7 years ago
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Matt Taibbi on the Summer of the Media Shill
Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news. "For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers." He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others." American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.
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Journalism is dead. Taibbi is one of the very few journalists left in the world. People don't want the truth, they want to be entertained. The truth scares the shit out of most people.
People have always wanted to be entertained. The problem is that journalism outfits now answer to corporate interests, and corporate interests are driven by profits. Therefore corporations put entertainment at a higher priority than journalism. There's very little competition to keep them honest since the rules were relaxed to allow a single person or organization to own multiple media outlets.
We need to break up Big Media and return to the rules that kept the news organizations independent and competing with each other to maintain journalistic standards.
Yeah, the problem is that they don't want competition because it eats into their profits. And, they own the people who make the laws. So, good luck with any change that could be considered positive for the average person.