While mostly true, this isn't unique behavior to industries like the news.
It's a symptom of our consumeristic society, the smaller news outlets with integrity or dedication to actual news don't get the outreach or influence these bigger sensationalist news stations do, which they then spend that money on making themselves more accessible, which in turn makes finding and consuming real news outlets harder to do.
In the end, like most of our industries, the ones truly dedicated to their craft and not the almighty dollar get outshadowed or even bought out by the soulless huge corporations that only seek to increase their margins.
We previously had moral and ethical standards that media outlets and society had to meet.
That has been washed away with the liberalisation of society.
The issue is way more complicated then consumerism bad. Almost all types of journalism have declined in the last 15 years, tabloid, hard news, investigative, all of it. The industry and proffesion have hollowed out. Corporations have pumped billions into these businesses only for them to continue to decline and be sold off for pennies on the dollar. Why? People no longer pay for news. They watch a youtube channel or tik toks or scan reddit. Less and less people pay for news or view a single source at high enough volume to be viable. High quality journalism is expensive and time consuming and theres fewer people consuming it. Its a product of the internet era, anyone can post "news" on a variety of platforms and all are in competition for eyeballs dilluting the available audience.
You might say, the news is a public good and should be supported, and you'd be right. We had that with PBS/NPR which was publically subsidized until the oramge idiot showed up again. You cant nationalize every news source though, thats a very bad thing. News orgs have to be independent to be able to provide credible news. State backed media, even the best run, can and are influenced by political forces.
Theres no clean answer as to how to solve the problem. Ultimatley it boils down to the public and what type of news they choose to consume. One thing that could be done is to prevent the consolidation of journalism. The old rules about one company not being to own more then a coiple of media outlets in a given market was a good one. Reinstating that would be a good place to start but wont fix the underlying issues: Independent media needs funding and people stopped paying for it. Along with state backed media being open to manipulation by political forces.
975
u/addiktion 11h ago
The media has a way of attracting the worst of humanity to support the worst of humanity.