News is a revenue stream and since we obliterated regulation in the 90s media consolidation and the ad spend arms race that followed meant news got more and more “attention grabbing.”
More murder, more sensation, more negative. Then, the cable news went straight up hot take pundit driven. The majority of people get their news not from the actual news broadcasts that utilize and actual news room that gathers and gets stories (still picking the most attention grabbing of the lot) and then reports it, but instead they get their news from pundits who aren’t delivering any news, they are using the news that same way the Daily Show does, as a basis for material. The issue is the material is being used for heightened opinion, hyperbole, and hot takes that tell people who to blame, hate, and how to be angry.
If the owners of major outlets could make more money with 24/7 coverage of puppy adoptions and babies laughing they would.
As for broadcast news, it’s still predominantly news gathering and reporting. Thank god.
However, the “digital content,” sister of broadcast is a completely separate thing. But people don’t realize this they see the branding and assume it’s all equal.
It’s not. The digital content is in direct competition with social media, content mills, blogs, etc… therefore it has shit lowk this story. Completely devoid of actual information but enough words to slap a clickbait title on and blast out across social platforms to garner clicks.
And all it does is erode the brands to the point we are at today where people will scream “duh MSM this” and “billionaire media owners that!”
If you get your news from actual news gathering and reporting outlets, not “digital publishers,” not pundits, not content mills, not social media accounts, and not hyper partisan outlets then you’ll realize that most of what you get from those other places is not news at all. It’s just news as a basis for bullshit content.
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u/TeardropsFromHell 17d ago
The news, all of it, is not designed to inform you. It is designed to construct a narrative that helps those in power stay in power.