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Comment by vearwhershuh | Hacker News Reader

I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.

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Propaganda, possibly Public Relations, or a different book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Publications

Interestingly (to me), Edward Bernays is discussed a lot in Mario Vargas Llosa's latest book Tiempos Recios (Fierce Times), as the "most influential person in the history of Guatemala" due to his PR work on behalf of United Fruit. Unfortunately I believe it is only available in Spanish currently.

That's a somewhat conspiratorial take. While there are publishers that heavy-handedly tell their newsrooms what to write (i. e. Murdoch), the vast majority does not.

Many publishers are typical corporations, with a large number of shareholders, none of which get to even talk to the journalists.

Even among those owned by individual billionaires, the evidence is lacking. The Washington Post, for example, has broken quite a few (often negative) stories about Amazon. The Seattle Times recently broke much of the 737-MAX scandal, even though they are faily dependent on Boeing. The New York Times doesn't even write much about Mexico, let alone topics related to Carlos Slim's financial interests.

The motivation to own these reputable papers seems to be far easier to explain as a status thing. Kinda like NFL teams, but for the more intellectual billionaires.

As laid out in Manufacturing Consent, the understanding is implicit, not explicit. I would classify this as ideological, not conspiratorial.

I used to think it was a strange coincidence that Bernays was Freud's nephew. But it wasn't. Bernays promoted his uncle in the U.S., so the fame of the two has a common cause.

Interesting, could you share a link?

These are the best three I found with a quick search:

http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...

https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=fron...

http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

I also recommend Adam Curtis’s four part documentary “The Century of the Self”, the first episode of which is here: https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04

The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact.

I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU

That reminds me of this post which touches on that idea.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

All you have to do is read the history of newspapers and journalism. Almost exclusively, they were created by financial, industrial and political elite to influence the population. They were never created to make money.

Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.

And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.

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