Tell the news.
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@futurebird look, the concept of nightly news used to be seen as a 'prestige' thing each network did to maintain visibility of their network and, to whatever actual extent this part of it was realized, to provide a public service.
Now, everything's got to sell the commercial space and bring in a return. The concept of noblesse oblige, if you will, has been lost. Everything is about engineering the audience.
A dozen years ago, maybe more, the stat was that for every one person with a comms or journalism degree working in public media, there were six working PR for companies, doing essentially the same job but with no accountability to truth or obligation to serve any form of greater good. That was back then. I shudder to think what it is now.
The message is the medium and the medium is the message these days and both are being aimed and calibrated by billion dollar enterprises and trillion dollar interests. There will be no return to a concept of an altruistic nightly news broadcast unless something wholly new arises to provide it.
@resonancewright @futurebird I think the end began when they introduced the concept of rolling news. It suddenly became essential to fill the space.
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Tell the news.
It's nice to link to an article, or do more in depth analysis, but I really appreciate it when people who I trust and who are knowledgeable (especially in areas I know less about) summarize news and events.
Even if it's very local stuff. Especially the local stuff.
Big newsrooms are dying. The editor of the paper or producer of a "new hour" used to do this job, and it a powerful job with tremendous responsibility.
Social media is taking the place of editorial control.
@futurebird awesomely put. I completely agree, especially now I have the feeling in words. 🤌🤌
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@resonancewright @futurebird I think the end began when they introduced the concept of rolling news. It suddenly became essential to fill the space.
@capnthommo @futurebird this may be a chicken and egg matter; you have to ask what factors led turner and cnn to jump into that gap and create that space in the first place. And of course a lot of it was peculiar to the situation, but I think the advent of chyron news is more of an aggravating symptom than a root cause
ymmv
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What is happening in the world now?
I would say "As we all ignore climate change the rich and power nation, America is returning to its more fascist roots: the US has been like this before. Billionaires capture public outrage over social liberalism: eg. women having rights, the decline of racism etc. to protect their fortunes from taxes, and to protect their power over government priories. They fear a world where the government serves the people with competent social programs."
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@futurebird @willyyam@mastodon.social the government social programs wouldn't be needed if capitalism were abolished. our environmental problems will cease to exist when the treaties are honoured and the land is given back. get rid of the bum on the plush, and the bum on the rods will disappear.
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Tell the news.
It's nice to link to an article, or do more in depth analysis, but I really appreciate it when people who I trust and who are knowledgeable (especially in areas I know less about) summarize news and events.
Even if it's very local stuff. Especially the local stuff.
Big newsrooms are dying. The editor of the paper or producer of a "new hour" used to do this job, and it a powerful job with tremendous responsibility.
Social media is taking the place of editorial control.
@futurebird this is why I start every day with Jay Kuo’s The Status Kuo and with Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. They don’t just comment; they inform.
I also rely a lot on non-profits like RAICES—the folks who provide lawyers to children caught up in our mass deportation machine—for detailed news as well as analysis of the issues I follow most closely.
I’ve been seeking and winnowing alt news sources like it was my part time job since November of 2024.
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So many billionaires have destroyed online social spaces I loved I'm starting to feel like I must be very dangerous.
livejournal was bought by a Russian company who destroyed it
blogger was mysteriously imploded just when it was getting good
facebook was turned into an unusable hell hole of ads and non-chron feed
twitter... we all know what happened to twitter
tumblr ... lives on in a way
but now I'm here.@futurebird @jmjm@mstdn.social facebook is kind of an outlier, cause it was a mysogynist project from the very beginning. i will not be sad when it finally dies. i hope that happens before i die.
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The nightmare of the powerful is a media landscape that is entirely organic. Where what is news is decided in the way that ants make decisions, every ant makes her own choice and the decisions are emergent.
Emergent editorial control.
So, it's important to me what articles you choose to share and what you have to say about them. It's helpful when you explain who the big actors in your local news are, who you identify, how you identify them.
@futurebird local news is the hardest to follow, isn’t it? Even for those of us who have a locally owned and controlled newspaper.
I confess, I get so much more news from social media—from that friend on the school board or who is a city manager two towns over—than from official news sources, which can be so blandly uninformative it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on.
And joining a lobbying group is good—though you’d kind of wish you could be informed ahead of that…
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I understand what my liberal friends are sad about when they are nostalgic about the media centralization of the past, but they are forgetting the way that massive lies were propagated and never questioned in that environment.
It is true that when Dan Rather did the news some things we see today would never fly... but I have spent my whole adult life unlearning the lies about US history that kind of news propagated.
We each must take some responsibility and 'Tell the news' ourselves.
@futurebird I would like to imagine that a resurgence of local news would help - envisioning a national connected patchwork of volunteer-run ghost-platform sites that would both reconnect the fractured residents of communities, and reacquaint people with facts, through shared experience. As I think local papers did help, in the before-times. But thinking about the logistical and interpersonal hurdles, all those devilish details: those take a kind of willing cooperation we no longer have in our communities.
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(When I say "liberal friends" I mean US fans of the democratic party. I'm someone who tolerates democrats due to a paucity of better options. Though, as of late, all I really care about is "are you a bigot?" and "are you a corrupt criminal?" I need to hear "no" twice or I won't even pay attention. I want politicians who will work: do your job, make the government run, improve the UI on the government website, publish the budget on time, fix the uneven sidewalks. WORK.)
As an outsider watching, the number of people who seem to believe they can "fix" things by just voting the dems in again is utterly horrifying. The sheer lack of awareness is unfathomable.
It's nearly as bad in Canada when it comes right down to it. Just quieter and with less gestapo. Trump's bullshit ignited an instant push of nationalism which meant people voted for anyone the liberals (Can) shoved down their throat and most of them don't even realize who he is and what he's doing. We will sure feel it when we suddenly need to protest and realize that corporations have more human rights than we do now.
People don't want to be aware of the machine they are inside of. Things don't just suddenly happen like a light switch turned on and off. That's the stuff of fairytales. It's the desperate symptom of societal arrested development and mindlessness to try to believe that they do.
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I understand what my liberal friends are sad about when they are nostalgic about the media centralization of the past, but they are forgetting the way that massive lies were propagated and never questioned in that environment.
It is true that when Dan Rather did the news some things we see today would never fly... but I have spent my whole adult life unlearning the lies about US history that kind of news propagated.
We each must take some responsibility and 'Tell the news' ourselves.
@futurebird while it’s not my gift to do that, I _do_ attempt what I can for the social justice groups I serve. (We use old fashioned listserves. Not Google, of course.)
You can’t bury folks under a sleet of horror stories—you have to balance those with action steps that can be taken and stories about the wins, yet without hiding the stark truth that this _is_ fascism, and it really is as bad as we think.
It’s not exactly telling the news. But I am told it makes a difference.
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@futurebird What is being mourned is the loss of a shared frame of reference. And yes, a lot of that shared frame of reference was propaganda.
@whvholst @futurebird and a lot of our frames of reference, of course, were systematically excluded from view.
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I understand what my liberal friends are sad about when they are nostalgic about the media centralization of the past, but they are forgetting the way that massive lies were propagated and never questioned in that environment.
It is true that when Dan Rather did the news some things we see today would never fly... but I have spent my whole adult life unlearning the lies about US history that kind of news propagated.
We each must take some responsibility and 'Tell the news' ourselves.
@futurebird If there is a single assignment from college that has influenced me the most, it was being given two first-hand accounts of a 12th C. priest. One was used to argue for his sainthood. The other was a complaint about what an awful person he was. And we were told to describe the *real* person behind both accounts.
Such a valuable skill to actually sort through contradictory info.
(FWIW, he got the saint gig: he's the patron saint of Iceland now)
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@capnthommo @futurebird this may be a chicken and egg matter; you have to ask what factors led turner and cnn to jump into that gap and create that space in the first place. And of course a lot of it was peculiar to the situation, but I think the advent of chyron news is more of an aggravating symptom than a root cause
ymmv
@resonancewright @futurebird yes maybe so. I was only voicing what were the first signs as I perceived them at the time.
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So many billionaires have destroyed online social spaces I loved I'm starting to feel like I must be very dangerous.
livejournal was bought by a Russian company who destroyed it
blogger was mysteriously imploded just when it was getting good
facebook was turned into an unusable hell hole of ads and non-chron feed
twitter... we all know what happened to twitter
tumblr ... lives on in a way
but now I'm here.Generally the billionaires seem to be in the business of destroying every ladder they ever climbed.
Better to rule in hell on earth than to compete fairly in heaven, I suppose.
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this depends on one's definition of politics (which is a word everyone has their own definition for), but sure. I think it's safe to say that any system that features powerful interests is one where you'll see the local journalism reflecting those interests.
The way it was put to me once is that it's human nature for editors to consider who will be happy, and how happy, and who will be angry, and how angry, if the story goes to print. Because this is news media it is seen as an inherently political decision by others, but really it's just an extension of how most people gauge social considerations when deciding what they should do and how they should act. In this model it is the aggregate of such small banalities that constitute the force that you sum up as political.
