Tell me more: "Bail Out Journalists. Let Newspaper Chains Die."

I'm listening. Any port in a storm; any revolution after a pandemic?

Bail Out Journalists. Let Newspaper Chains Die, by Ben Smith (NYT)

The coronavirus is likely to hasten the end of advertising-driven media, our columnist writes. And government should not rescue it.

 ... It’s a moment of deep crisis for the local news business, which could have been blown over by a light breeze and is now facing a hurricane. But it’s also a moment of great promise for a new generation of largely nonprofit local publications.

The time is now to make a painful but necessary shift: Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms. That way, we can rescue the only thing worth saving about America’s gutted, largely mismanaged local newspaper companies — the journalists.

“We need to accept that what local news is today is already dying,” said Ms. Green, 35.

She had that realization 12 years ago when she was a local education reporter. Her newspaper, The New York Sun, went under, and she created a new nonprofit organization to stay on the beat she loved. Now, her vision has expanded. She has co-founded the American Journalism Project, which aims to create a huge network of nonprofit outlets, some organized around subjects like education or criminal justice, others focused on covering a town, a city or a state. She wants to replace the hundreds of local newspapers now owned by hedge funds that are slowly being bled dry ...

Taibbi: "Hate Inc. ultimately makes a forceful case that the American media is broken by design."

I didn't know, either.

Chyron: a text-based graphic overlay displayed at the bottom of a television screen or film frame, as closed captioning or the crawl of a newscast.

How do you know what you know ... what you believe you know? If I make a statement with which you disagree, what are your grounds for thinking otherwise?

Manufacturing Consent One Chyron at a Time, by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is a raucous updating of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s classic dissection of capitalist news. Its message is hilarious yet grim: behind the buffoonery of the 24-hour partisan news machine is a propaganda system devoted to upholding the power of entrenched elites.

Review of Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, by Matt Taibbi (OR Books, 2019).

 ... Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is a seething, if amusing, indictment of American political media in the Trump era. But, more importantly, it is a systemically-minded account of the actual sources of media debasement and the ways in which particular patterns of behavior are hardwired into the news.

Those unfamiliar with Taibbi’s past work in media criticism, invariably skewering, may get a misleading impression of the book’s content from both its title and cover ... (but) Taibbi offers us a necessary and timely update to the theories advanced by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their landmark 1988 book Manufacturing Consent and a series of illustrative case studies drawing on his own frustrations with contemporary journalism.

The basic thesis advanced by Chomsky and Herman was that management of public opinion in capitalist democracies rarely takes the form of overt propaganda or censorship, but is instead achieved through vigorous policing of what constitutes acceptable opinion such that, as Taibbi puts it, “the range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.”

(snip)

Taibbi argues that three significant changes since the late 1980s necessitate an update of the thesis pioneered in Manufacturing Consent. The first is the rise of conservative talk radio and Fox News, which triggered the partisanization of news so familiar to today. “Using a point of view rather than ‘objectivity’ as commercial strategies,” Taibbi writes, “these stations presaged an atomization of the news landscape under which each consumer had an outlet somewhere to match his or her political beliefs.”

The second major change is the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, which the author says trained reporters to “value breaking news, immediacy, and visual potential over import” while creating “a new kind of anxiety and addictive dependency” among consumers.

Finally, the rise of the internet and social media contributed even further to the general atmosphere of frenzied and atomized content consumption that today structures the news business.

(snip)

Again and again, Hate Inc. returns to its central insight that the media is first and foremost a business driven by the pressures and imperatives of large-scale private enterprise. Though this will probably sound like a truism to many on the Left, it is nonetheless a useful materialist explanation for why the media tends to operate within discrete partisan silos: not, as is so often suggested, because the country suffers from some vaguely defined culture of “divisiveness,” but because it’s what the current business model both necessitates and demands. With audiences cordoned off into partisan market niches, the media can more easily commodify resentment and its leading talking heads can always get a ratings boost by stoking outrage, engaging in conspiracy, or just plain making stuff up.

It’s unclear what the solution is, or to what extent Taibbi even believes there is one. The preceding era of the news business, taken on by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent, was arguably preferable to today’s media in that its ranks were more working-class and its leading voices less shrill. But the ethos of objectivity it projected was still the function of a business model driven first and foremost by the profit imperative (albeit in a somewhat more inclusive way) and ridden through with deference to corporate and national security interests.

Hate Inc. ultimately makes a forceful case that the American media is broken by design. Though no one will find this a particularly comforting thought, it’s nonetheless a liberating insight for those of us who would sooner suffer a hundred hours of sensory deprivation than sit through three minutes of Rachel Maddow talking about Donald Trump’s tax returns — or watch Kurt Eichenwald and Tucker Carlson do performance art on national TV.

The other side of Cokie Roberts, beloved regurgitator of the status quo.

I understand why the late Cokie Roberts was valued by her readers and listeners on the basis of being a woman in a man's game who broke through the glass ceiling. However, as with so many other aspects of our existence, there comes a time when actual content matters, and not merely the outer appearances. It's important to have another, deeper point of view. Read it, then decide for yourself.

Nostradamus of the Obvious, by Mark Dery (The Baffler)

On Cokie Roberts

WHEN SHE DIED THIS PAST SEPTEMBER at seventy-five, Cokie Roberts, political commentator for NPR and ABC News and well-connected member of D.C.’s “little village,” as it’s known to Washington’s inner circle, was lauded as a pioneering female journalist who gate-crashed the boys’ clubs of broadcast news and political punditry. Her friend and fellow NPR reporter Nina Totenberg remembered her as “always polite” yet “willing to ask the impolitic question if necessary”—“impolitic” questions being the equivalent, in NPR’s ASMR-inducing atmosphere of timorous “civility,” of the caning of Charles Sumner.

To be sure, she was a tart-tongued observer of the misbehaving schoolboys in Congress, armed with the sort of inside-baseball knowledge of Capitol Hill you’d expect from someone whose parents both served in the House of Representatives. (Her father, Hale Boggs, a Democrat from New Orleans, made it to majority leader; when he was presumed dead in office, Roberts’s mother, Lindy Boggs, ran for his seat, won it, and held onto it for nine terms, from 1973 to 1991.) But she was also a Nostradamus of the Obvious, a mouthpiece for conventional wisdom who channeled the worldview of the D.C. elite for drive-time audiences. As such, she provides an invaluable civics lesson. Putting the class loyalties of the strenuously non-partisan pundit on full display, Roberts showed us how the commentariat heads off challenges to the status quo: by policing the boundaries, in public discourse, of what’s reasonable and what’s beyond the pale.

When Totenberg eulogized her colleague, multimillionaire, A-lister at Sally Quinn’s dinner parties, and fond friend of Bush Senior, as “always the voice of people with less power,” listeners familiar with Roberts’s reliably smug, often snide dismissal of any candidate or policy proposal a millimeter to the left of D.C. orthodoxy rolled their eyes so hard they could barely dislodge them. Roberts “never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend,” asserts Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media?, a critique of the conservative canard that the media tilts left.

For a “founding mother” of “liberal” NPR, Roberts had an incurable addiction to uncritically swallowing and regurgitating conservative bunkum ...