"At best, these stories get a good chunk of the airwaves for a couple of weeks, and then it's on to the next thing."
This is the true power of the media. It isn't whatever lies or truths they may tell, though those are impactful in their own way... it is the way they decide what we think about at all. The true power of the media is to inflate some tiny incident that happened to one person to a national-scale, multi-week crisis... and to be able to take national-scale, multi-decade crises and bury them to the point that it's right down there with "conspiracy theories" to think about them.
If you pay attention, you can see this sometimes in action. They'll push a story expecting a certain reaction, but if they don't get the reaction they expect, poof, it's gone. There's always a huge pool of stories to draw from, far larger than they need to send any message they want without having to necessarily lie at any point. They just have to control the spotlight of attention to get the results they want.
Sometimes HN denizens talk about breaking out of the filter bubble. This might be a better way of thinking about it... instead think of it as breaking away from the attention spotlight being pushed on you by the media. Almost the entire world is taking place outside that spotlight.
The media needs something engaging happening to have something to continue to report on. (Even if that thing is just public figures reacting to a thing.) If they lob a bombshell and see it explode, but there are no further consequences to that explosion — no “sequelae”, as the medical profession would put it — then they can’t very well continue to report on the explosion.
What makes further consequences happen? Powerful people taking an interest. The media is the fourth estate, but only insofar as their actions trigger reactions in the first-through-third estates. For a news story to “continue to happen”, it needs a patron in a position of power to actually care about what was reported, and act in response, in a media-visible way. News coverage is, and always has been, a feedback loop between journalists and the public figures they cover.
Which implies that if something is a “taken as a given” practice among pretty much everyone with power, then reporting on it won’t get any powerful patron riled up, and so won’t get anything done to feed back into the news cycle.
Democracy continues to function, separately from all this; voters read the news, get angry, and pressure their congressman, who then pushes for change in the house, causing ripples in the bureaucracy. But none of that is able to be framed in an incendiary “continuing coverage” format, because there is no heroic narrative to democracy, only the snowball effect of small actions — so the regular news media doesn’t attach to it at all, so it seems to just drop off the face of the Earth.
But it’s still happening; it’s just happening in a way you can only perceive with “I watch C-SPAN” glasses on.
I used to have so much faith (naively perhaps) in the major news networks. Maybe they used to be bastions of truth but I feel that is not the case. They are just a mouth piece of the elites at this point.
They have us divided and fighting each other so we're too busy to see the real cause of our discontent.
So much truth has been censored and replaced with lies in the last 2 years. But no one is calling them on it? There isn't even an apology or a retraction.
Real news is expensive, that is why so much of the news has turned into opinion pieces - it costs almost nothing to publish people’s opinions but it grabs eyeballs for advertisers just as well as real news.
When it’s not opinion pieces they are usually promoting someone’s book or hyping up some Lifetime special.
Even before reporting really started circling the drain I always noted how wrong the news got technology stories, and I wondered if all the other topics were just as off.
> Even before reporting really started circling the drain I always noted how wrong the news got technology stories, and I wondered if all the other topics were just as off.
Yep, and the opinion pieces are just advertisements in disguise. So who are the advertisers paying for the content. They don't care about truth. It's just about profit or control.
Lowering quality and trading on your brand works in the short term, but long term, more and more people just quit those news channels, or quit reading the news altogether.
The underlying issue is that a lot of people can’t distinguish between news, opinion, and paid advertising. Not that the people are dumb, its just not a skill you are born with, and it is not something widely taught in schools. Instead of not watching the news they are getting wrapped up in whatever opinion their favorite Fox/MSNBC/etc personality is pushing. It is great for places like Buzzfeed but seems to be a loss for society overall.
This is the true power of the media. It isn't whatever lies or truths they may tell, though those are impactful in their own way... it is the way they decide what we think about at all. The true power of the media is to inflate some tiny incident that happened to one person to a national-scale, multi-week crisis... and to be able to take national-scale, multi-decade crises and bury them to the point that it's right down there with "conspiracy theories" to think about them.
If you pay attention, you can see this sometimes in action. They'll push a story expecting a certain reaction, but if they don't get the reaction they expect, poof, it's gone. There's always a huge pool of stories to draw from, far larger than they need to send any message they want without having to necessarily lie at any point. They just have to control the spotlight of attention to get the results they want.
Sometimes HN denizens talk about breaking out of the filter bubble. This might be a better way of thinking about it... instead think of it as breaking away from the attention spotlight being pushed on you by the media. Almost the entire world is taking place outside that spotlight.