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Comment by alexkavon | Hacker News Reader

> We're moving to a state where only the rich can afford good information and everyone else is in the dark.

Please explain this dramatic conclusion more.

The first newspapers were expensive niche publications that provided businesspeople, politicians, and other elites with the information they needed. Mass market newspapers (and ultimately the mass market news industry) relied on advertising dollars to subsidize the costs of news production. With advertising dollars moving away from news production, there is no longer enough incentive to produce news for the average person. There has to be some subsidy in place to pay for news that regular people can't pay for. This is particularly bad in local markets, where news deserts are spreading. Without beat reporters, there's no way to know basic facts about what's going on around you.

https://www.cjr.org/local_news/american-news-deserts-donuts-...

Mass market news allowed for the professionalization of journalism, with a set of ethics that demanded (attempts at) objectivity. With mass market news dying, there isn't enough money to support a large professional journalism class. In its absence, we are left with propagandists that publish publicly for free or at discounted rates and consultants that publish objective information privately at high rates that only businesses, politicians, or the wealthy can afford.

What you are forgetting is that advertising is moving away because readers are. People came for the value they are no longer getting. Advertisers are just the result of that

> Please explain this dramatic conclusion more.

Not OP but I'll try: have you ever looked at the massive consolidations that happen in the news space? A couple of truly independent but small papers and public TV/radio stations remain, but the rest? Owned by Murdoch, Sinclair, Axel Springer and a couple other billionaires.

Coincidentally or not, Murdoch/Sinclair/Springer media massively lean towards the right/hardcore conservative edge, which basically means that the population is fed a heavy bias in news (and some programs don't even deserve that name anymore, they're outright propaganda). And these media conglomerates are those defining current politics, simply because of their massive reach capability.

Media needs to be broken up if democracy is to survive - and similar with entertainment, given that Disney basically owns all major movie franchises now.

You have conveniently neglected to mention all the news outlets with obvious left wing leanings, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, The Atlantic, Vice, Vox, etc. The media landscape is actually pretty well balanced, which isn’t surprising, given that the population’s political orientation is also pretty well balanced.

That's the point: they have left leanings. None of them is advocating full blown socialism, goes for gun bans, or a single-payer healthcare system with private insurance middlemen cut out of the picture.

The so-called "conservative" media however? Just look at how they portrait immigrants, that's no longer just leanings, that's propaganda.

In addition, for Germany the hardcore-conservative BILD paper (owned by Axel Springer) is still the most powerful paper given its circulation of 1.4M daily. The centrist-liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung follows wide after the BILD at 338k daily, followed by conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine with 241k [1]. By reach, the right/"conservatives" massively dominate.

[1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/73448/umfrage...

I’m not German, so I can’t speak to the German media landscape. I’m American, though, and to portray the media landscape in the US as right dominated is insane. Literally every single prestigious media and cultural institution is dominated by the left in this country. Insane views on the right regularly get deplatformed on facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, whereas insane left wing views are ignored. Left wing causes have a chorus of support from famous celebrities, musicians, and actors. Right wing views might have some support from random C-list celebrities or country music stars.

> Insane views on the right regularly get deplatformed on facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, whereas insane left wing views are ignored.

Yeah and then do show me please where the "insane left wing" advocates for conspiracy crap such as the "great replacement" or denies the Holocaust. There's a reason the right wings get deplatformed and the left wings don't, simply because the left wings don't devolve to inhumanity.

> Right wing views might have some support from random C-list celebrities or country music stars.

... and from the President of the United States as well as half of Congress. Yeah, "some support". Bannon literally ended up as consultant in the White House.

> because the left wings don't devolve to inhumanity

What would you call what happened in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, then?

And I agree that the right has political power. That’s because the population is split pretty evenly between right and left. I wasn’t talking about that, though, I was talking about media and cultural institutions. Popular and, especially, prestigious culture is dominated by the left in the US. For instance, a popular late night host in this country referred to the president’s mouth as “Putin’s cock holster” and still has a job. If someone had said that about Hilary Clinton, they would have been fired the next day.

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