The Predatory Nature of News Conglomerates
The rapacious appetite for readers, viewers, advertisers, power, prestige goes on apace in the news media. Reputations are built on sleazy reportage, on being on site and reporting every last nasty element in disasters visited upon hapless populations, whether nature-inspired or through the medium of human intervention. No detail too personal, too dreadful to relate to an omnivorous readership of a mass public eager to imbibe every last detail.These arbiters of taste, purveyors of point of view, manipulators of social and political arguments, the news media, headed by media barons of ill or illustrious repute. In Great Britain they are held in such high esteem that knighthoods are bestowed upon them for keeping the public informed, for amassing great private fortunes for themselves. In the United States and Canada the owners and operators and publishers of news outlets, be they print, electronic/visual or Internet, scramble all over each other to be the first to startle, confuse, belittle and unsettle.
Giving the public what it wants is the mantra in excuse of publishing and airing details best left on the cutting-room floor. Apart from the value of imparting facts relating to actual newsworthy events, that other, sometimes-related quotient in prurient, celebratory, scandal. For the delectation of the masses, for the instruction and knowledge of the locker-room crowd, the water-cooler messengers.
Separate and apart, or sometimes the right hand of government; conversely, high-mindedly averse to government edict and action. Ever conscious of its popular ratings, its hold on the public trust and imagination, the media seek more power by extending its ever-grasping tentacles. They vie to out-trump one another on timeliness of story-line, on insider information where unnamed politicos are quoted and unattributed sources provide the inside track.
Free, community-originating and -oriented newspapers are now being targeted by these unscrupulous vendors of news. Small-press, dynamic and community-influential papers are being shoved out by the deliberate intervention of large news presses, launching their own community newspapers, scooping up the advertising dollars, and presenting their offerings as free, value-added news sources. Not enough to dominate in one media empire, the dissemination of news through print, radio, television and Internet.
Oops, here's Thomson Corp. expressing an interest in the acquisition of global financial news giant Reuters Group PLC with a multi-billion dollar takeover to challenge Bloomberg LP as the world's largest provider of financial news. Look, here's shares in Yahoo! Inc. jumping as news reports air it may be talking to Microsoft Corp. about linking up to take on Google Inc. which dominates online searches and advertising.
Wow! Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is preparing to pay US $5-billion for Dow Jones & Co., with its flagship Wall Street Journal and Barron's publications. Seems a fundamental shift is taking place driven by economic factors and technology seeing advertising shifting from traditional media companies to social media Web sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's all quite explicable; the news that shapes your opinion and mine, like a wickedly determined manipulator of social and political awareness dictatorship is seeking out economies of scale and efficiencies.
"The need to stand out has an even higher premium," said Kaan Yigit, president of media consultant Solutions Research Group. "Differentiated information assets and intellectual capital has even more value. That's why you are seeing [interest in] Dow Jones, Reuters and even Yahoo!" Manipulating our mindsets and opinions and perceptions has never exemplified big business more than at present. Where to turn for unbiased and truthful information?
Headache coming on.
Labels: Technology, World News
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 06, 2007
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