Money is an issue, but not the main one. When "The Message" is more important than anything else, people eventually tune out.
Same thing is happening with Hollywood and that has little to do with money - at least as far as production. "The Message" is more important than solid storytelling so people are checking out.
Seems to me the way out is to get back to basics. Stuff your opinions and indoctrination and just report the facts or tell a good story. Guess these industries will have to totally collapse before they reset back to something more reasonable. Oh well.
Not entirely sure this is avoidable with multicast media that must be self-funding.
You end up with perverse incentives left and right when you make media primarily a for-profit venture.
Herman/Chomsky's propaganda model - essentially. There's no way to "just report the facts or tell a good story" when the primary motive is profit-seeking.
I think you got it backwards. The media products are about "The message" because it sells. Even the fact that right wing pundits go batshit crazy about it in Twitter is a win.
When it stops selling, it'll die down. These US media companies are very simple minded.
And it ends up being self-perpetuating. You mostly don't have newsrooms any longer and much of the reporting is being done by young people earning pennies. Which makes quality even worse, so less money for decent journalism, rinse and repeat.
There is a fair bit of decent material out there but you have to seek it out to some extent. And most people still won't pay. You may not like The Economist for whatever reason but you can't really argue it's not good journalism.
I mentioned The Economist. I think The New York Times is pretty decent as well. For technology news, I don't think there's a single magazine source though Technology Review isn't bad for a broader view. I'm not sure there are any good business magazines these days though some sites are better than others. Individual columnists and newsletters like Levine.
The New York Times is a shell of it's former self and no longer really practicing objective journalism as far as I can tell.
Journalism is very nearly dead.
The only information sources I find worth my time these days are a very short list of blogs, YouTube (almost entirely on Lex Fridman's channel) and random links found here on HN.
Of course people were complaining about perceived political biases at papers like the Times decades ago. I don’t much care for Fridman’s interview style specifically but interviews can be a good source of info although they’re not really investigative journalism in general. Thought can be with the right topic and interviewer.
Of course many would argue that even journalism of the 60s or so mostly represented a very Ivy League east coast view of the world.
That’s very much a reaction to no one paying is it not? I remember journalism having been much better before online advertising came in and hollowed them out.
