Tell the news.
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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.
(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.)
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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 I love the hope in your vision. The problem with the news environment is that fact gathering is slow, "flood the zone" is fast, and attention is finite.
It is hard to demonstrate object permanence in this environment, and not everyone, or even most people, are far enough from precarity to have the space to form and maintain thoughts over time. If you don't stop and think, but just emoji and move on, you become a wind sock in your information environment.
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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 I miss the community of voices I followed on Twitter before that billionaire destroyed it.
I miss the community of friends I had on Facebook before Meta got into the business of selling vulnerable users to custom tailored psyop houses ("AI induced psychosis" but before AI).
I miss the open web. We didn't safeguard what we had from bad actors. We couldn't.
It was far from perfect, but I'm going to miss America.
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I do still think there is a role for pundits, but now all pundits are freelance.
This is why so much money and power focused on Joe Rogan. He's essentially a kind of pundit and the hope is that here is one place where it's possible to centrally control what is and isn't "the news" -- but, even Rogan faces backlash if he can't keep it feeling authentic.
Sometimes my liberal friends say it makes them sad that in the US we don't all watch NBC and CBS news hour anymore. The chaos is scary.
@futurebird Well said. I follow some MSM on the net in English and in Dutch. Sometimes German too. And believe my own ¨small but precious" list of people I follow here on Mastodon reflect on that with a sound mind. 100% safe ? No. But the best I can do. Good contact with most of my volunteer-team, with a few having vivid ties with 21th Century Hot Spots. That's it. No other social-whatever for 3 years feels fine.
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@futurebird I miss the community of voices I followed on Twitter before that billionaire destroyed it.
I miss the community of friends I had on Facebook before Meta got into the business of selling vulnerable users to custom tailored psyop houses ("AI induced psychosis" but before AI).
I miss the open web. We didn't safeguard what we had from bad actors. We couldn't.
It was far from perfect, but I'm going to miss America.
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. -
(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.)
@futurebird This country is a thousand scams in a trench coat. Shutting them down has to be a priority.
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@futurebird I love the hope in your vision. The problem with the news environment is that fact gathering is slow, "flood the zone" is fast, and attention is finite.
It is hard to demonstrate object permanence in this environment, and not everyone, or even most people, are far enough from precarity to have the space to form and maintain thoughts over time. If you don't stop and think, but just emoji and move on, you become a wind sock in your information environment.
I think the desire to not feel flooded is why we each gravitate to people who offer summaries, who make connections between events and facts and produce a bit of a coherent story about what is happening.
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I think the desire to not feel flooded is why we each gravitate to people who offer summaries, who make connections between events and facts and produce a bit of a coherent story about what is happening.
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."
1/
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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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"As the memory of the horrors of WWII fade, nations are forgetting why it was important to spend political capital opposing things like war crimes. Everyone is aware of the problem of climate change and some of this response is a bunker mentality, rather than meeting the problem and solving it some very powerful people are seeking only to survive and maintain their control over others."
That's my new of the year.
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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 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.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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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."
1/
@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.
