The Newspaper Business

I've been reading A Flash of Green by John D. McDonald. I picked it up from Powell's back in January. I'm a little slow. The first half of the book was definitely slow going, talking about all the characters and their comfortable suburban life style, but the second half is starting to pick up. Or maybe I've just developed an interest in the story, not because of the first half, I only know the name of a couple of characters: Jimmy Wing, newspaper reporter, and Kat, works at a bank or something. Maybe something just changed in my head. Anyway, round about page 207, pursuant to a local political dispute over whether to dredge and fill the bay in order to build a new subdivision, Jimmy explains the newspaper business to Kat. I thought his explanation was spot on. Remember, this was back in the 1960s and local newspapers were still a thing.

"Kat, are you comfortable? Can you listen to a lecture?"

"I’m stretched out across my bed," she said, "but don't you

want to dry off?"

"I brought my towel along. Feet on my desk. Cigarettes

handy. Now listen carefully, dear. You're an intelligent woman. I

went into journalism out of a sort of idealism. I fell in love with

a glamorous gal called the newspaper game, and after I'd lived

with her a few years I found out she's a whore. She talks big,

sometimes, but she's bone-lazy, cynical, greedy and perfectly sat-

isfied with herself. Do I sound like a college sophomore?'

"Maybe . . . a little."

"So let's look at the facts. I think these figures are close. There

are seventeen hundred and sixty-one daily newspapers in this

country. Sixty-one of them are in cities with more than one

newspaper. The other seventeen hundred are monopoly- papers.

The Record Journal is a monopoly paper. Now here is the crazy

thing about a monopoly paper. It is the only form of monopoly

not subject to regulation. Regulation would be interference with

the freedom of the press. The A.N.P.A. would never let that hap-

pen. So, in seventeen hundred cities of America, including this

one, the publisher decides exactly what he will give the public.

We present the cheapest, dullest possible coverage of national and

international news, and all the bargain syndicate items. In con-

trast, our local news coverage is maybe a little better than average.

But the publishers—Ben Killian included—look on news as a

tiresome but necessary evil, and they resent the public for expect-

ing it. It's the only game in town, Kat, and its main, basic, pri-

many, unchangeable purpose is to sell advertising and make

money. Follow me?"

“Yes,” she said hesitantly.

“Actually this is a better paper than the average, because Ben

Kilhian doesn’t have any particularly strong opinions. Our politi-

cal stance is conservative Democrat on a local level, Republican

on national issues, which precisely reflects the point of view of

the advertisers. Suppose, as is true in many unhappy areas, Ben

Killian was a confirmed John Bircher, a witch-hunter, an Oppres-

sor of every variety of liberal thought and viewpoint. Then,

with no regulatory checkrein, no holds barred, he could make

happen here what has been happening in, for example, Boulder,

Colorado. He could have an outraged citizenship, indomitably

ignorant, purging their community of everything which did not

fit their standards of mediocrity. But Ben and Borklund have

merely the simple touching desire to make the maximum amount

of money with the minimum fuss. To do this, the paper must go

along with the viewpoints of the advertisers. So, if Ben showed

any sign of deviation, it is natural that the advertisers would ar-

range to move against him in the direct way of cutting their bud-

gets for newspaper advertising as much as they dare. Because they

can’t cut it completely and survive themselves, they move against

him in other ways, through the pressure they can generate

through their indirect control of the agencies of local govern-

ment. Clear?”

“It sounds so... cut and dried.”

The business about The John Birch Society in Boulder is a little curious, but Google found nothing. It could just be a stand-in for anytown where a firebrand got the local folks all fired up about something.

I quoted another passage in an earlier post.

Update June 2, 2025. In response to an inquiry I made, Caroline Woodiel, the Archive Manager of the Boulder Public Library sent me three clips from their archives. They don't really shed any light on the subject, other than you can see that the John Birch Society was active in Boulder back then. You can see them here.

View From South Africa

Western media outlets have often resorted to dumbing down societies by reducing global events to shallow soundbites or clickbait that reinforces convenient stereotypes, writes Gillian Schutte

Introduction to story from IOL - Independent Online, a South African news website:

Why Compete with a Dying Media? A Call for a Radical New Global Media By Gillian Schutte

The moment has come to question the wisdom of continuing to battle a wounded but still formidable behemoth: Western corporate media. For decades, it has held an almost unassailable grip on the global narrative, buoyed by wealth, political patronage, and an entrenched belief that it alone possesses the authority to define reality. Yet the years of reflexive sensationalism, patent double standards, and top-down editorial dictates have eroded the very legitimacy Western outlets once took for granted. The cracks in their façade are now impossible to ignore, with disillusioned viewers, readers, and even former insiders acknowledging that something profoundly dysfunctional lurks at the heart of so-called “mainstream” news.

She goes on for a bit and it's pretty good.

 Via RT. I am glad I can still see RT. One more reason I am glad I live in Amerika.

I probably look at a hundred headlines a day. I mean it doesn't take long, maybe five minutes. What eats up the time is when something sounds promising, so I take the time to read it. Maybe one or two out the hundred. I course I always look at the memes from Midwest Chick, Busted Nuckles and the Village Hemorrhoid. I enjoy them but the seldom get reposted here. There is a limit to the number of keystrokes I can make in a day and some days it ain't very many. Tonight I think I'm making up the week.

Anyway, every so often, something catches my eye, I take time to read it and decide to repost it or link to it, like here.

YouTube is Huge

Why David Gilmour Won’t Be On My Channel
Rick Beato

I only noticed this guy recently. I've watched a couple of his short videos and some of them are entertaining. If you are a musician or a music nerd you might enjoy him. But the first part of this video is about the reach of various video media and I liked that. The thing you need to remember is that although the numbers he quotes sound ginormous, there are a zillion people on the planet and half of them have access to the internet. Divide ginormous by a zillion and you start to get numbers you can deal with. Rick Beato is famous enough that he has his own Wikipedia page.

Joe Rogan Media Matters

The Joe Rogan Experience

Very cool and encouraging article about the fringe media, like me: 

Joe Rogan Gets New Spotify Deal Worth Up to $250 Million by Anne Steele February 2, 2024

Hit show to be distributed broadly, including on YouTube, rather than exclusively on audio-streaming service

I especially liked this bit: 

My friend Phil Bak casually asked me on Friday what I thought the marketing budget was for big media corporations.

“Like fifty million a year or something,” I guessed.

“Exactly,” Phil replied to me. “Fifty million fucking dollars. And they can’t find a single interesting thing to say.”

Via ZeroHedge

 

Taylor Lorenz, Stooge for Biden Administration

Because I am feeling lazy today, I stole this post from ZeroHedge. The original has several Tweets embedded if you are into that kind of thing. I find they are mostly redundant.

'The Entire Journalism Industry Is In Freefall': Taylor Lorenz Vlogs The Death Of MSM As BuzzFeed, Insider And Vice Jettison Assets By Tyler Durden

JAN 25, 2024

Corporate media is on life support. Driven to cut costs by sagging ad revenues and waning appetite for propaganda, layoffs and 'restructurings' are happening all over.

Earlier this week the LA Times laid off 120 employees, around 20% of its newsroom.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed and Vice Media - two former darlings of digital media, are looking to siphon off assets. BuzzFeed, which has lost over 97% of its value since going public in 2021, is looking to sell its food sites, Tasty and WeFeast. While Fortress Investment Group, which took over Vice in bankruptcy last year, is looking to sell its Refinery29 women's lifestyle site, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Fortress is in talks to sell Refinery29 after a failed attempt to find a buyer for Vice in its entirety, which includes its namesake news brand, production studio and creative agency, among other assets. Fortress is in discussions with prospective bidders for Refinery29, which saw a decrease in revenue to $30 million last year from around $50 million in 2022, according to people familiar with the matter.

Vice notably bought Refinery29 for $400 million in 2019, while Tasty was an attempt by BuzzFeed to generate revenue streams beyond advertising with direct sales of kitchenware.

The outlets join Jezebel ("Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth"), which was shuttered in November by G/O Media amid corporate layoffs, and Business Insider, which is now cutting 8% of its staff, per Semafor.

Time Magazine also laid off 30 people this week.

In 2023, there were over 30,000 workers laid off by media companies.

This is the largest number of cuts in employment since 2020 when Covid-19 was raging and over 30,000 workers were laid off.

The figure is also six times higher than the number of job losses in 2022 when several large media companies including Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney and others had undergone a series of layoffs impacting thousands of media workers. -Forbes

Taylor, Taylor, Taylor

Opining on the sad state of journalism is Jeff Bezos's vocal-fry champion,Taylor Lorenz, who said this week that "The entire journalism industry is basically in a free-fall," and that the LA Times' woes follow "months and months of layoffs in the media industry."

"And it's not just digital media sites," she continues. "Local news has been obliterated, the newspaper industry is cratering, radio is essentially dead - aside from NPR which has been gutted. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Conde Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to the New Yorker to Vanity Fair are on strike."

Despite her claims that she is a grassroots reporter that worked her way up from independent media into the halls of establishment journalism, Taylor Lorenz represents the quintessential media spin doctor.  She is notorious for her consistent and often ludicrous defense of the Biden Administration, as well as her constant attacks on the alternative media; specifically on conservative YouTubers and social media accounts like Libs of TikTok. 

She became somewhat famous after her exposé on Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik in what many argued was an attempt to dox and intimidate a person critical of woke activists (the initial story published by Lorenz contained a link to the woman’s work address and other work details.  A later version of the story had the link removed). 

She was also accused of lying in an article about coverage of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial when she claimed she had contacted certain YouTuber's for comment before publishing her attack on them (they say she did not and she had no evidence to support her assertions).  The Washington Post was forced to quietly stealth-edit her article in embarrassment.

The point is, Lorenz has made it clear by her actions that she views citizen journalists negatively if they aren't on the political left.  She has tried to sabotage them using dubious methods, and ironically it is this kind of behavior from corporate journalists like her that has led directly to the death of her industry.  It is this kind of biased behavior that has compelled the public to seek out the alternative media and abandon legacy platforms.   

No matter how much you hate journalists, it's not enough

In a 2022 Pew Research poll of US mainstream journalists of all ages, over 55% said that they don't believe all sides of any given story deserve equal coverage.  The youngest journalists (ages 18-29) were the worst, with 63% saying they did not agree with equal coverage.  Lorenz reflects this very sentiment as she rolls her eyes at the notion of objectivity in news writing.   

In a similar poll, over 76% of the general public said they want equal coverage of all sides by the media.  The disconnect between establishment news sources and what their audience wants is immense.  Given that progressive ideology is greatly over-represented in most corporate media, the public has simply sought out the other side of the story.       

Lorenz argues that she wouldn't want to live in a world where people get their news from sixty second TikToks (while posting her appeal to TikTok), but she knows full well that it's not TikTok journalism that's taking the legs out from under organizations like The Washington Post – It's the growing prevalence of the alternative media which she has lambasted for a large portion of her career.

That said, ultimately the picture Lorenz paints is actually a positive one (though she doesn't realize it).  The implosion of legacy media is an expression of the free market.  The public has spoken and finally these people are suffering the consequences of their dishonest activities.  And to be clear, no, legacy companies do not matter.  

They are not special or integral to the economy or to society.  They are not “too big to fail” and their collapse should be applauded after the years of disinformation and propaganda they have excreted on the doorsteps of the American populace.  They deserve this and the world is better off without them.  They are already being replaced with better companies and better journalists; may the free market run its course.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering - while corporate media has been imploding, ZeroHedge has been growing. We thank you for your readership.

COPYRIGHT ©2009-2024 ZEROHEDGE.COM/ABC MEDIA, LTD

Of course, now I am wondering just who ABC MEDIA, LTD are. Google gives me results that point to the USA, British Columbia, Canada and the UK. One search result points to a Wikipedia article about Krassimir Ivandjiiski, who is also the father of Daniel Ivandjiiski, founder of the U.S.-based alt-right website, Zero Hedge.'

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Gulf of Tonkin Incident - August 2, 1964 - E. J. Fitzgerald

Who in tarnation is running this show? Did you know that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the one on August 4th, the one that was used as an excuse to get us into war with Vietnam, was bullshit? There had always been rumors that there was something funny about it, but there are always those kinds of rumors about anything. I mean, no matter what happens, like the sun coming up this morning, there are going to be people who are going cast doubt on that event. 

But now I'm reading The Media is the Number One Cause of War Since 1898 by Simon Black on Sovereign Man and I find this:

The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact.

Well, no doubt in his mind, which kind of surprised me. So I go check and according to Wikipedia and History, Simon is correct, the incident was totally made up. There was an incident on August 2 (subject of the painting at top), but it wasn't a war starting event. The incident used as an excuse to start the war supposedly happened on August 4th, except it didn't happen at all.

All of which makes me wonder who is actually calling the shots? Could it be the heads of the big media corporations, people like Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and George Soros? That makes as much sense as anything.

Via ZeroHedge

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Fickle Finger Of Fate COMPILATION | Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In | George Schlatter* 
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
Marcel tells us that The New York Times is a stinking pile of shit. He doesn't say so explicitly, I just summarised what you should already know. He refers to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, which sounds vaguely familiar. Michael Crichton, who coined the term, provides us with his description:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

But how did this effect get it's name? A little digging unearths Michael's explanation:

I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.

For some reason that prompted me to check me blog, and lo and behold, I posted about this subject once before. Funny how I forget names like Murray Gell-Mann but remember Michael Crichton.

Who runs the NYT? A. G. Sulzberger, great-great-grandson of Adolph Ochs who bought the paper in 1896, that's who. Should we blame him for the crap his media empire produces? Yes, we should, not that it is likely to do any good, but we can feel good about pointing the flying fickle finger of shame at him. He is just like any other media mogul, out to maximize profit, never mind the truth or any of the little people who get squashed. Which brings to mind this quote from H. L. Mencken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

* Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was on the air circa 1970 when the dollar was worth about ten times what it is now, so the $9 billion dollars they mention is like $90 billion now. It's not a trillion dollars, but it's still a fair chunk of change.

We Need a New Media System

Hostile Forces

We Need a New Media System by Matt Taibbi

That's what I've been saying! Matt, I could kiss you! No, wait, would that be considered gay? A hug? Eh, maybe not. I handshake and warm congratulations (on agreeing with me, the king of my world). That would be the ticket.

Here's a couple of quotes from his post that I really liked:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share. - Mitch McConnell

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. - Matt Taibbi

P.S. I was sure I had written about YouText, the next great website / service, but Blogger's search function couldn't find it. Weird. Is Blogger crushing my dreams? Here's another post where it gets mentioned: Text R Us

Update Tuesday. Commenter Bruce points out that there is a YouText website, but it's more like a sexting service, which is not what I am looking for. I am going to have to come up with a new name, well, somebody is, if it's ever going to be implemented.

some useless information supposed to fire my imagination

The Rolling Stones Satisfaction (I Cant Get No)
Organized retail crime costs retailers nearly $778,000 per $1 billion in sales . . . (don't follow the link, it's crap).

That is less than one-tenth of one percent. The stores could save more by renegotiating the rate that the credit card companies suck off the top.

Note they are talking about organized retail crime, which I suspect means traveling gangs who swoop in and grab a bunch of high dollar items before heading off to the next town. They aren't talking about shoplifting.

Typical mass media, babbling about a small problem that it going to get people stirred up, but isn't going to have a big effect, other than fuck up the lives of people who get stirred up and decide to do something about it and end up getting arrested for assault or worse.

There have always been thieves, and if they are stealing from big box stores, then at least they are not breaking into people's houses. Mostly it's a matter of belief / religion. On one side you have the good citizens who believe theft is bad and who have enough money that they can buy what they need. On the other, we have those don't feel like they are part of society and are going to ignore social conventions in order to get what they feel they deserve. If might be that they have been expelled from society, and it wouldn't have to be for bad behavior, it could be something as common as getting laid off. Or it could be that they have rejected the position that society has offered them. Could be a good reason, or it could be a personality defect.

Via Iaman

P.S. I always thought the line from the song was 'fry my imagination', but I suppose that's what you would get from firing it.

Links

• What Assange was indicted for. Good explanation of password cracking. Via Borepatch
• Berlin Wall Escape that was financed by an American News Agency. 1962. My Daily Kona
• How a Few Lucky Civil War Soldiers Started Glowing and Healed Faster. Bio-luminescent bacteria. Knuckle Draggin My Life Away

Feelings

These days it seems like everything produced by mass media is designed to inflame an emotion, facts be danged. People make decisions based on emotion, not on facts, so if you want to sway people's opinion on an issue, you need to make an emotional appeal, not a cold, calculating one, although that is exactly what the people behind the scenes are doing: coldly calculating what should go into their emotional appeal that will make it most effective.

Seems like everyone has an agenda these days, and every story that comes out is given a slanted emotional appeal designed to serve that agenda. Marc, one of our most vocal supporters of right wing politics (although I think a lot of it is just to irritate anyone who voices a liberal opinion), listens to NPR, who have some interesting stories. However, after you have listened to them for a bit it becomes pretty clear that the stories are designed to make you feel bad or guilty about whatever issue is under discussion. Never mind the facts.


CO2 and global warming popped up at Thursday lunch and things like CO2 from cow farts and rice paddies (and some other source that I have forgotten) are suspected of being bigger contributors to global warming than the burning of fossil fuels by the industrialized West. I discouraged any further exploration of the topic because it's an endless rathole. There is no bottom to it, mostly because every single story you will find has been painted with a big fat brush dripping with colored paint, red or blue.

---

We finished watching season one of Goliath last night and while I enjoyed the show, it was kind of low on logic. It was basically a sequence of emotional scenes tied together with some pretty thin thread. For instance, there is a bad guy running around loose, wreaking havoc on our heroes, but he gets taken out. By who? No clue is ever given. A death bed confession is not convincing. And then there is the case of police brutality, or at least it seemed like it could have been a case, and should have been pursued, but there wasn't even a failed attempt to collect the video from police car camera. And what's with the hooker? Nothing she does makes much sense, but then if I was making $10,000 for a weekend of snorting coke and screwing my brains out, maybe I wouldn't be making any sense either.

Sinclair's script for stations

Sinclair's script for stations
Murdoch has a competitor. Maybe that's why he isn't dead yet. You know a man will crawl out of his grave to slay a rival.

Wikipedia's article on the Sinclair Broadcast Group
Sinclair Broadcast Group website

Guilt by Association

Michael Crichton

Murray Gell-Mann

Marcel put up a post that mentions the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. The description of the effect is enlightening and amusing and is all over the web, but where did the name come from? It took a little digging (okay, pointing and clicking), but I got to the root of the matter:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) - Michael Crichton

A famous name? Perhaps in some circles. I had never heard of him before today.

Mass Market Politics

Indian soldiers who served during World War I in France. ca. 1915. (Library of Congress)

I have a hard time communicating with my family. They like to talk, they talk a lot, when they are together they talk constantly. But it's not deliberate, considered, speech. They banter. What they say is not nearly as important as how it is said. Their comments fly back and forth. I suppose they are meaningful to them but to me it's just so much noise. I gave up trying to understand their conversations some time ago. I got tired of asking them to repeat themselves and getting responses that implied I was old and hard of hearing. I had my hearing checked, it's just fine. Doc told me it's a common affliction among older men. There's nothing wrong with the ears, it's the sound processing part of the brain that's not keeping up. I suspect it's because it doesn't get as much use as it used to because I quit listening to people talk because I never heard anything worth hearing. It's all just noise. I've got better things to think about. Yes, I'm a grumpy old fart.
    I've been making an effort the last few years to pay attention to politics, but I have decided it's a lost cause. There's too much money promoting unknown agendas. Media coverage follows whoever is making the biggest stink, regardless of how important it is. Actual, real important things are buried, never to be heard about, much less discussed. It's like my family's bantering, played on a grand scale. It's okay, it gives people something to do, and that more than anything is what we all need.
    The only organizations I trust are the NRA and the ACLU (the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union). The NRA seems to be doing fine without me, and the ACLU is such a weak sister I'm not sure anything I could do would make any difference. I trust these two because one, they have a very narrow focus, and two, they have been around for a long time and they have stuck to their guns, so to speak.

Regarding the photo: I did a search on the title and this picture was the coolest one that popped up.

Swampland

TIME Magazine has a new website called Swampland. Did I miss something? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? Or maybe the sane people have booted the crazies out? I thought TIME was all about serious discussion, not the crass tabloid crap that makes American politics look like a swamp. Or maybe they just realized where they are and have made peace with it. I dunno, maybe I have been so accustomed to American political double-speak that when something approaching the truth appears it just throws me.