patrick.net

Why

Investigative reporters get shot.

The media is losing the ability to select, moderate, and interpret the news.

It's as if once upon a time, there were only a handful of internet forums and all were moderated by Georgetown Graduate Neoliberals with a penchant for editing comments they didn't like and banning users they thought annoying, even downvoting posts. Then one day you could access forums from all over the world, plus a thousand emerging in your own country. And the original handful was like "HEY!!! We are the thought leaders, dammit! Give us our control back! These other thousand forums are run by Nazis and Crazies, and the ones elsewhere are run by Dictators, Racists, and Socialist-Nazi Propagandists!!"

The best example is say, China and Saudi Arabia. China could imprison some Falun Gong guy and it would be headline news. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia could jail 7 Christian Guest Workers for having a prayer meeting in a private home, and execute a witch and a gay, and most entities wouldn't cover the story; you'd have to dig for it on the wires.

I hope patrick.net is annoying to the Georgetown Graduate Neoliberals!

rando says

I hope patrick.net is annoying to the Georgetown Graduate Neoliberals!

Hell! patrick.net is annoying to me!! roflmao

This phenomenon is not limited to the US, it has encompassed most western European countries as well, fanning the fuels for "globalist elite" conspiracy theories. In Germany the media does everything they can to prevent the rise of the immigration-skeptical, anti-EU party AfD, and they do everything to paint Shillary in the best light possible and Trump in the worst light possible, and they also have partially embraced the new cold war on Russia against Putin. People here on patnet are mostly split in 2 camps, but what those promulgating the regressive left forget is that the "gleichgeschaltete" media and authoritarian, fascist government war machine have been working with the left now for a while since the right has splintered way too much into different fractions and since the small government movement gained momentum within conservatives. The ruling class feels much more at easy in bed with the left than with the right, hence the "new media" phenomenon is easily explained. Welcome to the new western Pravda.

What the proliferations of the internet have made observant people realize now, is that the media outlets have and always have been outlets of propaganda controlled by competing vested interests.
The government and the media have contempt for the general public's capacities, and not without reason. The media outlets are mostly concerned with spinning mythologies attractive to their particular polity, whether or not those mythologies are supported by fact or reason.
The power elite are mostly worried about fires being ignited in mobs, and how to put them out, not whether the general populace is accurately informed.

mell says

the "gleichgeschaltete" media

for those who don't know the term, it's one the Nazis used for "the process of successively establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society", literally translated by "synchronization":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung