Okay, Let’s Talk About Journalism

So, we all laughed while Taylor Lorentz wailed about the “Slaughter of the Innocents” among the millennial generation of journalists.  Of course, we did.  Everyone on our side despises them because they are everything that is wrong about the mainstream media.

They are dishonest, stupid, lazy and almost completely unqualified to perform their primary mission; discover what is happening in the world and communicate it to the people reading, listening and watching their news outlets.  Instead, they have become the Ministry of Truth.  And thereby, they have deserved the monumental collapse in public trust in them and also the huge drops in paying audience.

Now, fair to say, a part of the lost audience is not directly related to their lack of skill and honesty.  The internet has upended the financial model that used to govern how newspapers and other forms of journalism made their money; advertising.

Google and Facebook have swallowed almost all the advertising dollars by means of their surveillance of people’s search histories and other internet activity.  So, it’s not fair to blame media’s collapsing profits completely on their lousy work.  And in fact, some countries (e.g., Australia) are now forcing Facebook to pay news sites for the content that they allow people to post on their Facebook pages.  But the new world is what it is.  News sites are struggling to keep their doors open.

Well, okay.  What that means is that news will become a subscription-based product.  People will have to pay for what they want to read or see.  And most people tend to be unwilling to pay money to be insulted.  Which means one of two approaches must be adopted by the news corporations.

The first approach is to continue with what they currently do.  They can keep up a far-left-biased version of the news which insults half of the viewing public.  And this means building their financial model based on whatever payments they calculate they can get from the left-leaning half of the country.

The second approach is to try to perform objective journalism and get money from anyone who wants to know what’s actually going on in the world.  Now this would be a wholly novel idea.  So far, it’s never been tried by any major news organization.  And for all I know maybe it would produce less income than the first approach.  But I tend to believe that providing unbiased news coverage and separating it completely from a program that featured opinion pieces from both sides of the partisan divide would serve the public better and at the same time would make more money.

And why do I think unbiased news would make more money?  Because we’ve seen what the opposite looks like.  The opposite of unbiased news is Taylor Lorentz.  And that model is crashing and burning from coast to coast.  And it will get worse.  Eventually, people will get to pay a la carte for their media.  When that happens places like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News will either have to provide the public what they want or go out of business.

And all of this is actually for the good.  We pay for the awful cable companies with our cable bill and we never get our money’s worth.  I would pay extra if none of my money went to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and certainly not MSNBC and CNN.  Of late Fox News has been barely half a step better than these.  If my internet provider would charge a fair price for access to the internet and I could choose from the media options that I preferred and paid for nothing else it would be a much better world.  Instead of five or ten large leftist media outlets there would probably be one or two at most.

And from where I stand that would be a vast improvement.  Because that would mean that about eighty percent of the obnoxious leftist journalists currently employed by these woke fake-news corporations would be driving cabs and waiting tables in New York and DC.  Sorry Taylor Lorentz, but that’s what should happen.