair, not at all unlike the playlist at a ClearChannel radio station.
The only act that will stop this trend is to abolish the current media ownership rules and return media outlets to control by local hands. That, and invest billions in education starting with increased teacher pay. The little bastards are smart, and we need smart teachers to stay ahead of them and make them think.
You Can Also Tie in Your Post
on Psy Ops because they aren't even trying to hide it anymore. It's all about expanding the propaganda machine and dumbing down the populace.
For that matter, you can also tie in Davidson's piece about how newspapers use misogynistic terms because the propaganda machine is all about retaining privileges for the privileged. The same could be said for the pathetic coverage the media gives to issues that effect the poor and racial/ethnic minorities. For example, what has happened to our public schools, particularly in urban areas, should be a national outrage, but it isn't and it's because education issues get the same level of media discourse as everything else. Funny how that works.
I've come to believe that unless we get better media, we'll never get better government.
In some ways, btw, Chris Matthews getting elected Senator would be the perfect comment on our times. Which is why we need to start planning on ways to defeat him now. There must be some nice progressive Democratic woman who wants to run against Arlen Spector, right?