Comment by pritovido
6 years ago
The problem is in who owns the mass media.
Newspapers are bankrupt, specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state(newspapers own properties in the center of cities that are very expensive) than with journalism.
Newspapers gold days are long gone.
So when someone buys it, it is not for making good journalism but for buying a propaganda channel for the owner's own interest.
The good journalist do not matter, if they say anything that the owner does not approve they are instantly fired. So they auto censor themselves.
Journalist are people too, they have families that need shelter and food. Being independent usually means almost starving. Young idealistic single people usually do that until they pick the comfortable alternative.
> specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state
This is verifiably untrue. As a public company, their balance sheets are public, and almost 90% of their revenue is accounted for by subscriptions and advertising.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...
That’s true now because they sold their headquarters. But in fact they earned more from that sale than they had in many prior years of operations combined. So the essence of the comment was spot on in the case of the NYT.
Wouldn't that be kind of like saying that I'm a real estate baron instead of a Software Developer, because I own a house that is worth many years of my salary as a software developer combined?
I haven't looked at the NYT balance sheets at all recently, so it's possible that I'm off the mark here, but a one time sale of a headquarters does not make them a real-estate company in my mind. To do that, you would need to demonstrate to me that they are regularly engaging in the transaction of property and buildings, instead of a one time sale.
I'm not convinced that this is a new problem. Newspapers used to make money, but they have always been owned by someone rich enough to buy a printing press.
What's different now is that people have more access to primary sources. The story says that the boy was 11, because kids in that grade are usually 11 and the reporter was lazy, but the boy was really 12.
In the world where only one organization in the city has a printing press, the boy is now officially 11 years old because nobody who knows any better has the means to contradict it. In the world where your cat can get more hits on YouTube than there are people in New York City, the inaccuracies get publicized left and right, and then, rightly or wrongly, people lose faith in the news media.
This is kind of what we asked for. Give everyone a chance to speak to the world instead of only a privileged few and you get all the stories instead of only the rich man's story.
The problem now is instead of one party telling you a lie you didn't know was a lie, you have two parties saying contrary things and you know they can't both be right but the average person has no way to know who to believe and also doesn't have the capacity to verify everything personally.
So we end up with camps who are absolutely convinced that the other camp is nothing but angry malicious idiots who can't see the truth, even though that's what they think about you.