Slashdot Mirror
Online Journalism Is Becoming a Billionaires' Plaything (Again)
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, the titular newspaper magnate (played with cheeky insouciance by Orson Welles) gleefully tells a doubter that he's prepared to lose a million dollars every year in order to keep publishing. "At a rate of a million dollars a year," he smirks, "I'll have to close this place in 60 years." Over the past decade, of course, many newspapers and magazines have lost a lot more than a million dollars a year, and there are signs that online publications are having trouble holding their finances together, as well. But some very rich people are stepping in to prop things up: first Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million, then eBay founder Pierre Omidyar offered journalist Glenn Greenwald a whole lot of cash to start up a general interest publication. Billionaires and multimillionaires, of course, have total freedom to fund whatever they want—and that could be a good thing for publications with a mission and a serious need for cash. But what if the rich investor disagrees with something that his pet publication releases into the world? If (and when) that situation occurs, it could serve as an interesting test of whether the latest version of this "generous benefactor" model can work more effectively as an impartial channel for news than it has in the past (when conflicts of interest often sparked titanic fights between editors and owners)."
Ok, who didn't have to lookup that word?
this has happened in all sectors of our emerging dystopia. the media was the first to go. the endgame of controlling information is to control everything. unless you have someone with good intentions at the helm, this is simply a step in a conquest of dominance. it's like the dark ages but with lawyers instead of soldiers.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There was another film about this...
The freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press.
This is not a signature.
Billionaires and multimillionaires, of course, have total freedom to fund whatever they wantâ"and that could be a good thing for publications with a mission and a serious need for cash.
in the late 19th century and into the beginnings of the 20th century america and england had epidemic problems with the 'well to do' financing newspapers. it took investigative journalists that didnt care about the advertisers or the backers to correct this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_newspapers#The_press_in_the_Party_System:_1820.E2.80.931890
the difference being todays muckrakers have the internet. its much harder, although not impossible, to silence a glen greenwald or a julian assange if they so choose to expose your corruption. plutocratically controlled news is an important thing to have when voters are striking for fair minimum wage, protesting your banks in occupy camps, and largely backing healthcare and prison reforms that would undermine your system of creating intentional strife within parties or groups of people to further advance your cause.
Good people go to bed earlier.
.. always bends to business or advertisers. At this point I'd like (I know it's unrealistic) to have a news organization that's totally funded by the public via central bank and they have a bottomless well of money to spend in case of political emergency (aka build it into the system) that's run by the sanest citizens. They are picked for their sanity and respect for the truth. People who accept science, aren't easily fooled by left/right ideology, understand that societies have to change in accordance with what is true about the universe, even if that up-ends the status quo. We have people trying to cling to 19th century ideologies in a world where technology is fast making human elements unprofitable over the long term.
News sucks so bad because most people are just too scared or too sheepish to actually call out the corporate system on its bullshit because they depend on that very system for survival, too many people are easily manipulated by the threats of loss of income, relationships and status.
Since the Internet has failed to realize its goal of making it possible for the little guy to be on an even playing field with the large companies, I would say that it's par for the course that the rich people will take over.
The promise of open standards and democratic information have been destroyed with the enthusiastic participation of the very people who told us open standards were the way forward. E-mail has been abandoned for Twitter. The web has been abandoned for Facebook and the PC has been abandoned for the iPhone. And you love it.
This all happened after the U.S. high tech industry was strangled and dumped in a drainage ditch naked in 2000 and the space program was raped and left for dead somewhere in northern Asia.
It's too late to cry about it now. You got exactly what you wanted, and every step of the way when people pointed out we were on the wrong path you shouted them down with your smartass memes and your neckbearded atheist-habit self-assurance you are the smartest people in the world.
In ten years the Internet will be destroyed completely, and since there is nobody left under the age of 50 with an attention span longer than ten seconds the people who lose it won't have any idea what the hell happened.
And it will be your fault.
You needn't go back to Charles Foster Kane or the William Randolph Hearsts of the world he was meant to represent. This kind of thing never went away (vide Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner). The main difference between a Bezos and a Murdoch is that Bezos made his fortune indiscriminately selling books filled with insight, entertainment, truth, facts or lies, while Murdoch was much more discriminate in peddling lies.
But what if the rich investor disagrees with something that his pet publication releases into the world?
It is much more about the content, in *all* cases where a billionaire takes over, becoming poorer and poorer. Why ? Because the billionaire has become a billionaire by earning ( lots of ) money, and is 100% geared toward .... earning money. The only way to do that, with media, in our dystopian world, is by advertising. Advertising only works well if and when the media carrying the ads reach a large public. A large public can only be reached by rendering content poorer: shallower, shorter, simpler.
And that is how it works and has worked, e.g. for the ( prime example ! ) French "quality newspaper" Le Monde. Up to the beginning of the '90s, that newspaper was owned by private investors, philantropists actually, who knew that producing a quality newspaper costs money, more than that same newspaper can bring in. But then, some time in the '90s, Le Monde was taken over by rich investors. The result: from the stern, photo-less format for which it was famous, from great heights of linguistic refinement and from immense depths of understanding and background articles, Le Monde went to... well, pretty much the same format as other large-public newspapers: advertisements everywhere, shallow articles dealing with the craze and the hype of the day. If even Le Monde could not do it, I do not see how any other serious media can do it, whether they be newspaper, tv programme, radio - you name it.
Conclusion: any take-over of traditional media by billionaires is bad news. Bad news for the public at large. Bad news for the employed, conscientious journalists and reporters. Bad news for the "third power" that media have come to be in our ramshackle democracies. Bad news for all.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
In the past century selling copies was a common method of financing; the entire book ecosystem is built around this concept. Similar is the movie ecosystem, which sold views until DVD's came along.
Recently the Internet has exploited the advertising method of financing. Newspapers and magazines have relied on this for decades.
RIch investors are not a new invention - it goes back thousands of years. This was how The Old Testament was paid for. Today nobody would know about Abraham except for the fellow who financed hand-written copies of the Torah. It is by far the oldest tradition. It's not evil. You pay to print your opinions, I pay to print my opinions. Millions read yours, maybe one or two will read mine. We both become part of the human cultural heritage.
Why am I supposed to worry about Jeff Bezos having more of an effect on the editorial direction of the WaPo than I am on, say, Disney affecting the editorial direction of ABC News (or Gannett, if you want to stick with print)? The only difference that I can see is that the latter is answerable to shareholders and so might tolerate fewer losses on the business. IMO, this horse was out of the barn years ago, and the nouveau riche* are the "same as the old boss" at this point.
*Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
I wouldn't hold my breath over the Post launching an in-depth investigation into Amazon's contracts with the CIA, for example. More to the point, Bezos won't even have to say a word; even the dimmest editor knows which side of the bread his butter lies. Kinda like Russia Today's coverage about the treatment of the LGBT communities in that country is a bit... light. Or Al Jazeera's reportage on the practical enslavement of south pacific workers in the Middle East. Lesson: never single-source.
Many claim that government wants a dumb population that is easily controlled. Things that point to this is how people vote depending on their situation and what they are willing to accept as fact.
The truth is, corporations have owned government for some time now, and it is in their best interest (or the elite that own the corporations), to have a dumb population, that are willing to accept certain things as fact, usually despite their situation. This allows them to sponsor and get elected people who are malleable their cause, which can be summarized as: Keep as much wealth as possible or become even more wealthy. It also allows them to control political situations events by building a base to which a politician will need.
Many networks/publications are already nothing more than simple propaganda machines trying to spit our their masters will onto the populace as fast as they can vomit it out. It is all a bunch of billionaires looking after their own interests, and liberal or conservative, they both share one thing in common and that is they are massively wealthy and want to stay that way, and want more. This is just another tool in the tool box to that end.
yeah, the first half of them were advertising and self-serving propaganda too.