{"id":56414,"date":"2021-01-11T19:19:51","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T00:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56414"},"modified":"2021-01-14T08:38:10","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T13:38:10","slug":"we-need-a-new-media-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56414","title":{"rendered":"We Need a New Media System"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

We Need a New Media System<\/a><\/h3>\n

If you sell culture war all day, don\u2019t be surprised by the real-world consequences<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.<\/p>\n

Media firms work backward. They first ask, \u201cHow does our target demographic want to understand what\u2019s just unfolded?\u201d Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s why\u00a0Fox News\u00a0<\/em>uses the term, \u201cPro-Trump protesters<\/a>,\u201d while\u00a0New York<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>use \u201cInsurrectionists.\u201d It\u2019s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon\u00a0shut down the \u201cFree Speech\u201d platform Parler<\/a>\u00a0over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly\u00a0planned for January 19th or 20th<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the\u00a0Hate Inc<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the\u00a0Fox<\/em>-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a \u201cJust the facts\u201d newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.<\/p>\n

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan?\u00a0Fox\u00a0<\/em>slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for \u201ceconomic reasons.<\/a>\u201d The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>counters by running a story about how the caravan\u00a0was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House<\/a>\u00a0staring at poor results in midterm elections.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We Need a New Media System If you sell culture war all day, don\u2019t be surprised by the real-world consequences The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media. Media firms work backward. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[496,3733,512,30824,827,1920],"class_list":["post-56414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-mainstream-media","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-media","tag-tk-news","tag-united-states","tag-us-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}