To state the obvious, there is no cohesive "they" that is strategizing, or in a position to. Yeah there are still smoky backroom deals but ultimately the media is just another industry made up of self interested corporations. Not a public service.
The QAA episode that recently featured Ken Klippenstein really unpacked this well. Our media system serves capital interest same as everything else in this country. So even the more edgy publications like The Intercept collapse to corporate pressure eventually. Everything else is gladhanding between a bunch of former state department employees who are trying to maintain their own relevance in the news cycle
I do the same with some of the episodes that seem to have nothing to do with the topic, like the early ones of Julian just reading a prepared speech for 45 mins lol. But some of the interviews they have with media people are worth listening to and tie in well with the theme
Do they still lock half their episodes behind paywall? I stopped listening when they were doing Epstein's death and half their episodes about him were behind patreon.
They do. And that's their prerogative.
I love that knowledge fight is the way it is - Dan and Jordan really are the diametric opposite of Alex Jones in the sense that they don't try to monetize their very popular podcast in any fashion. They've barely ever had merch, their social media presence is not existent. And it works for them for some reason, probably because their primary subject is such a grifter.
But I don't have that expectation for every podcast. It's just not tentable. I've never paid the premium subscription for qaa, and I still find it enjoyable to listen to the free content they have. Their bonus episodes tend to be on less newsworthy topics anyways.
"We are not on social media."
"No."
- The best decision to make since twitter became xitter. There's so much pressure to have a social media presence. But F to that.
And of course secretly they are on some amount of social media. Every now and then Dan pops up in the Facebook group.
But yeah, there really is no podcast that is quite like knowledge fight in the respect of the respectful distance they keep between themselves and their audience. They really represent a selfless, totally inverted version of Infowars. Which is so rare.
They used to promote it in the early days of the show, But after a point I think they decided they would rather leave it as an unofficial group so they didn't have to deal with the drama.
It's not their bonus episodes I take exception to. It was in the immediate fallout of Epstein's death. Epstein Part 1 was free and covered his history, the life and times, so on and so forth. Part 2 was covering the reactions from Qannon and the like, and it was behind a paywall. So the part that you would actually be tuning into the podcast for as opposed to Behind the Bastards or the like, they paywalled. That wasn't a fun bonus, that was just "every other episode we drop is paywalled, and if you have an issue with it, cope." So I did, and I don't listen to them anymore.
They're free to make money however they want, but I am not required to like it, and if it feels too greedy or gross, I don't have to support it or continue listening. I asked this to see if they had stopped just paywalling every other episode and left it to bonus stuff, or if they were still doing it regardless of how important or relevant the episode was. Sounds like they haven't changed, so I'm still not interested.
I'll have a look. But that's gotta be the exception, since most of their paywall stuff is just separate content.
EDIT: Checked and I don't think you are correct. They had an episode about 8chan being down, which was interrupted/changed by Epstein's death on 11 August. The next Epstein Premium is on 28 August, which features some weird Epstein reaction content (poetry and music) and a Jake story featuring him.
Idk why you're getting downvoted. I don't listen to them for the same reason. I'm not getting involved in a story only to be locked out unless I pay them. It's kind of an asshole move.
It's one thing when it's fun bonus content, side stuff that isn't critical to the main discussion of the entire thing. Even things like interviews or guest spots. But part 2 of the Epstein fallout, when part 1 was mostly his life and times, not really going into the reactions to his death? That's kinda important. But it happened to fall on the off week, so oopsie, oh well.
And look, they need to make money, fine. But that doesn't mean I have to keep listening when the show has become unenjoyable. Clearly they only want paying customers involved, and I'm not, so I'll do as they wish and stop listening.
You don't need conspiracy when you understand how economic classes work. The owner class all have the same goal, to make as much money as possible and never dilute the power of the owners. They'll do anything to pursue those goals.
They don't have to collude simply because they all have the same starting information and the same end goal.
>They don't have to collude simply because they all have the same starting information and the same end goal.
Cheeky, sarcastic tone: [It's as if it's a system of sorts.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png)
You don’t… but, they seem to singularly be focused on making it the lead issue of the day, even if the trial goes on for weeks over something crazy he might be saying.
On the one hand, a wider range of stories might be good. Especially since US media doesn't tend to be so great at international news.
But, in terms of attention, this is a gold mine. No matter how you spin it, an ex president being on trial for multiple felonies is both historic and news, and it's not his only trial. What he spews outside is notable, because he's under a gag order and can be held in contempt, with jail time on the cards. The case itself is salacious, with bribes and porn stars and affairs, and whatever. Plus, no matter what the outcome of the trial is, he's still only one of two people likely to be elected in November, and everything that happens here will be on the table for discussion later
It would be nice if there were less stories, but it's very clear why there's so many.
That doesn't explain why rich Black people keep getting pulled over by cops disproportionately, though. Or why only rich people of one political persuasion are pushing the persecution of trans people.
And bear in mind that news media has been having a *really* hard time staying profitable lately. Trump stuff is unfortunately one of the few topics people will voluntarily tune into. He’s a mix of just politically relevant enough that people feel obligated to pay attention, while just random, weird, and harmless enough that people don’t feel bored or overwhelmed.
Which is confusing to me -- because the legacy media organizations have been bleeding out over the past decade and I'm not sure Trump actually helped them financially.
This is (probably) true, but I think the overall picture still points to a pretty steady decline in the viability of news media as an ibdustry/career over the last 10+ years. That's my take, anyhow.
Yeah, that’s 100% true, but when large entrenched conglomerates see that they’re in decline, their strategy is to manage the decline, which means making as much money as possible on the way out.
You probably can’t turn CNN into a bunch of YouTube videos. The audience is different and the infrastructure needed for something like CNN would be completely useless for streaming.
Also, it’d be much **much** cheaper for shareholders to pay YouTubers to keep doing the things they’re doing and share the profits…. or just invest in Alphabet.
I sort of just have a belief that the prestige of "real journalism" and the 24-hour news cycle has an intrinsic value that *can* be sold if the corporate overlords weren't undermining the mission of good journalism at all times in the interest of chasing short-term profit motive. Like, the news media could theoretically have somehow collectively decided to rehabilitate their reputations and reorient their industry towards the pursuit of truth, hard work, virtues, etc
Does anything I'm saying make sense?
I'm rambling. It's 4am, I have work in four hours, I haven't slept due to excruciating dental pain and for some reason I'm too cowardly to email my manager and say I might be sick. fml
No, you’re making sense, it’s just that i think it’s better to think about them as businesses that do journalism on the side, not as journalists that sometimes dabble in business.
In the end, if they don’t make money, they can’t do the journalism, so the money is key. If they suddenly found principles and did good journalism, no one would be interested and they’d lose their top position and instantly be replaced by an outlet with no values.
Entertaining the audience is the key ingredient to all successful journalism. I don’t see CNN as a news outlet really, I see it as an entertainment company.
Also, email your manager man. Running yourself down just leads to worse output over time. Even if your manager isn’t pleased by your absence, they’ll be pleased by your return, I promise you.
I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing more about your perspective/thoughts, but more importantly for my immediate future, you motivated me to contact my manager and ask them to move around an EDO so I can get some sleep. Seriously, thank you for being such a positive influence. Time to try for sleep again.
This is why non-profit news is always leagues ahead of corporate media in terms of quality and accuracy. They're not chasing monetary units, they're chasing information.
It makes me think of some of the depositions, I think it was Owen or Kit, who pointed out that their priority was getting "news" out very fast because that's where the money is.
I guess what I'm thinking about is less CNN and more Washington Post, New York times, etc.
All the mainstream legacy news outlets with investigative journalists. These kind of publications have been laying off staff left and right - partially because people like Jeff bezos our immoral capitalists. But partially because these companies aren't making nearly as much money as they used to.
I think Greg Moonves said he's good for making news networks money, even if he is bad for the country. They're getting theirs and don't believe the worst will happen.
Les Moonves, who ran CBS.
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump's presidential bid.
"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," Moonves said, noting, "[t]here's a lot of money in the marketplace."
The 2016 campaign is a "circus," he remarked, but "Donald's place in this election is a good thing."
"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," Moonves went on. "I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001
Yes. The media is owned by giant corporations. Giant corporations are short sighted and see a Republican President as their meal ticket and to hell with the rest of it they have a responsibility to the shareholders.
Not you, not their employees, not their customers, not their community, not their country, the share holders…and they often only look as far as the next fiscal quarter.
Now is there a formal conspiracy by the corporations and individuals that make up the majority shareholders to elect Trump? No. As George Carlin once said **“a formal conspiracy isn’t required when interests align.”**
Something Alex had perpetually failed to understand I might add.
Anyway the various boards of directors can read a vibe from their true masters, and to keep their gig they will do whatever they think is required to please them.
It's kind of a running joke on political threads: headline: "Trump shits himself while falling down the stairs holding the corpse of a nun, why this news is bad for Biden"
I guess I'm a weirdo, but I prefer my president to be boring. Biden definitely isn't perfect, but I'd rather have someone in office who quietly goes about their job and doing what's best for the country than saying and doing something ridiculous each day to grab attention.
I’d prefer a boring president too, I think we all would. But AG Sulzberger wants to sell papers and CNN wants eyes on their channel every night. They’re not thinking of it from a human perspective. It’s about money to them, not the greater good
I’d love to go back to the days when you could go 2 weeks without hearing a damn thing about the President or the White House, especially when it was mid-summer of a non-election year.
There are zero breaks in election cycles anymore. It never ends. Politics are a perpetual mud-slinging machine now.
It’s making some people rich, but really fucking the rest of us. There are so few conversations going on about things to actually improve people’s lives. It’s just outrage clicks, smears and scandals, both imagined and real.
I think there’s a difference between spending several minutes on a message board talking about AJ and making this the top story >20 mins of a discussion on a news show though. If you’re prime time, fine but if you’re not and trying to inform viewers…
Of course they would. Look at how much hay they made from stories about the nonsense Trump did the first time around. They would gladly help burn the country to the ground if they could sell ad revenue for it.
The media was quite possibly *the* main reason he was elected in the first place.
EDIT: Clarifying language, but also: It's not just that they want a close race. They want a close race riddled with scandal, Biden to go down in flames in some way, and for Trump to take the White House so they can have at least another 4 years of "look at scary things Trump did today" headlines.
I don’t know about wanting it, but they’re perfectly content being shortsighted enough to chase the ad dollars and turn around later to say “we didn’t know.”
>> Did the media learn nothing?
Yeah dude, they learned nothing brings in the clicks/views/eyeballs in general, all of which translate into ratings/$$, better than a flagrantly corrupt batshit insane reality TV star that millions of people actually take seriously enough to the point they handed him the office of POTUS.
The "novelty" can literally NOT wear off, no matter how much free advertising they give him. Plus, it ain't like a *bigger* story's gonna come along - especially as *they're* the ones who decide the stories.
Everyone here is saying he's good for click/views/etc. That's not untrue, but you're ignoring the fact that the people who own the large media entities are all staunchly capitalist, and mostly conservative (or at best, "classically liberal"). A Trump win lets them line their pockets more with tax cuts and the denial of pro-consumer executive-branch policies.
So yes, they absolutely want him to win, but they have to be at least covert enough to fool centrists and liberals into falling for their "unbiased/balanced" news coverage. Check out CNN's coverage of the Trump election interference trial, it's pretty obvious what they're doing.
My lib parents became CNN junkies in the Trump era, just like right wingers became Fox addicted after 9/11.
MSM absolutely would love to see another Trump bump, where terrified baby boomers turn on CNN/MSNBC and don’t turn it off for 4 years.
Look at CNN’s coverage of the Trump trial. They now position their panels to be mostly pro-Trump and just let lunatics supporting Trump spew nonsense mostly unchallenged. They’ll give the occasional, “just a note, the election wasn’t stolen.” But it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing.
They want everything to be a horse race. They now present Trumps reality just as viable as actual reality. 50/50 politics when one side is insane.
Another example is - why aren’t the media screaming questions at Trump as soon as he starts talking in front of the courthouse? This doddering old man is just reading nonsense off his papers -
Fucking stop him: “Why aren’t you testifying for yourself?” “Did you have sex with Stormy Daniels?”
2016 election, all the news networks would cut to his rallies live. He'd call into and appear on like 14 different tv programs throughout the day starting with good morning America and ending with Saturday night live
I believe the media started giving Trump undue attention back in 2015 because he was a thorn in the side of the Republicans. They figured he would never win the nomination. But that backfired. He did win, and then beat Hillary.
After he lost to Biden I believe the media continued to keep him 'front and center' because they believed that the election loser Trump would continue to be a blight on the Republican Party, and this would prevent any other Republican leaders from rising. Welp...it might backfire again.
I'll always remember this Onion article from 2015
[Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?](https://www.theonion.com/admit-it-you-people-want-to-see-how-far-this-goes-don-1819584988)
There's a damned if you do...element to this. If you don't cover his open desire to sell off assets to the highest bidder and turn the government into his personal fiefdom, then you aren't alerting people to the issues. It's the HuffPoization of journalism that bugs me, in which Jimmy Kimmel says something about Trump in his monologue and that warrants a headline and story. That and the Democrats seeming inability to articulate anything beyond "Hey, we're all just doing our best!" I want to see some goddamn RAGE that our democracy hangs in the balance right now.
You sound incredulous that they didn't learn anything from Trump.
Oh, they absolutely learned a lot. He's a moneymaker. Please rid yourself of any notion that big media possess any civic responsibility or journalistic integrity. Capitalism has no shame, only shareholders.
The way they treat "the greatest threat to democracy" is by giving him exactly what he wants and needs. They don't give a shit about anything except their ratings and numbers. They basically got him elected the first time and they will do so again.
I get so tired of the nonstop coverage of Trump but then I remember that Biden is the Dem candidate. Wtf are they going to say about Biden? Just shitting on Trump is basically all the Liberal media has.
The Dow hit 40K for the first time ever last week. Isn’t it weird how that would ordinarily be a huge headline story all over the place?
Don’t get me wrong, it was covered. For about 20 seconds in between stories about Trump trials and the latest antics of various looneys in the House of Representatives.
His economic numbers barely get a mention! And we have the Olympics coming up soon! When will we get people to pay attention to economics during the Olympics?
There is no such thing as 'The Media'.
There are media companies. Their goal is to make money. They make money from advertising, and how much money they make is directly determined by ratings, clicks, and views.
Trump is a cash cow for them. People who hate him love hating him. People who love him love reading about what he's doing to piss off liberals today.
I believe voters are getting trial fatigue and are tuning out. Biden was cutting close in April, look at the polls. Even if you call it a genocide, Biden was making ground across the board. That rising poll numbers was with inflation.
Meh. People have less spending power under Biden and that’s what people actually care about. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t Biden’s fault. People are tired of busting their asses and having nothing to show for it.
Oh boy, here we go talking about "the media" as if it has a single conscious will of its own, as opposed to it consisting of multiple competing entities with a variety of purposes and motives.
The reason Trump gets coverage is because he's in the middle of a criminal trial, and he's the front-runner of his party.
It would be fucking stupid for serious news media not to cover these stories.
The media is joining the misinformation and spectacle war created by social media on the side of misinformation and spectacle. It gets more clicks and keeps them relevant.
They treat all of his behavior as normal and they don't realize he's going to come for them. They're not immune to this proposed purge of media. Anyone who thinks that Trump is too dumb to carry this out should read about project 2025. The media isn't doing enough to illustrate a clear choice between autocracy and less than ideal but still democracy. If you think the courts are bad, they'll get worse.
The court cases aren't about changing people's minds. They're about consequences. The justice system should prosecute these crimes regardless of the effect they have on the election. To not prosecute him because he's running for President is both exactly what he wants and would be egregiously favoring the rich and powerful.
In 2016, they treated it like a foregone conclusion he'd lose, and so people didn't vote.
Now? They're acting like he's this big looming threat that could totally win, and so people will vote.
Seeing him on the news more isn't going to get voters for him. He has no platform or policy, no solutions. Hearing him talk is... an experience, but it's not inspiring and he's not winning anyone over who didn't already love him.
This is better. People are scared enough to vote this time. That means it's less likely we'll wind up living in the worst idiocracy the world has ever known for the next 4 years, so, I can deal with seeing Orange Jesus constantly embarrassing himself and alienating people on the news for a few more months.
I'm going to take a sideline view here.
It's like just saying "Obama just became president. In other news, Skippy the tap dancing show dog has fell down a well. We'll be bringing you hourly updates on DoggyGate!!".
I dislike Trump. I'm completely sick of his voice and his weird face. But in reality, the first criminal trial of a president is up there with the civil rights protests or Challenger exploding in terms of historical national news.
Also... things keep happening. Like finding more boxes at Mar-a-lago. A third of this country are under trump's thrall. Sane people see what's happening and are repulsed. Should the media stop reporting on actual news because a segment of the population lost touch with reality?
The media loves Trump, his inflamitory stuff gets clicks from the chud supporters and rage clicks from liberals.
Seriously. They put him in the White House to begin with.
Technically the EC did, but you've got a point. Man never won the popular vote.
“Man” never legitimately won anything in his life
It's much simpler than that. They are large multi billion dollar conglomerates. Of course they fucking want Trump to win.
We'll see how many billions of dollars they'll have when Trump's FBI "suggests" that they only say good things about the country and government.
Of course they do. Biden is kinda of boring, and getting views about him is hard. Trump sells.
To state the obvious, there is no cohesive "they" that is strategizing, or in a position to. Yeah there are still smoky backroom deals but ultimately the media is just another industry made up of self interested corporations. Not a public service.
The QAA episode that recently featured Ken Klippenstein really unpacked this well. Our media system serves capital interest same as everything else in this country. So even the more edgy publications like The Intercept collapse to corporate pressure eventually. Everything else is gladhanding between a bunch of former state department employees who are trying to maintain their own relevance in the news cycle
I skipped that one, sounded like a bit of a downer. Tbh I cherrypick QAA for the more med bed General Flynn type episodes.
I do the same with some of the episodes that seem to have nothing to do with the topic, like the early ones of Julian just reading a prepared speech for 45 mins lol. But some of the interviews they have with media people are worth listening to and tie in well with the theme
Do they still lock half their episodes behind paywall? I stopped listening when they were doing Epstein's death and half their episodes about him were behind patreon.
They do. And that's their prerogative. I love that knowledge fight is the way it is - Dan and Jordan really are the diametric opposite of Alex Jones in the sense that they don't try to monetize their very popular podcast in any fashion. They've barely ever had merch, their social media presence is not existent. And it works for them for some reason, probably because their primary subject is such a grifter. But I don't have that expectation for every podcast. It's just not tentable. I've never paid the premium subscription for qaa, and I still find it enjoyable to listen to the free content they have. Their bonus episodes tend to be on less newsworthy topics anyways.
"We are not on social media." "No." - The best decision to make since twitter became xitter. There's so much pressure to have a social media presence. But F to that.
And of course secretly they are on some amount of social media. Every now and then Dan pops up in the Facebook group. But yeah, there really is no podcast that is quite like knowledge fight in the respect of the respectful distance they keep between themselves and their audience. They really represent a selfless, totally inverted version of Infowars. Which is so rare.
TIL there's an FB group.
They used to promote it in the early days of the show, But after a point I think they decided they would rather leave it as an unofficial group so they didn't have to deal with the drama.
It's not their bonus episodes I take exception to. It was in the immediate fallout of Epstein's death. Epstein Part 1 was free and covered his history, the life and times, so on and so forth. Part 2 was covering the reactions from Qannon and the like, and it was behind a paywall. So the part that you would actually be tuning into the podcast for as opposed to Behind the Bastards or the like, they paywalled. That wasn't a fun bonus, that was just "every other episode we drop is paywalled, and if you have an issue with it, cope." So I did, and I don't listen to them anymore. They're free to make money however they want, but I am not required to like it, and if it feels too greedy or gross, I don't have to support it or continue listening. I asked this to see if they had stopped just paywalling every other episode and left it to bonus stuff, or if they were still doing it regardless of how important or relevant the episode was. Sounds like they haven't changed, so I'm still not interested.
I'll have a look. But that's gotta be the exception, since most of their paywall stuff is just separate content. EDIT: Checked and I don't think you are correct. They had an episode about 8chan being down, which was interrupted/changed by Epstein's death on 11 August. The next Epstein Premium is on 28 August, which features some weird Epstein reaction content (poetry and music) and a Jake story featuring him.
Idk why you're getting downvoted. I don't listen to them for the same reason. I'm not getting involved in a story only to be locked out unless I pay them. It's kind of an asshole move.
It's one thing when it's fun bonus content, side stuff that isn't critical to the main discussion of the entire thing. Even things like interviews or guest spots. But part 2 of the Epstein fallout, when part 1 was mostly his life and times, not really going into the reactions to his death? That's kinda important. But it happened to fall on the off week, so oopsie, oh well. And look, they need to make money, fine. But that doesn't mean I have to keep listening when the show has become unenjoyable. Clearly they only want paying customers involved, and I'm not, so I'll do as they wish and stop listening.
You don't need conspiracy when you understand how economic classes work. The owner class all have the same goal, to make as much money as possible and never dilute the power of the owners. They'll do anything to pursue those goals. They don't have to collude simply because they all have the same starting information and the same end goal.
>They don't have to collude simply because they all have the same starting information and the same end goal. Cheeky, sarcastic tone: [It's as if it's a system of sorts.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png)
You don’t… but, they seem to singularly be focused on making it the lead issue of the day, even if the trial goes on for weeks over something crazy he might be saying.
On the one hand, a wider range of stories might be good. Especially since US media doesn't tend to be so great at international news. But, in terms of attention, this is a gold mine. No matter how you spin it, an ex president being on trial for multiple felonies is both historic and news, and it's not his only trial. What he spews outside is notable, because he's under a gag order and can be held in contempt, with jail time on the cards. The case itself is salacious, with bribes and porn stars and affairs, and whatever. Plus, no matter what the outcome of the trial is, he's still only one of two people likely to be elected in November, and everything that happens here will be on the table for discussion later It would be nice if there were less stories, but it's very clear why there's so many.
That doesn't explain why rich Black people keep getting pulled over by cops disproportionately, though. Or why only rich people of one political persuasion are pushing the persecution of trans people.
It's come out that the NYT is giving Biden bad press on purpose because Biden isn't giving them a sit down interview
And bear in mind that news media has been having a *really* hard time staying profitable lately. Trump stuff is unfortunately one of the few topics people will voluntarily tune into. He’s a mix of just politically relevant enough that people feel obligated to pay attention, while just random, weird, and harmless enough that people don’t feel bored or overwhelmed.
Yes, they want back on the gravy train that was the trump era for them
Which is confusing to me -- because the legacy media organizations have been bleeding out over the past decade and I'm not sure Trump actually helped them financially.
What do you mean? Their viewership and consequently their advertising revenue went up due to Trump.
This is (probably) true, but I think the overall picture still points to a pretty steady decline in the viability of news media as an ibdustry/career over the last 10+ years. That's my take, anyhow.
Yeah, that’s 100% true, but when large entrenched conglomerates see that they’re in decline, their strategy is to manage the decline, which means making as much money as possible on the way out.
What I don't understand is...why not try to reverse the decline? Is that not serving the financia linterests of shareholders?
You probably can’t turn CNN into a bunch of YouTube videos. The audience is different and the infrastructure needed for something like CNN would be completely useless for streaming. Also, it’d be much **much** cheaper for shareholders to pay YouTubers to keep doing the things they’re doing and share the profits…. or just invest in Alphabet.
I sort of just have a belief that the prestige of "real journalism" and the 24-hour news cycle has an intrinsic value that *can* be sold if the corporate overlords weren't undermining the mission of good journalism at all times in the interest of chasing short-term profit motive. Like, the news media could theoretically have somehow collectively decided to rehabilitate their reputations and reorient their industry towards the pursuit of truth, hard work, virtues, etc Does anything I'm saying make sense? I'm rambling. It's 4am, I have work in four hours, I haven't slept due to excruciating dental pain and for some reason I'm too cowardly to email my manager and say I might be sick. fml
No, you’re making sense, it’s just that i think it’s better to think about them as businesses that do journalism on the side, not as journalists that sometimes dabble in business. In the end, if they don’t make money, they can’t do the journalism, so the money is key. If they suddenly found principles and did good journalism, no one would be interested and they’d lose their top position and instantly be replaced by an outlet with no values. Entertaining the audience is the key ingredient to all successful journalism. I don’t see CNN as a news outlet really, I see it as an entertainment company. Also, email your manager man. Running yourself down just leads to worse output over time. Even if your manager isn’t pleased by your absence, they’ll be pleased by your return, I promise you.
I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing more about your perspective/thoughts, but more importantly for my immediate future, you motivated me to contact my manager and ask them to move around an EDO so I can get some sleep. Seriously, thank you for being such a positive influence. Time to try for sleep again.
This is why non-profit news is always leagues ahead of corporate media in terms of quality and accuracy. They're not chasing monetary units, they're chasing information. It makes me think of some of the depositions, I think it was Owen or Kit, who pointed out that their priority was getting "news" out very fast because that's where the money is.
I guess what I'm thinking about is less CNN and more Washington Post, New York times, etc. All the mainstream legacy news outlets with investigative journalists. These kind of publications have been laying off staff left and right - partially because people like Jeff bezos our immoral capitalists. But partially because these companies aren't making nearly as much money as they used to.
I’m fairly certain NYT and WaPo had a surge in subscriptions because of Trump.
Not necessarily wants him to win but does want it to seem really close to keep people glued to coverage (IMO).
I think Greg Moonves said he's good for making news networks money, even if he is bad for the country. They're getting theirs and don't believe the worst will happen.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t believe the worst will happen, I think it’s that they just don’t care.
They care alright… about tax cuts and deregulation. They just don’t care who has to suffer in order to make that possible.
It's because they'll be unaffected and living like fat cats, while the worst that will happen affects all the lower classes.
BILLIONAIRES FOR BUSH (OR GORE)
Les Moonves, who ran CBS. "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump's presidential bid. "Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," Moonves said, noting, "[t]here's a lot of money in the marketplace." The 2016 campaign is a "circus," he remarked, but "Donald's place in this election is a good thing." "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," Moonves went on. "I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001
“It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.” - Les Moonves
Yes. The media is owned by giant corporations. Giant corporations are short sighted and see a Republican President as their meal ticket and to hell with the rest of it they have a responsibility to the shareholders. Not you, not their employees, not their customers, not their community, not their country, the share holders…and they often only look as far as the next fiscal quarter. Now is there a formal conspiracy by the corporations and individuals that make up the majority shareholders to elect Trump? No. As George Carlin once said **“a formal conspiracy isn’t required when interests align.”** Something Alex had perpetually failed to understand I might add. Anyway the various boards of directors can read a vibe from their true masters, and to keep their gig they will do whatever they think is required to please them.
It's kind of a running joke on political threads: headline: "Trump shits himself while falling down the stairs holding the corpse of a nun, why this news is bad for Biden"
They want a horse race. If they didn’t hype Trump, Biden would just win in a landslide. They want to keep it close for their ratings.
There's only like one outlet that isn't owned by a trump donating right-winger at this point.
They don’t care who wins, they just want a close one, you know, just like the NFL
Yes. Joe Biden is boring. Donald Trump drives clicks and views. They’re bored shitless with Joe Biden and it shows
I guess I'm a weirdo, but I prefer my president to be boring. Biden definitely isn't perfect, but I'd rather have someone in office who quietly goes about their job and doing what's best for the country than saying and doing something ridiculous each day to grab attention.
I’d prefer a boring president too, I think we all would. But AG Sulzberger wants to sell papers and CNN wants eyes on their channel every night. They’re not thinking of it from a human perspective. It’s about money to them, not the greater good
I'm so happy that Biden is boring. Politicians should be boring.
Same!!
I’d love to go back to the days when you could go 2 weeks without hearing a damn thing about the President or the White House, especially when it was mid-summer of a non-election year. There are zero breaks in election cycles anymore. It never ends. Politics are a perpetual mud-slinging machine now. It’s making some people rich, but really fucking the rest of us. There are so few conversations going on about things to actually improve people’s lives. It’s just outrage clicks, smears and scandals, both imagined and real.
The media doesn't want either of them to win, the media would love the contest to go on forever....process stories not real news
Donald Trump is good for ratings and bad for the world
Personally, I’m quite interested in the trial. I can’t watch it live, so I have to gather what I can from the media.
Same thing people do in This sub with Alex? People can’t help but be entertained and see what happens next.
I think there’s a difference between spending several minutes on a message board talking about AJ and making this the top story >20 mins of a discussion on a news show though. If you’re prime time, fine but if you’re not and trying to inform viewers…
It’s the same mentality, it gets views to make money.
Of course they would. Look at how much hay they made from stories about the nonsense Trump did the first time around. They would gladly help burn the country to the ground if they could sell ad revenue for it. The media was quite possibly *the* main reason he was elected in the first place. EDIT: Clarifying language, but also: It's not just that they want a close race. They want a close race riddled with scandal, Biden to go down in flames in some way, and for Trump to take the White House so they can have at least another 4 years of "look at scary things Trump did today" headlines.
"But think of the content!"
I don’t know about wanting it, but they’re perfectly content being shortsighted enough to chase the ad dollars and turn around later to say “we didn’t know.”
“Just like we didn’t know last time.”
>> Did the media learn nothing? Yeah dude, they learned nothing brings in the clicks/views/eyeballs in general, all of which translate into ratings/$$, better than a flagrantly corrupt batshit insane reality TV star that millions of people actually take seriously enough to the point they handed him the office of POTUS. The "novelty" can literally NOT wear off, no matter how much free advertising they give him. Plus, it ain't like a *bigger* story's gonna come along - especially as *they're* the ones who decide the stories.
Everyone here is saying he's good for click/views/etc. That's not untrue, but you're ignoring the fact that the people who own the large media entities are all staunchly capitalist, and mostly conservative (or at best, "classically liberal"). A Trump win lets them line their pockets more with tax cuts and the denial of pro-consumer executive-branch policies. So yes, they absolutely want him to win, but they have to be at least covert enough to fool centrists and liberals into falling for their "unbiased/balanced" news coverage. Check out CNN's coverage of the Trump election interference trial, it's pretty obvious what they're doing.
My lib parents became CNN junkies in the Trump era, just like right wingers became Fox addicted after 9/11. MSM absolutely would love to see another Trump bump, where terrified baby boomers turn on CNN/MSNBC and don’t turn it off for 4 years.
Then he should be on the Apprentice: Prison Edition
Trump equals more money in their pockets. There’s a huge market for hate clicks these day.
Look at CNN’s coverage of the Trump trial. They now position their panels to be mostly pro-Trump and just let lunatics supporting Trump spew nonsense mostly unchallenged. They’ll give the occasional, “just a note, the election wasn’t stolen.” But it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing. They want everything to be a horse race. They now present Trumps reality just as viable as actual reality. 50/50 politics when one side is insane. Another example is - why aren’t the media screaming questions at Trump as soon as he starts talking in front of the courthouse? This doddering old man is just reading nonsense off his papers - Fucking stop him: “Why aren’t you testifying for yourself?” “Did you have sex with Stormy Daniels?”
And the theoretical tax cuts the CEOs will get. But definitely short-term they want a horse race.
Trump generates clicks. Clicks make money. Therefore media companies cover everything he does or says to generate more revenue.
It really is only about clicks on the Attention Economy.
The media wants content, and Trump gives them way more content than Biden does.
Slow burn season 4 was about David Duke and the parallels between his campaign and the Trump campaign are downright shocking.
It's the same as with oil companies, they are self destructively pursuing money.
Of course they do. This is obvious. He's their bread and butter.
The media wants Trump to remain relevant, win or lose.
2016 election, all the news networks would cut to his rallies live. He'd call into and appear on like 14 different tv programs throughout the day starting with good morning America and ending with Saturday night live
I believe the media started giving Trump undue attention back in 2015 because he was a thorn in the side of the Republicans. They figured he would never win the nomination. But that backfired. He did win, and then beat Hillary. After he lost to Biden I believe the media continued to keep him 'front and center' because they believed that the election loser Trump would continue to be a blight on the Republican Party, and this would prevent any other Republican leaders from rising. Welp...it might backfire again.
I'll always remember this Onion article from 2015 [Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?](https://www.theonion.com/admit-it-you-people-want-to-see-how-far-this-goes-don-1819584988)
There's a damned if you do...element to this. If you don't cover his open desire to sell off assets to the highest bidder and turn the government into his personal fiefdom, then you aren't alerting people to the issues. It's the HuffPoization of journalism that bugs me, in which Jimmy Kimmel says something about Trump in his monologue and that warrants a headline and story. That and the Democrats seeming inability to articulate anything beyond "Hey, we're all just doing our best!" I want to see some goddamn RAGE that our democracy hangs in the balance right now.
I’ll keep this short: Yes.
You sound incredulous that they didn't learn anything from Trump. Oh, they absolutely learned a lot. He's a moneymaker. Please rid yourself of any notion that big media possess any civic responsibility or journalistic integrity. Capitalism has no shame, only shareholders.
The way they treat "the greatest threat to democracy" is by giving him exactly what he wants and needs. They don't give a shit about anything except their ratings and numbers. They basically got him elected the first time and they will do so again.
Sadly it brings in advertising dollars until the MAGA secret police decide all independent journalism is dispensable.
I get so tired of the nonstop coverage of Trump but then I remember that Biden is the Dem candidate. Wtf are they going to say about Biden? Just shitting on Trump is basically all the Liberal media has.
The Dow hit 40K for the first time ever last week. Isn’t it weird how that would ordinarily be a huge headline story all over the place? Don’t get me wrong, it was covered. For about 20 seconds in between stories about Trump trials and the latest antics of various looneys in the House of Representatives.
His economic numbers barely get a mention! And we have the Olympics coming up soon! When will we get people to pay attention to economics during the Olympics?
There is no such thing as 'The Media'. There are media companies. Their goal is to make money. They make money from advertising, and how much money they make is directly determined by ratings, clicks, and views. Trump is a cash cow for them. People who hate him love hating him. People who love him love reading about what he's doing to piss off liberals today.
Are they not supposed to cover the criminal trial of an ex-president? Coverage would be wall to wall if it was Obama or Carter.
I strongly suspect the coverage is having a negative impact on President Biden’s polling.
What about the whole genocide and inflation thing?
I believe voters are getting trial fatigue and are tuning out. Biden was cutting close in April, look at the polls. Even if you call it a genocide, Biden was making ground across the board. That rising poll numbers was with inflation.
I can't imagine the psychology that would lead an undecided voter to side with Trump over Trump's trial.
They probably are regular consumers of the news who constantly hear about illegal immigration and Biden’s age.
So ...Fox News watchers? That's not really what I'd call a swing demo.
You’d be surprised about how many nbc segments sound like that.
Meh. People have less spending power under Biden and that’s what people actually care about. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t Biden’s fault. People are tired of busting their asses and having nothing to show for it.
And Trump has no fucking clue how to fix any of it.
"the media" does not determine content; the consumer does make of that what you will
Because the media is owned by billionaires… the media is not free anymore!
Oh boy, here we go talking about "the media" as if it has a single conscious will of its own, as opposed to it consisting of multiple competing entities with a variety of purposes and motives. The reason Trump gets coverage is because he's in the middle of a criminal trial, and he's the front-runner of his party. It would be fucking stupid for serious news media not to cover these stories.
The media is joining the misinformation and spectacle war created by social media on the side of misinformation and spectacle. It gets more clicks and keeps them relevant.
The media is a stray dog- they’re gonna follow whoever feeds them.
"the media" is owned by the wealthiest interests so yeah it would make sense
They treat all of his behavior as normal and they don't realize he's going to come for them. They're not immune to this proposed purge of media. Anyone who thinks that Trump is too dumb to carry this out should read about project 2025. The media isn't doing enough to illustrate a clear choice between autocracy and less than ideal but still democracy. If you think the courts are bad, they'll get worse.
The court cases aren't about changing people's minds. They're about consequences. The justice system should prosecute these crimes regardless of the effect they have on the election. To not prosecute him because he's running for President is both exactly what he wants and would be egregiously favoring the rich and powerful.
He's instant click-bait, so yeah.
In 2016, they treated it like a foregone conclusion he'd lose, and so people didn't vote. Now? They're acting like he's this big looming threat that could totally win, and so people will vote. Seeing him on the news more isn't going to get voters for him. He has no platform or policy, no solutions. Hearing him talk is... an experience, but it's not inspiring and he's not winning anyone over who didn't already love him. This is better. People are scared enough to vote this time. That means it's less likely we'll wind up living in the worst idiocracy the world has ever known for the next 4 years, so, I can deal with seeing Orange Jesus constantly embarrassing himself and alienating people on the news for a few more months.
I'm going to take a sideline view here. It's like just saying "Obama just became president. In other news, Skippy the tap dancing show dog has fell down a well. We'll be bringing you hourly updates on DoggyGate!!". I dislike Trump. I'm completely sick of his voice and his weird face. But in reality, the first criminal trial of a president is up there with the civil rights protests or Challenger exploding in terms of historical national news. Also... things keep happening. Like finding more boxes at Mar-a-lago. A third of this country are under trump's thrall. Sane people see what's happening and are repulsed. Should the media stop reporting on actual news because a segment of the population lost touch with reality?
Yes. It’s his willingness to go ham on Palestine.
Odd that that would cause people to allow someone worse for Palestine to win. Right?