• @[email protected]
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    211 hours ago

    You think it’s any different for other media outlets? I’d say it’s remarkably worse for most other media formats. Cable - that quickly was taken over by the oligarchs, even though it had some interesting working-class roots at the very nascent stages on local cable.

    Local news - mostly all owned by Sinclair - terrible. And don’t get me started on how “social” media turned out.

    Actually, nearly all of media (newspapers, radio, TV, cable, Internet, “social media”) has had a very similar trend, with more recent cases being taken over far more rapidly than print media was.

    • @[email protected]
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      211 hours ago

      I was just referencing newspapers. It is easy to study newspapers and their articles throughout history to see the bias they had because of who owned them. This can help inform us to how modern media is ran.

      My wife studied broadcasting in college and I am acutely aware that all media stories come from a few select sources. The control is very real and there is shockingly little independence.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 hours ago

        Fair enough. I remember Chomsky talking about how lively print media used to be (when he was younger, or something his parents told him about). I wonder what that would have been like. By the time I started reading any papers, it was already dominated by things like McClatchy…and hasn’t gotten any better with time. WSJ was already radically right wing, at least on its op-ed pages but as Chomsky pointed out, they had to report mostly straight news as it pertained to business interests, because of who their audience mostly was - they need actual reliable information to run this system. Then Murdoch bought them. I doubt it got any better.

        And then there is WashPo and NYT, supposedly the most liberal of liberal rags. I don’t ever remember a time when that was true of either.

        • @[email protected]
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          28 hours ago

          I remember years of being told about left mainstream media. Like a mythical beast I have never seen it.

          There was a lot more independence with journalism in the past, but it was also always tightly controlled.

          I was around back when Bush senior took the presidency and all the media fell in line that it was not okay to criticize the President. There were of course exceptions, but for the most part it was clear dissent was no longer a real option.

          I think Goodnight and Good luck is a great critical film to see how going back before I was even born that journalism had already been brought and paid for. Independence was always an illusion.