Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim

This article does a good job of drawing parallels between the book and reality in a short amount of time. I feel like the article is just scratching the surface though. > Television was transforming the news into a rapid and proliferating series of images, a form of entertainment that prized ‘the unreal’ and the ‘more or less totally irrelevant’. You can contest facts, he said, but not images. Noam Chomsky has some excellent work in this area. It can be very very dry reading, but very informative. Check out manufacturing consent [LINK] In the same vein and much more entertaining is this video that compares local news channels: [VIDEO]

Well, amusing that people thought this was wholly irrelevant. Here's what I was thinking of when I said that: [VIDEO] Also amusing that there are two confident opposite opinions in response.

> The way you change a corporation is by not patronizing it until it changes. Unless it's a monopoly or companies colluding, which is prevented by enforcement of regulation, not any goodness on behalf of corporations. And unless it's a conglomorate, in which case, "just switch the channel" can sound kind of hollow. E.g. [VIDEO] In theory, we could change companies by abstaining, if they magically knew why you don't patronize them, and took that into acount. In practice we now have fewer consumer OS than in the 90s, the return of walled gardens, and people who avoid them don't affect anything, the walled gardens care less about what people want, than what the walled gardens want. > The problem with governments is that they don't work that way, so the opinion of anyone not in the majority is invalid. So why are their any laws, at all, protecting minorities, why are things like access to disabled regulated, why is not legal to just lynch a person "most people don't like", and so on? How long has Comcast been the worst thing since soaked bread, how is that possible, how have they not either changed or gone the way of the dodo? And why does Facebook keep regressing its UI even though anyone who cares hates it, "as long as most people don't mind"? How's YouTube shitting all over creators working out? Captured audiences and network effects wherever you look. For companies, "If the majority does that with you then the corporation changes" is apparently good enough, with governments y

Examples for what happens when media ownership is concentrated: [VIDEO] And this one I'm not sure if it's just good PR by Amazon or laziness by media outlets or both: [LINK]

I don't think people are dumb though. Most working class people see through the BS because they live it everyday. I'm not talking about just us, I'm talking retail, waiters, miners, etc. They've seen way more shit with their bosses and life experiences to know what's what. I don't think it's infantilizing. I think since these major news sites are owned and backed by the rich, they have certain messages they want to push. And one idea they don't want people to know about is worker organization. The rich all have a vested interest to not mention it at all and instead want us to use their rigged process to resolve issues. Here's an interesting video that shows every news station saying the exact same thing: [VIDEO]

This was great thanks... Also there's this [1], which just boggles my mind. I can't make sense of this level of centralized message control and dissemination. It's straight out of 1984. It's hard to believe "the media" (whoever "they" are) has an agenda... it's tinfoil hat stuff.. Usually I write it off as emergent behavior of collective groups of humans trying to make $$$ from clicks, standard selfish behavior + time, leading to a race towards the bottom that looks like this. But watching those clip segments it's pretty clear there's a story/narrative being pitched by someone with the leverage to do so. Is this propaganda? What is propaganda? How can I recognize it? Is everything propaganda? Is "the media" captured and is now just a tool of whatever "system" is controlling things. This is the kind of stuff Jean Baudrillard was writing about. Sometimes we get journalism other times we get whatever that this stuff is. I don't have a problem with journalists sticking to the facts, SBF hasn't been charged, so lets not lynch him just yet. But hopefully he's being investigated (they usually don't announce when they are investigating someone, as it puts them on notice). Overall I think this is a direct result the 1996 Telecommunications Act which eliminated the rules on the number of radio stations a company could own (which also was one of the most lobbied bills in history). In hindsight this was a big mistake, and set things up for the kind of centralized messaging we see. There

* CBS has recently been caught fabricating lines at a drive through testing facility in Michigan * Nicholas Sandmann * “Experts generally agree that N95 masks have little value in the community.” * Local “news” stories that are effectively infomercials * [VIDEO] * allegedly CNN removing the Larry King episode from Google Play with a call from Tara Reade’s mother * implicitly or explicitly suggesting unrelated archive footage represents the story being reported (Italian hospital footage in a story about New York hospitals, firing range footage presented as foreign conflict) * the my pillow guy, who retooled to support health workers being railroaded simply for standing next to Trump * the sudden and nearly universal admiration for GWB * NYT editing an article, without notice that originally claimed HRC implied the Russians were grooming Tulsi Gabbard. I have a terrible memory for specific details, so those just the ones I can think of recently. I primarily listen to NPR in the car. Their bias is staggering. They present opinion as fact frequently, often misrepresenting parties in opposition.

And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"? In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news. Some examples of "oligarch news": [LINK] [VIDEO] As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim. To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them. An article on the latter is here: [LINK] In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect. So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.