Another of your excellent posts thanks, David. Your list of Fourth Estate functions illustrates what should be rather than what is, and that's part of the reason MSM have become "legacy media"!
But several generations of people have steadily become incapable of maintaining the level of attention required to watch (or listen to) much less read news. Most children are politically pre-conditioned by teachers at school, followed by lecturers at tertiary. Unless they had/have parents with influence over their children (as was the case in the past) they were brainwashed towards the "left" of politics. Recently towards ideological "beliefs": e.g. "anthropogenic" climate change, leading to "carbon zero", etc. These are the new religions that MSM provides propaganda.
Furthermore, I can attest to declining responsible reporting way back in the early 1980s when I took a university course for "graduate/senior journalists" (I was never a journalist but I had good cause to understand what made them "tick", so I secured a place with help from a friend in the "profession"). I learned how journalists sought to "angle" news to suit their own (or those of their employers') views.
And so the rot began a very long time ago. But until the advent of "social media", the Fourth Estate were invulnerable... and peddled increasingly "left-wing" "news" with the objective of influencing their audience and/or readers rather than providing them with unbiased information and/or news.
Achieving commercial returns - especially for listed companies such as NZME. The migration of advertising to the tech giants and drying up of government funding via the Public Interest Journalism Fund and extensive government advertising campaigns such as during Covid is affecting NZME's bottom line. Hence the need to cut costs.
Great article. Brought to mind Gail Wynand, owner of the Banner newspapers in Rand's The Fountainhead. He had long believed that he created public opinion, but eventually realized that the public owned him because he gave the public what they wanted, sacrificing his soul to the masses, His last appearance in the book concerns a building being built for him of which he says to the architect, the book's heroic protagonist Howard Roark, "I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand building will have nothing—except what you give it." ...."Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours ... and could have been mine."
Something analogous to the idea of resonance-driven news that the NZ Herald seems to be pursuing has unfortunately already begun to permeate the thinking of those who run this country's libraries. The advent of computerisation has meant that librarians can now track how often a given book has been borrowed (how many "hits" or "likes" it has received, so to speak), and this in turn has led library managers to jump to the misplaced conclusion that books that aren't being regularly borrowed can safely be consigned to off-site storage - or worse, discarded altogether. A computerised catalogue is no substitute for the old-fashioned browsing of physical books on physical shelves, and even with such a catalogue, borrowers are less likely to realise what holdings actually exist if they can't see them for themselves. The upshot of all this is very real risk that - like readers of resonance-driven newspapers - borrowers are effectively being denied access to information that would result in them being better informed in their personal field of interest or, in a wider sense, about the world around them.
Another of your excellent posts thanks, David. Your list of Fourth Estate functions illustrates what should be rather than what is, and that's part of the reason MSM have become "legacy media"!
But several generations of people have steadily become incapable of maintaining the level of attention required to watch (or listen to) much less read news. Most children are politically pre-conditioned by teachers at school, followed by lecturers at tertiary. Unless they had/have parents with influence over their children (as was the case in the past) they were brainwashed towards the "left" of politics. Recently towards ideological "beliefs": e.g. "anthropogenic" climate change, leading to "carbon zero", etc. These are the new religions that MSM provides propaganda.
Furthermore, I can attest to declining responsible reporting way back in the early 1980s when I took a university course for "graduate/senior journalists" (I was never a journalist but I had good cause to understand what made them "tick", so I secured a place with help from a friend in the "profession"). I learned how journalists sought to "angle" news to suit their own (or those of their employers') views.
And so the rot began a very long time ago. But until the advent of "social media", the Fourth Estate were invulnerable... and peddled increasingly "left-wing" "news" with the objective of influencing their audience and/or readers rather than providing them with unbiased information and/or news.
Also a key function:
Achieving commercial returns - especially for listed companies such as NZME. The migration of advertising to the tech giants and drying up of government funding via the Public Interest Journalism Fund and extensive government advertising campaigns such as during Covid is affecting NZME's bottom line. Hence the need to cut costs.
Great article. Brought to mind Gail Wynand, owner of the Banner newspapers in Rand's The Fountainhead. He had long believed that he created public opinion, but eventually realized that the public owned him because he gave the public what they wanted, sacrificing his soul to the masses, His last appearance in the book concerns a building being built for him of which he says to the architect, the book's heroic protagonist Howard Roark, "I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand building will have nothing—except what you give it." ...."Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours ... and could have been mine."
Something analogous to the idea of resonance-driven news that the NZ Herald seems to be pursuing has unfortunately already begun to permeate the thinking of those who run this country's libraries. The advent of computerisation has meant that librarians can now track how often a given book has been borrowed (how many "hits" or "likes" it has received, so to speak), and this in turn has led library managers to jump to the misplaced conclusion that books that aren't being regularly borrowed can safely be consigned to off-site storage - or worse, discarded altogether. A computerised catalogue is no substitute for the old-fashioned browsing of physical books on physical shelves, and even with such a catalogue, borrowers are less likely to realise what holdings actually exist if they can't see them for themselves. The upshot of all this is very real risk that - like readers of resonance-driven newspapers - borrowers are effectively being denied access to information that would result in them being better informed in their personal field of interest or, in a wider sense, about the world around them.
It seems to me that Mr Kirkness and Mr Boggs at least have not yet found the way to reverse Has Been Media’s ongoing decline to Gutter Press status.
I can’t imagine this in future turning out to be physicians that healed themselves.