Amerika

At this point, American free market news reads like Tass did in the 1980s: basically praising Communism via civil rights, and championing the new audience of non-White Americans taking over what is left of the dying Republic.

We might wonder how this happened but luckily, market forces explain the death of news:

In her book Ghosting the News, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that her old paper, the Buffalo News, was once so flush that, for many years, “the News would send a million dollars a week” to its owner, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. But after the Internet destroyed the advertising moat that had protected newspaper revenues for more than a century, editors and publishers stripped down the old newspaper, including local sections, to a more basic package to cut costs.

In 1940, when the population was less than half of today’s, American newspaper circulation was greater. Newspapers lost audience not just to the Internet but to cable, TV and radio, as well as to the non-news functions found on smartphones. The advertising dollars that once helped to support local news fled for the Web, where ads could be better paired to content—sometimes at a lower cost—to sell an advertiser’s wares. As Google economist Hal Varian put it in 2013, pure news had “very high social value to interested readers” but “low commercial value due to the difficulty of showing contextual relevant ads.”

In other words, the bottom fell out of the market, so the market turned to cater to its most devoted followers, Leftists, who consume more news.

At the same time, they cut costs. Why hire intelligent writers when you can find some idiot willing to blast out propaganda full time? These get the same amount of clicks, since people on social media tend to read headlines not stories.

Similarly, social media caters to only a small portion of the population, but since these people are on the sites all day, they constitute its bread and butter, so it caters to them.

This mirrors the rise of Leftism itself: it appeals to an audience of misfits and outsiders, but because they are fanatical since they have nothing else in their lives, they generate disproportionate noise and get more attention than those who are living normal lives and have no need for or interest in equality.

Tags: media, news, social media