patrick.net

Good video. Why can't American news be this good?

Dan8267 says

Why can't American news be this good?

Ben Bagdikian warned about this issue in 1983.

BEN BAGDIKIAN: It’s the fact that if you have competition, and if you think that you have to, that you will change the paper to fit the needs of your audience, that that really does work, because the audience in San Francisco— as a matter of fact, the audience in the United States as a whole—much more liberal than its newspapers, much more open to serious news about things they care about than most papers give them. But most papers can concentrate on the content that will attract ads and that will be minimally troublesome and will cost as little as possible. And if it takes live reporters to cover things in the city, then that’s expensive. Local stories cost almost twice as much as the stories that come out of the syndicated machines and newspapers will prefer. If they have competition, they will start covering things in a live way. And if they have competition, they will be forced to be closer to the needs and wants of the audience that they say they’re serving.

Monopoly is pervasive and media is no exception.

A meritocracy of failure.

Excellent video - watch the second half later. TY Man with No Name.

On the topic of monopolies, I found this interview interesting.

From the interview:

What you see among regulators in the United States is people moving “back and forth,” but regulatory capture is not just people moving back and forth. It’s the ideological thing: if you control the ideology, then the regulators, when they look at something, they don’t see the problem. It’s not that they’re afraid to enforce something: before they become afraid, they have already dismissed the problem entirely. That is why an ideological revolution of the kind that we had can be so powerful for so long. What we have is capture of the regulators’ minds, which is a much more sophisticated form of capture than putting money in their pockets or a promise of a future job. Even the ones who are careerists, who had no intentions of going to the private sector, are still controlled by the same set of ideas.

This is fantastic on the Libertarian Utopia BS:

The modern libertarian movement is one of the most sophisticated Orwellian creations we’ve ever seen in the United States. They sing liberty, but they are the vanguard of the plutocrats. People who aren’t that sophisticated or well educated, but distrust power in the same way that their grandparents did, they listen to the libertarians, and the libertarians sound exactly like what they believe.

Dan8267 says

Why can't American news be this good?

PBS news hour.

marcus says

Dan8267 says

Why can't American news be this good?

PBS news hour.

Where to begin?

1) The OP posted already a thread on Thomas Frank and his book. @uomo_senza_nome_0, please don't become another tovbot, spraying the home page with endless threads about the Hyperloop.

2) Calling RT "good" is a significant oversimplification. RT is President Putin's ongoing critique of America, definitely worth considering but not a replacement for an objective news source. If you want informative news, you're going to have to switch off the idiot box and read.

3) PBS NewsHour has become the American government/corporate news, the echo chamber of the corporate state, including the relentless push for Obamneycare and the military industrial complex. Shields&Brooks presented "both" sides of the Obamneycare case with Mark Shields literally praying SCOTUS would uphold it, and David Brooks agreeing that would be the responsible thing to do, and then presto: NewsHour gets a new corporate underwriter, UnitedHealth Group, which wrote the Obamneycare website and sells policies on the exchanges and profits from selling the medical "services" that Obamneycare covers. Federal courts were about equally divided on the matter, but you would never have got any clue about that from the team players at the NewsHour. NewsHour coverage of Israel has become equally lopsided and uncritical: the weapons we bought for the government are being used and working as designed, so we will need to buy more, and so on, basically the opposite side from al Jazeera and Democracy Now; about the only sources reporting actual policy debate are the Israeli press, where even in war they continue arguing about policy. Back when Canadian Robin MacNeil worked at the News Hour, it was the best, but then he retired and USMC Jim Lehrer ran the show with no counterpoint, and now he's retired too and it's become a reverse barometer.

Seriously, if you want a clue about anything, don't expect the idiot box to substitute for reading. The idiot box is good for infotainment, but not news.

curious2 says

Calling RT "good" is a significant oversimplification. RT is President Putin's ongoing critique of America, definitely worth considering but not a replacement for an objective news source. If you want informative news, you're going to have to switch off the idiot box and read.

First, I only called RT America "good" news. RT Russia is an entirely different matter.

Of course Putin uses RT America to expose the bad things about America, but that's the entire point of news. That's why it's called the fourth estate. And if RT America reported false information, I'd gladly call it propaganda like I call Fox News, but it doesn't. RT America is basically American journalists working for an organization that gives them the go-ahead to report the ugly truth about America, as long as they don't report any ugly truths about Russia. So, RT America is good for American news, but not Russian, and every RT News post on PatNet has been about America.

Unfortunately, American news organizations refuse to cover the ugly truth about America, with a few exceptions like NPR and PBS to a limited degree, because it would cost them access and advertisers. I'm sure American news covers the ugly truth about Russia pretty well, but I'm not as much interested in that because I don't live in Russia.

European news, in my opinion, is also way better at reporting on American news, but not as much as RT News, because the European news organizations still hold back.

curious2 says

If you want informative news, you're going to have to switch off the idiot box and read.

Text news outlets can be as idiotic and untruthful as video. I wouldn't discount any media because of its form. There are informative videos and there are a multitude of propaganda magazines, newspapers, and blogs. The source matters more than the format.

Dan8267 says

Text news outlets can be as idiotic and untruthful as video. I wouldn't discount any media because of its form.

You can skim text a lot faster than video. The medium is the message. Video slows the metabolism and the mind, massaging you instead of informing you.

Dan8267 says

European news....

tends to be government run also, and among NATO countries to reinforce NATO policy, e.g. invade&import&surveil. If they present "both" sides of the issue, it's the civilized Merkel vs the neo-Nazis. It's their version of the PBS coverage of Obamneycare, with the calm cerebral Obama vs the most colorfully misinformed Tea Partiers. Muliparty debate among ideas gets reduced to bedtime stories and easily videographed juxtapositions, e.g. scary noisy protestors vs reassuring technocrats in suits. It's the machinery and process of manufacturing consent

curious2 says

The medium is the message.

I've always disagreed with that. Shakespeare written on toilet paper with shit is far better than a comic book written on gold leaf with the most exquisite writing of monks.

curious2 says

Video slows the metabolism and the mind, massaging you instead of informing you.

I definitely disagree with this. Video engages our two primary senses: sight and sound. We are evolved to process data in this format. Text barely engages sight or touch in the case of braille. The information density potential of a video is many orders of magnitude greater than text. Multimedia allows for interactive sessions, hands on problem solving, and real-time feedback.

I spent a good part of the 1980s, 1990s growing up on multimedia tutorials from the OSI Seven Layer Network Model to the parts of cells to astrophysics. Multimedia courses have always been superior to text courses simply because they can do everything text can plus a hell of a lot more.

Quite frankly, text has only one advantage over video and multimedia. Text is cheap to produce. Video and multimedia takes more time and effort, but if you have a large audience the value added greatly outweighs the additional cost.

Ultimately though, it is content that matters. There is nothing inherent about text that produces good content, and there is nothing inherent about video that produces superficial content. Hollywood is not video. Video is whatever you make of it.

curious2 says

PBS NewsHour has become the American government/corporate news, the echo chamber of the corporate state,

Absolutely. It is painfully obvious when the government programming takes over at PBS Newshour. In spades for the major news channels like ABC News. They seem to believe, wrongfully I hope, that most viewers are total morons.