The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry

The rise of our corporate state has done the most, however, to decimate traditional news-gathering. Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think. And news that does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing. This is why the networks have shut down their foreign bureaus. This is why cable newscasts, with their chatty anchors, all look and sound like the "Today" show. This is why the FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox's celebrity gossip program "TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network's "700 Club" as "bona fide newscasts." This is why television news personalities, people like Katie Couric, have become celebrities earning, in her case, $15 million a year. This is why newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are being ruthlessly cannibalized by corporate trolls like Sam Zell, turned into empty husks that focus increasingly on boutique journalism. Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters. They prefer to transform news into another form of mindless amusement and entertainment.

The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry

from AlterNet.org by Chris Hedges, Truthdig


Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."


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http://journalism.org/node/11961 "Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008"
και μιά ανάλυση:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/07/21/the-changing-newsroom-good-bad-and-ugly/

"On the good side, there's ample evidence that newspapers have embraced the internet [..]
The bad news is that newspapers haven't figured out how to make money online. [..]
The ugly news [..] has to do with the change of mission of the newspaper, specifically a shift away from foreign and national news to an increased focus on local and community news"

(Αστερη, σ' ευχαριστώ!)