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The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature. This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening

by davidw 1y ago

The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature. This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-inconsistent-narrative-selection-and-framing-that-tends-to-favor-republicans/ https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in... The press has a lot of problems right now: * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance. * Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left. * Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources. IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.

ch4s3 1y ago
> * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs This has more or less always been the case.
- yepitwas 1y ago
  The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners. Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    My point is that they were always owned by some rich guy, and the heyday of old serious journalism was quite brief.

by davidw 1y ago

ch4s3 1y ago

> * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs This has more or less always been the case.

yepitwas 1y ago
The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners. Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  My point is that they were always owned by some rich guy, and the heyday of old serious journalism was quite brief.