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The decline in local news likely plays a big part in the decline in American civic life and social capital. That said, $300M isn't nearly enough to even mitiga
by naravara 8y ago
The decline in local news likely plays a big part in the decline in American civic life and social capital.
That said, $300M isn't nearly enough to even mitigate the damage Facebook does to American civic life simply by virtue of being a data-mining, misinformation spreading behemoth.
Their business model is at cross purposes with the ideal of having an informed citizenry. The entire point of marketing and advertising is to construct a reality in which people are motivated to buy what you're selling. It is utterly indifferent to truth.
You can't have a medium whose every design pattern is geared towards empowering bullshit artists and fostering susceptibility to said bullshit and then just try to paper it over by throwing some cash in the direction of "local journalism." Seriously, $300M is the equivalent of spare change found between couch cushions for Facebook. This is nothing. This is just image laundering.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoName me a war the US entered that isn't World War II that wasn't coincident with a misinformation campaign published on dead tree legacy media. The truth is that mass media IS edutainment at best and completely misleading fiction most of the time. You get to pick two: fast, cheap, and good/true. If it is fast and cheap it is fake. If it is cheap and true it will take time to attain. If it is true and fast, it won't be cheap to get the information.
- r00fus 8y agoNational media is the problem there. Anything at that level is a target for misinformation campaigns. Local newsrooms are too many to thoroughly corrupt as easily as a national (or in the case of FB, international) media system. I'm not sure your "pick 2 of 3" is valid here. Do you have actual examples to support your hypothesis?
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoIt's just an old saying that is basically accurate about any human endeavor that is used to deflate sham projects that can never succeed at their stated ends. E.g. "I'll build a hydroelectric dam in 24 hours that will power the whole state and it will cost $1." Local news is even more beholden to big local advertisers who dictate coverage. So few people actually care about local political news that even if you threw resources at it, you would not find that many people who cared enough to pay attention to it. C-SPAN's ratings aren't as good as almost any other cable network you can think of, for example, and the same theme is repeated in local news. People care much more about things like real estate, crime, arts&leisure, and fluffy health coverage.
- gowld 8y agoWhy exclude WWII? US entered WWII via a false explanation of what caused the Pearl Harbor attack, and support for the war was kept aflout by propaganda.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoActual bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor regardless of the historical questions about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the attack.