If reporters have any purpose at all, they should be remote sensors or antennas. They should go into places where ordinary people can’t afford the time or money to go, or where ordinary people aren’t allowed. Reporters should talk with people who know stuff, not available to us by money or time or status. And then the reporters should tell us what they saw and heard. This convenient delivery service is worth paying for.
“Journalists” occasionally did their job before 1974. Since 1974 they’ve been doing the exact opposite. Instead of a delivery service for information, they’re a Wall of Rock-n-Roll, blocking our view of all places and people and drowning out our thoughts with a dazzling light show and pounding bass beat. And I mean it literally. TV dazzles us with constant split-camera switches every second, and “news” always has a backbeat behind the voices.
We’ve stopped paying for their service because they stopped providing it.
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Putting it in historical perspective, the media’s job is NOT conveying information to peasants. The media’s job is the same as a spy’s job. Gather information, report it accurately to the king, spread lies to the peasants. Always been that way. The media made their spy work easier by establishing the myth that they’re conveying accurate information to the peasants. As long as the peasants believe the myth, they won’t seek competing sources of information. They won’t consult their own senses or talk to their neighbors or pay unofficial spies.
Now the myth is busted, so the secret-keeping job is much harder. The media spies are effectively reduced to normal spies, reporting info to the king and keeping it completely secret. Nobody reads the fake output to the peasants. The media spies don’t understand what happened. Even the “defectors” like Taibbi still believe their own myth. They blame the peasants for being filthy pigs who refuse to appreciate the media’s generosity.
Polistra's Mill 