Well, it's clear now that traditional journalism is dead and not coming back. TV and newspapers are biased as hell and the idiots on YouTube are, well, idiots.
But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made his fame and fortune from.
One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots. And that's putting it charitably.
The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons, partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a way to do that anyway.
But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made his fame and fortune from.
One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots. And that's putting it charitably.
The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons, partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a way to do that anyway.