41 sats \ 7 replies \ @TNStacker 20 Dec 2023 freebie \ on: Mass Media Crisis news
The news used to be a public service good provided because they were using publicly owned airwaves. CNN (cable) disrupted the model into one where they had to compete for profit. This fiat wins until the incentives change
#bitcoin fixes this!
Right
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Competing for profit is not the problem, it's the solution. Did you see those negative traffic numbers? That means less profit. If they didn't need to compete there would never be any incentive to improve, or mechanism for them to go bust.
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I get this philosophically, but is is inaccurate historically. News programming and information quality improved greatly before this change happened. It was trusted.
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I put the blame on the money, not on profits/competition. The quality was already going downhill since 1971 (no surprise). CNN was founded in 1980, eight years after the negative trend had already started. Also print newspapers and magazines were always for-profit and highly competitive. Presumably, these account for most of the high trust percentage prior to the time period on the graph (print being more dominant back then). So as usual this is another example of what happens when the money is broken.
tl;dr I think for-profit news would work well under hard money like bitcoin, just like it worked well when USD was hard money prior to 1971 (same can be said for everything).
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You conflate much. You are describing the change and timeline I reference. Money was broken in 1933. People give room much credit, or blame, to Nixon.
Print media started with muckrackery and is a completely different animal and outside this argumentnI am making which was about public airwaves.
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Still, how is profit/competition to blame? It is historically accurate to say 1) for-profit media companies (aka newspapers) existed before the decline in trust, and 2) CNN was founded well after the downard trend started. So something else (broken money) must be the cause.
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There is lots of information on the history of media in the U.S. Read up on that muckrackery history I mentioned. William Randolph Hurst, etc. Google it. In America, the news was originally a side-activity of printing and other companies, etc. Just as when radio and TV started the news was a public service add on. In the case of using public airwaves, it was a regulation.
Big industrial change takes a decade. CNN's planning, organization, and early work was far before it's founding date and out of the effects of the changes going on in the 70s.
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