“Without #censorship, Hitler never would have achieved his terrible power, nor would he be able to hold it.”
“A #censor tells the #newspapers what to publish, so that in this ignorance the citizen will support the #government in #power."
September 30, 1938 | The Daily Times
Yesterday's papers...
#Photo
#Photography
#Photographer
#MyWork
#Newspapers
#architecture
#FleetStreet
#London
Swinton took a permanent position as an editorial writer for the New York Sun in 1875. Before he left the Sun in 1883 to launch a newspaper of his own, he delivered at a press dinner the speech he is most famous for today:
"There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves.
You know it, and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with.
Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things.
If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone.
The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job.
The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary.
You know this, and I know it;
and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"!
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes.
We are jumping-jacks.
They pull the string and we dance.
Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men.
We are intellectual prostitutes." #journalism #news
#media #newspapers #tv #radio #publishers #web #historians #johnswinton #1883 ">
John Swinton — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)
see also https://thirdworldtraveler.com/index.html
#press #news #newspapers
https://www.thedailybeast.com/washington-posts-new-boss-will-lewis-is-walking-into-an-epic-mess
If I'd wanted to buy the Post, I'd have subscribed to the Post. #BreakUpPostmedia #TorontoStar #newspapers #CanadianMedia
https://www.thestar.com/business/2023/06/27/toronto-star-owner-in-talks-to-merge-with-postmedia.html
The End of Sharon Randall’s columns. She’ll be missed.
http://sharonrandall.com/2022/12/how-to-say-a-hard-thing-dec-27-2022/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/28/media-groups-urge-us-drop-julian-assange-charges
‘ #PublishingIsNotACrime’: the #Guardian, the #NewYorkTimes, #DerSpiegel, #LeMonde and #ElPaís urge #US to #drop #JulianAssange #charges. #Twelve-years after the #publication of “ #Cablegate”, it is time for the #US #government to end its #prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing #secrets. #Publishing is not a #crime.
#media #dropthecharges #wikileaks #journalism #freepress #letter #newspapers #magazines #censorship #leak #journalismisnotacrime #freeassange #freespeech #weareallassange
In no particular order[0], issues and thoughts:
A: The product stinks. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, local publications, if they exist, are abysmal. National-level publications may be quality, but even that can be iffy. The typical large-city publication now consists almost entirely of press releases and foreign outsourced text, if not outright auto-generated copy. GPT-3 should be all the rage any minute now.
B: At the same time, there's a phenomenal resistance to providing information in sensible formats: tables or charts for quantitative information, maps for geographic (say: wildfire boundaries, natural disaster impact regions). The press appear to feel the public are entirely illiterate and are taking all possible pains to ensure this remains the case.
C: Partisanship has increased to the point that trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame.[1]
D: Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional phenomenon. Reading Kormelink's article, the claim is that "print readership has seen a steep decline over the last decades". That is a lie by omission: print readership has fallen almost continuously since the 1950s. World War II was the exceptional event that drove a strong interest in international news, at a time when broadcast media were not a viable alternative. And the Internet was in its extremely early stages.[2]
E: Historically, quality news was at best a minority interest, largely of business and political classes. Mass-consumer press began with the "penny paper" and John Law, not as a vehicle for delivering news to the public, but as a vehicle for delivering the public to advertisers. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
F: There's an extant literature. Read Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. Read Manufacturing Consent by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. Oh hell, here's a "short reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/
G: Stubbornly persistent percentages. For decades, listener support to public media stations has ranged from 15--20%. As with numerous other stubbornly-persistent percentages,[3] this seems strongly resistant to change. Perhaps it should be accepted as a given.
H: The incessent upselling. Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn't sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket. That alone was peace-of-mind justification for not subscribing even to print, and is orders of magnitude worse online. The public media variant is being added to other charities' solicitation lists.
I: Privacy. I don't want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I'm reading. The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.)
J: Relevance. As many have noted here, news really isn't. At the same time, the matters which are of significance ... aren't covered, and aren't rewarded in the market.
K: The market. Basically, information and markets don't work. Market dynamics turn quality information to shit and motivate shit in droves. It's the Sidam touch --- the reverse of Midas. Included in its entirety by reference: "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (2015) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/
L: Subscription fatigue. As streaming video providers are discovering, there are only so many services a household is likely to subscribe to, before cancelling, subscribing on an as-needed basis, or seeking out piracy sites. Entertainment and information budgets are limited.
The closest I've come to a solution is that media should be supported on a progressive basis. Preferably through taxes, though perhaps more feasibly through broadband service providers. It's the natural tollgate for payments, and greatly simplifies accounting. There's a reasonable degree to which actual readership can be assessed, though I feel that that alone is an abysmal basis for remuneration. Excluding specific prohibited behaviours, access from both readers and publishers should be without limits, though perhaps subscribers would be able to indicate specific excluded publishers (that is, no funds would be provided to those, from that subscriber's payments). Obligations for local coverage would exist. Separating the content gating from the physical infrastructure also seems highly advised.[4]
Yes, that's a very rough sketch, but it really seems to me the most viable and useful path forward.
Specifically excluded: micropayments, advertising (we tried that, it broke liberal democracy), NPR/PBS's public media model (it's devolved to corporate capture).
(Adapted from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449413)
Notes:
I've identified paragraphs by letter, for anyone who cares to respond to specific points. I'm hoping that this will tend to lessen the tendency to think of these as having some sort of ranking, no matter how much a lost cause that might be...
How you read that statement will, of course, tell much about which side of that divide you fall on. Likewise, this footnote.
Comedic understatment. Pedants, I love you, welcome to Costco, you're my third favourite people, except on the second Thursday of the month.
Just a few off the top of my head: literacy rates, espeically when rated by level (about 15% high, about 50% low or none), US high-school graduation rates since the 1950s (90--95%), food wastage rates (30--40%, though with improved transport, refrigeration, and processing, it now occurs later in the supply chain, at far higher cost and resource utilisation).
This concept has evolved from my earlier "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication"
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ That itself, of course, has numerous other precedents, including by RMS and Phil Hunt.
"Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/
#news #media #newspapers #journalism #NoGoddamnItMicropamentsAreNotTheAnswer #UniversalContentSyndication
Media Lens
(...) Following his death in 2004, we described how Ronald Reagan’s eight years as US President (1981-89) had resulted in a vast bloodbath as Washington poured money and weapons into client dictatorships and right-wing death squads across Central America. The death toll: more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, and 30,000 killed in the US Contra war waged against Nicaragua. Journalist Allan Nairn described the latter as ‘One of the most intensive campaigns of mass murder in recent history.’ (Democracy Now, 8 June 2004)
On the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme, Gavin Esler said of Reagan:
‘Many people believe that he restored faith in American military action after Vietnam through his willingness to use force, if necessary, in defence of American interests.’ (Newsnight, 9 June 2004) (...)
The basic rule: Official Friends of State are greeted by ostensibly independent corporate media with a wry, knowing, ultimately approving smile. Official Enemies of State are greeted with a sneer or a snarl.
In the immediate aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death on 8 April 2013, we found 461 UK national newspaper articles mentioning the word ‘Thatcher’. Of these, 29 articles mentioned ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Saddam’. None mentioned that Thatcher had armed and financed the Iraqi dictator. Links to torture and mass murder that would have been front and centre in reviewing the life of any Official Enemy were airbrushed from history. (...)
Also in 2013, following the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (...)
The corporate media version of events was nutshelled by an editorial in the Independent titled:
‘Hugo Chávez – an era of grand political illusion comes to an end’
This of a leader who had reduced poverty by half, having sparked a regional move towards greater independence from the ruthless superpower to the North. The editorial continued:
‘Mr Chávez was no run-of-the-mill dictator. His offences were far from the excesses of a Colonel Gaddafi, say. What he was, more than anything, was an illusionist – a showman who used his prodigious powers of persuasion to present a corrupt autocracy fuelled by petrodollars as a socialist utopia in the making. The show now over, he leaves a hollowed-out country crippled by poverty, violence and crime. So much for the revolution.’
For the oligarch-owned Independent, then, Chávez – who had won 15 democratic elections, including four presidential elections – was a ‘dictator’. (...)
A further example of five-scythe filtering was provided by recent media coverage following the death of Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. Tutu was one of the great leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, but he protested many other forms of oppression. In 2002, the Guardian published an opinion piece in which Tutu commented:
‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.’ (...)
Tutu even drew attention to the power of the pro-Israel lobby in smearing criticism of Israel as ‘anti-semitism’:
‘to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?’ (...)
Elsewhere, Tutu wrote:
‘The withdrawal of trade with South Africa… was ultimately one of the key levers that brought the apartheid state – bloodlessly – to its knees… Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of “normalcy” in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice.’
In December 2020, Tutu added:
‘Apartheid was horrible in South Africa and it’s horrible when Israel practises its own form of apartheid against the Palestinians, with checkpoints and a system of oppressive policies. Indeed another US statute, the Leahy law, prohibits US military aid to governments that systematically violate human rights.’
In a stirring example of just how low the Guardian has sunk under the editorship of Katharine Viner, the same newspaper that published Tutu’s comments made no mention whatever of Palestinians or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its obituary on 6 December 2021.
In response, a Change.org petition, signed by more than 3,250 people, sent a searing open letter to Viner:
‘Tutu’s repeated criticism of Israeli apartheid policies, and his commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people, are all simply omitted.’ (...)
The BBC made no mention of the issue here, here and here. (...)
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer responded to the death of Tutu:
‘Desmond Tutu was a tower of a man, and a leader of moral activism. He dedicated his life to tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed. His impact on the world crosses borders and echoes through generations. May he rest in peace.’
As the website Skwawkbox noted accurately in response:
‘But if Tutu had been a Labour member, Starmer would probably have expelled him, at least if he had the spine to do it, for comments in support of Palestinians and of boycotts and sanctions against Israel…’
Clearly, our media guardians of power were keen to say as little as possible about Tutu’s criticism of Israel without exposing themselves as outright totalitarians by blanking the issue 100% – 99% is a much better look, especially when reviewing the life of a courageous anti-fascist. (...)
Tags: #obituary #desmond_tutu #tutu #reagan #ronald_reagan #central_america #el_salvador #guatemala #nicaragua #contra #thatcher #margareth_thatcher #media #journalism #journalist #news #interational_politics #fireign_relations #power #bbc #the_guardian #inependent #newspapers #news_media #venezuela #chaves #hugo_chaves #israel #anti-semitism #apartheid #pro-israel_lobby #labour #keir_starmer
The Chicago Sun-Times would become a subsidiary of Chicago Public Media, nonprofit parent company of WBEZ 91.5-FM, under a “historic partnership” being pursued by the two legacy media organizations.
Confirming a report here, the board of Chicago Public Media voted Wednesday to approve a non-binding letter of intent to “explore joining together as one organization to grow and strengthen local journalism in Chicago.” Target for completion of the merger is the end of this year.
https://www.robertfeder.com/2021/09/30/chicago-public-media-acquire-sun-times-merger-plan-wbez/
WBEZ & the Sun-Times joint announcement: https://www.wbez.org/pressroom/chicago-public-media-and-chicago-suntimes-announce-plans-to-explore-a-combination-as-a-local-nonprofit-news-organization-in-chicago
For those not familiar with the US Midwest media scene: one of Chicago's two surviving daily papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, is in a deal to be aquired by the city's NPR affiliate, WBEZ, and operated as a not-for-profit news organisation under the Chicago Public Media umbrella.
This leaves the rather troubled Chicago Tribune standing on its own (though with its recently-installed blood-leeching capital-equity fund owner sucking what little cashflow remains). Crain's Chicago Business is, as it says on the tin, a busines-focused newspaper also operating in the city.
Numerous other mentions:
Crain's Chicago Business: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/marketing-media/chicago-sun-times-chicago-npr-outlet-wbez-merge
The Chicago Sun-Times: https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/2021/9/29/22700608/sun-times-wbez-parent-company-talks-combined-entity-chicago-public-media
As of earlier today, the Tribune lacked any mention of the story concerning its principle print competitor, though it did note the departure of yet another of its own senior editors, one of over 40 departures since May. They've since filed their own story: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-wbez-sun-times-merger-nonprofit-news-20210930-uianzlimx5dxljt2xa5qfybcbq-story.html
#media #PublicRadio #Newspapers #DeathOfNewspapers #MergersAndAquisitions #wbez #ChicagoSunTimes #NonProfitNews #journalism #chicago
:format(webp)/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/business/2023/06/27/toronto-star-owner-in-talks-to-merge-with-postmedia/bitove_candian_club.jpg)
