Posted on 08/16/2011 6:39:08 PM PDT by abb
People positively lust to know what is going on. That's why Adam ate the apple, and why Ulysses went crazy when he heard the Sirens' song. Is it any wonder that people have been making a buck selling information ever since? Now, with the Internet (made possible by the dirt-cheap communications bandwidth of fiber optics and lasers as satellites), all of a sudden (in historical terms) people can communicate so freely on a global scale that the business model not only of dead-tree journalism but even of radio/TV journalism are shaken. Because people want to be heard, just as much as they want to hear. And because the business of journalism was always to sell the "sizzle" of knowledge but deliver only titillation ("'Man bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'") and irritation ("If it bleeds, it leads), leaving the thirst for knowledge and understanding unassuaged.It's hard for us, who have lived with the "magic" of electronic communication all our lives, and whose grandparent lived with it all of their lives, to grasp what it was like to not be able to learn of events until days and weeks after the fact. The commercial transmission of news via telegraph had a huge cultural impact. This was the opportunity which the Associated Press exploited to create a monopoly of news, and the concomitant cult of the "objective" journalist. The cult of the objective journalist is a central feature of monopoly news, so the associated press (not merely the Associated Press, but any journalists anywhere who are willing to go along and get along with the AP) cooperates in promoting it. The cult of the objective journalist is incompatible with the idea of the equality of the people; it is a hierarchy which is maintained by propaganda "pecking" just as surely as the hierarchy of the barnyard is enforced by the dominant chickens pecking the less dominant ones.
Perhaps in that context it is understandable that the culture of the news business does not permit it to adapt to the distributed and interactive Internet model of journalism exemplified by Free Republic.
Take a look at this.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia-20110817,0,632518.column
Social media crackdown? It’d be more than unsociable
In the wake of recent civil unrest, the thought of government’s trumping bad behavior with worse rules is disturbing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.