The media would rather have a monopoly in a broken country, than live in a thriving country where internet content is too diversified to support traditional media organizations. Like Milton’s Satan, it would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And it’s turning the country into its own private hell.
(Daniel Greenfield – Front Page Magazine) It’s always bad news for the media.
Verizon is looking to dump the Huffington Post. It’s the latest bad news for the industry in a year that has already seen over 7,200 job cuts across the media spectrum from digital to old-fashioned print.
Why should the rest of the country care about what’s happening to the media industry?
Same reason you should care about what happens when a crackhead can’t pay for his crack.
Like the proverbial crackhead, the media has two survival strategies: stealing and going crazy. These strategies are happening all around us and they’re wrecking the country worse than a million crackheads could.
Unable to make its business model work, the media turned to cannibalism. The print media began merging into bigger conglomerates, and, lately, the failing digital media has gotten merger fever. But the media can’t actually outgrow its problems, and the bigger organizations, after cutting jobs and outlets, still can’t make it work. But the mergers also spurred unionization in print and digital media. While the media bowed to political pressure and signed off on the unions, the costs are killing the media.
Unions aren’t just making it too expensive for the papers and sites they work for to operate, they’re also wiping out freelance journalism. The furor over AB5, a California law that makes it all but impossible for freelance journalists in the state to find work, pitted freelancers against unionized media members.
Personalities from unionized media outlets, the Los Angeles Times and Vox, defended AB5’s attack on freelance journalism. The debate soon boiled down to accusations of “scab” being hurled at freelancers.
While media unions are cannibalizing the outlets they work for and wiping out freelance journalism to protect their own jobs, they’re also cannibalizing the entire internet and social media by demanding that Facebook, Google, and other big tech companies, censor and suppress content from non-media sources. The media’s demand that companies embed their ‘fact checkers’ as gatekeepers is an assault on free speech, and is triggering anti-trust investigations of the tech companies that surrendered to the media.