While mostly true, this isn't unique behavior to industries like the news.
It's a symptom of our consumeristic society, the smaller news outlets with integrity or dedication to actual news don't get the outreach or influence these bigger sensationalist news stations do, which they then spend that money on making themselves more accessible, which in turn makes finding and consuming real news outlets harder to do.
In the end, like most of our industries, the ones truly dedicated to their craft and not the almighty dollar get outshadowed or even bought out by the soulless huge corporations that only seek to increase their margins.
We previously had moral and ethical standards that media outlets and society had to meet.
That has been washed away with the liberalisation of society.
The issue is way more complicated then consumerism bad. Almost all types of journalism have declined in the last 15 years, tabloid, hard news, investigative, all of it. The industry and proffesion have hollowed out. Corporations have pumped billions into these businesses only for them to continue to decline and be sold off for pennies on the dollar. Why? People no longer pay for news. They watch a youtube channel or tik toks or scan reddit. Less and less people pay for news or view a single source at high enough volume to be viable. High quality journalism is expensive and time consuming and theres fewer people consuming it. Its a product of the internet era, anyone can post "news" on a variety of platforms and all are in competition for eyeballs dilluting the available audience.
You might say, the news is a public good and should be supported, and you'd be right. We had that with PBS/NPR which was publically subsidized until the oramge idiot showed up again. You cant nationalize every news source though, thats a very bad thing. News orgs have to be independent to be able to provide credible news. State backed media, even the best run, can and are influenced by political forces.
Theres no clean answer as to how to solve the problem. Ultimatley it boils down to the public and what type of news they choose to consume. One thing that could be done is to prevent the consolidation of journalism. The old rules about one company not being to own more then a coiple of media outlets in a given market was a good one. Reinstating that would be a good place to start but wont fix the underlying issues: Independent media needs funding and people stopped paying for it. Along with state backed media being open to manipulation by political forces.
Why do you think small "journalists" don't fall victim to this? The single person YouTube channel type are scale wise way bigger than even legacy media at this point and they do the exact same stuff.
I'm not saying small news source are immediately better, but that those who actually care for the integrity of journalism over the dollar will always be smaller in influence than the "mainstream media" because their goals are vastly different.
People also forget about Operation Mockingbird and how the CIA are literally infesting modern media with their agents and have been doing so for over half a century now.
I'll bet half the major influencers online are connected to some intelligence agency as well.
See Donald Trump. They are largely responsible for his election. When he was gone and the world was quieter and calmer, they secretly hated it. His chaos is good for business.
It wasn't always like this. There was a short period early 20th century when news, radio, paper and tv, were all fighting to be the most legit source of news. But it all collapsed in the later 20th century. Cable went full political in the late 80's, and leveraged by the power of capitalism, realized that focusing on producing content, especially favouring one political party, was way more profitable than unbiased news reports. These days social media has pushed that even further. Engagement is king and truth no longer matters.
Granted, misinformation has always been in the playbook of news outlets, but it didn't hit the critical point until global news coverage became a possibility and tv ratings became king.
Absolutely. The news will never be perfect. But journalism is an important job that serves a function in democracy.
In my childhood, when you watched the news you saw serious people speaking intelligently about important topics. And the news cycle was slower. There were no 24/7 news channels or clickbait websites. Tabloids existed, but everybody knew they were trash and you would just make fun of them at the grocery store checkout.
It's a bit more than that and I dont think its quite that cynical. People may get ideations, as that always occurs to some degree, we all have heard of copy cat's. It would be a super duper small chance of it actually happening though. It already happens without the news. Financial stress is set to break even more. A family of 6 was found dead near me, Grandma talked her daughter into killing her kids then themselves. All to prevent the kids from going to their father.
The real root of the case op posted, is covering a topic that has been forgotten by many, mental health.
They are saying she had postpartum and warned everyone she could about her ideations/voices. No one stepped up to help. Then everyone left her alone with the kids. So the story is more about, Who failed her? Thats why it is getting the attention and donations. The court case will determine if she had her faculties or not. The issue with the people is.... they are rushing to support someone they have no clue about. It could all be fabricated, like some believe. Or it could be about a system that is set up for failure.
"We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blond who comes on at five.
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.
It's interesting when people die.
It's so dirty laundry"
Or more simply because that's what people want to watch, and that's all media companies care about. They are obviously not trying to make society worse in some kind of abstract way to increase the likelihood of tragedy - that's not how companies operate.
Its not tinfoil if we have proof they actually do this. Epstein files dropped a bomb confirming many terrible things and nothing happened because of them. They are already forgotten, because normal people just dont have the time or energy to go through them.
Whether on purpose or not, the idea that the massive media attention on the perpetrator of a mass shooting has a big influence on others to commit the same act, is an accepted phenomenon. Why did something like this almost never happen before Columbine to suddenly becoming an epidemic?
Experts literally told the media to quit broadcasting school shootings because putting their name and body count on television was incentivizing copycats. They continued.
You don’t need a tinfoil hat, it’s all about ratings. It has to be or they could not afford to be on the air. News used to be ran as a loss. They started trying to make money off the news in the 1970s. It has been all downhill since. There’s a very good fictionalized movie about this called network.
Media today is based on engagement. Mostly whether or not people share a particular piece of media.
Turns out, the best way to get people to share something is if it generates a big emotional response. And the best emotion to generate a response is anger.
So the media ecosystem is one giant filter, that makes whoever is willing to run the story that will make people angriest the most successful. And what makes people angry? Horrible people doing horrible things. Which means media becomes run completely by assholes, about assholes, to make the general public angry to share the story.
The best thing is you can frame the same story differently to make different people mad. Women's media frame the husband as the evil mastermind who manipulated his wife into murdering the children and committing suicide. Men's media frame the wife as evil.
Nothing is more infuriating than people who are unable to understand the difference between an explanation and a justification and them then getting mad over it.
People are talking about why she did it, and what led to her doing it, not to say that what she did is okay, but to figure out how to prevent similar things from happening in the future.
You can't save future lives without discussing the reasons why the event happened in the first place.
There's like a few posts from insane people saying that she should go free that are getting shared, and like 95% of everyone else is pretty firmly in the "she should go to jail or a mental hospital for years," camp.
There doesn’t need to be any framing. A woman who murders her 3 children is a psychopath and deserves to be put down like a sick dog. Man, woman, black, white I don’t give a fuck, if you kill your children you should be executed as soon as possible.
Believe it or not, I didn’t need media to convince me that a mom, who strangled her children to death one after the other, should be executed. I could not care any less what role mental illness played or post partum played.
“Mens media frame the woman as evil”. But…..but….she is evil. Why is Reddit having such a hard time getting this? Even this post is full of chumps saying, oh well the media just wants to make money, blah blah blah. It is so hard to get anyone on this site to say anything bad about a woman under virtually any circumstance. I’ve never seen such a brainwashed group of imbeciles.
Media people in general are sacks of shit. They love portraying a world of oppression, victimhood, and underdogs, because the American public eats it up.
What some people don't realize about social media is that even if you say something negative about someone, there is a good chance you are still boosting their visibility.
So every time these people say how awful the woman is, the algo pushes her higher.
Its mostly due to the fact that hate travels faster, further, and has a greater impact. I am sure social media plays a hidden but impactful role in all this.
We just experienced this in Reno. The media portrayed our town like it was completely burning down and every single resident was evacuated and pending death. Meanwhile, there wasn’t even smoke in the air after one day.
Mass shootings come to mind. Dont be surprised if more Clancys pop up over the next few years, esp when reports scream killing ur kids will get u a million bucks.
lets be real. when the lady that called the little black boy the n-word got paid, i lost all faith in humanity. her vile, racist hate towards a child was rewarded with fortune.
Yep. That's why the victims of racist attacks can barely raise any money, while the perpetrators of racist attacks can make millions in donations. We've seen this play out multiple times over the past few years.
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u/addiktion Aug 26 '26
The media has a way of attracting the worst of humanity to support the worst of humanity.