The profit motive, when it gets into a fighting stance against something with a very different agenda, will usually come out ahead. The original purpose of th

The profit motive, when it gets into a fighting stance against something with a very different agenda, will usually come out ahead. The original purpose of the 'media', or journalism and the digital and print press which is its media, is to disseminate information. The direction/bias of the authors can be one of many things: - state actors attempting to disseminate ideas of the state and influence readers in its favor - state actors with a directive to attempt to be a place for different voices to be heard - private actors attempting to promote the spread of their ideas - private actors attempting to promote the spread of unique / diverse ideas .. skipping further down the muckraking hole - private actors attempting to promote eyes on their ideas, no matter what they are, because pairs of eyes have become more profitable thanks to programmatic advertising and the brokering of digital space next to the ideas. The word journalism conjures up the image of a flak-jacket-donning hero risking life to get to the truth to dissemminate it to the masses. That's how the word journalist is understood in the context of an article like this Slate article. But journalism also has one writer who actually writes the article, and someone(s) who write numerous headlines and tests them out programmatically in order to get the most clicks, and selects that headline for the article in question. It's all done very quickly. Thus, clickbait. Thus, the profit motive. Does TV Media suffer from that? Of course - it's been well documented how uncomfortable stories on the lines of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and such can lead to advertisers pulling revenue. But one major difference is that in the by now old days of TV media journalism, YOU go TO the information (by flipping to the channel). Today, stuff goes FROM the Internet TO you because they know you better than you know yourself. Facebook news feeds, personalized news search results, programmatic 'click here' type imagery in our periphery -- all of that seriously questions what journalism has become. Or perhaps, how it's packaged.