The Atlantic: "Is American Journalism Headed Towards an 'Extinction-Level Event'?"

Dear Jesus, please, I don't ask for much.

Is American Journalism Headed Toward an 'Extinction-Level Event'?

The news industry has been in decline for decades, but the latest round of layoffs is especially ominous.

By Paul Farhi

For a few hours last Tuesday, the entire news business seemed to be collapsing all at once. Journalists at Time magazine and National Geographic announced that they had been laid off. Unionized employees at magazines owned by Condé Nast staged a one-day strike to protest imminent cuts. By far the grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper west of the Washington, D.C., area. After weeks of rumors, the paper announced that it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom.

My dick's so hard it just got hired by Fani Willis.

...

What makes this so unnerving is the fact that the meltdown has come amid--and in seeming defiance of--a generally booming economy.

LOL.

Dear Diary, why doesn't anyone trust the media? Me don't understand.

...

It's the same old story, only worse. Since the 2020 presidential election, Facebook has steadily reduced the amount of news that users see in their feed, wiping out a major source of traffic and, as a result, ad revenue. Meanwhile, the 2024 cycle has yet to deliver the expected "Trump bump"--the surge of public interest and subscription revenue generated by fascination with, or alarm over, the previous president--and it may never come.

I'm just going to go out on a limb and say you're not seeing a "Trump bump" BECAUSE YOU'RE ACTIVELY CENSORING ALL TRUMP STORIES.

You can't fear the devil if everyone says the devil doesn't exist!

To the contrary, some studies suggest that "news fatigue" has reduced audience demand for journalism in the post-pandemic era.

More like "fake news fatigue." We just don't believe you any more. We don't believe a word of what you say. Listening to you is like listening to cats. Cats have an agenda, a very narrow and stupid agenda, and never stop caterwauling that agenda.

Like you.

By far the greatest damage to the news ecosystem over the past 20 years has been at the local level. Nearly all of the 2,900 newspapers that have closed or merged since 2005 have been small weeklies, according to researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This has left broad swaths of the country lacking professional reporting of any kind.

Psst: They lacked "professional reporting" before, too.

...

"As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked," observed PEN America in a 2019 white paper. "With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office." Not all citizens, though. A weakened local press corps is a gift to someone like George Santos, whose serial fabrications went mostly (if not entirely) unreported during his campaign for Congress.

Who's reporting on the excess deaths crisis? Nobody, right?

Is that because of "weakened local newspapers" or because the entire media is a corrupt leftwing propaganda machine that has the maturity of a three year old and can never admit "I was wrong"?

...

Some have called for direct and muscular government intervention.

LOL, I'll bet. We all knew this pitch was coming, right?

Policy proposals include tax credits for publications that hire reporters and for advertisers that place ads in those publications, as well as increased government spending on public-service ads.

Fuck you. I will literally join a guerilla warfare unit before I allow you to take my money to propagandize against me.

A potentially more powerful mechanism: a law compelling Google and Facebook to compensate publishers for the news content the tech companies display on their platforms.

Failing industry brainstorms rent-seeking schemes, film at 11.

...

Among those who wish Congress would act is [LA Times owner] Soon-Shiong, who responded to criticism from Democratic lawmakers by urging them to pass a law to support news organizations. "I'd like to put the question to them," he wrote, according to the Times' own coverage. "What can they do to help preserve a free and robust press, one that is instrumental in upholding our democracy?"

LOL, rich man buys into a dying industry, loses money, demands government make up his losses. Film at 11.

It's a fair question. The news industry has been in steady decline for two decades. Expecting some kind of free-market-based turnaround is lunacy. If journalism is essential for preserving democratic self-government, perhaps only democratic self-government can preserve journalism.

Or you could try not lying about everything, and demanding the government censor anyone who points out that you're lying.

But you'll never try that. So you'll have to go extinct.

And just to prove that: All through the covid hysteria, the media scolded Americans that they must accept being locked up and absolutely must accept their kids being locked out of schools. And they swore that Zoom lessons would be just as good as in-person losing.

This was a lie pushed by the teachers unions and other Democrat pressure groups.

Now that the evidence is in and the school shutdowns resulted in kids falling a year or more behind -- there is still no apology from the leftist propaganda outlets that destroyed America's children.

The devastating impact of pandemic-era policies on kids' educations is too great to ignore, although school districts are doing everything they can to hide it by lowering standards and dropping tests altogether.

The New York Times' Editorial Board member Brent Staples has a short piece on their blog The Point, that touches on this point: time is running out to do anything about the disaster, if there ever was any time available to reverse the damage in the first place.

Staples' short acknowledgment of the problem is mildly refreshing, but as Dr. Prasad points out, it obscures the fact that The New York Times bears a considerable amount of responsibility for creating this problem in the first place.

But no apology.

Not even a Whoops! Whoopsie!

On January 18th, the NY Time bravely admitted that... mistakes were made.

By who?

Let's not get into that.

Some pandemic mistakes were inevitable... But others betrayed an ideological intransigence. The obvious example was long-term school closures, mostly in blue states, which we now know caused significant delays in learning, especially among the most vulnerable populations with the fewest resources. In many places during the pandemic, to suggest that kids might suffer learning loss or social and emotional consequences was tantamount to wishing death upon teachers. Forbidding socializing among young children denied them the development of social skills, yet to advocate otherwise could get you kicked out of a parent group chat [or worse, you might lose your job]"

Whose "ideological intransigence"? And which propagators and enforcers of ideological conformity were responsible for this?

Any idea, New York Times?

No?

Remember, these same institutions want you censored, deplatformed, demonetized, and de-banked (yes that is a word, Geniuses of SNL) if you get anything wrong.

But for them...?

Getting everything wrong is not only permitted -- it's the noblest calling.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:00 PM

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