I have no idea what “The MSM” is | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what “The MSM” is

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5 pointsjaredwiener10 comments

It sure seems to me like a scary fringe behavior, that lumping so many multipolar entities- with a variety of journalists, editors, & owners- together, and branding them all corrupt, all bad, all part of a conspiracy to deceive & propogandize, is a terrible terrible case of projection from the conspiratorial minded.

There definitely is a pretty paved road mainstream, mostly to me embodied by the tv news, and it tends towards banal pro-corporate mediocrity. I'm uninspired by it. But it still seems mostly based in truth, not to be heavily omitting the real stories, to be basically adequate & a product of the low engagement mass-mediaform that it is, that is it's audience.

Any news agency staffed with US government propagandists as part of Operation Mockingbird, or other programs fulfilling the same purpose.

America in this era:

- TV is more mainstream than print

- Cable channels are more mainstream than nightly broadcast programs

- Advertising profit is more mainstream than donation-reliant

That means you're part of it :D

From the article: "I spent most of my career working for what I imagine most would consider to be the MSM, going from intern to news producer at a national television network. But that experience left me even less convinced there is a meaningful distinction between a mainstream media, and everything else."

A perfect cog.

yep same with the journalists who pretend to not know the answer to the question "what does woke mean?"

> I have trouble with the idea that all of the members of this group – the mainstream media – whose membership is so ambiguous, could establish a shared agenda.

> If you’ve ever worked for a big company, you know how many different people work there, all with different opinions, different goals, different everything. News agencies are no different.

> Multiply that by the sheer number of news agencies, and add in the tight and unforgiving deadlines and you can see how improbable a broad, coordinated agenda would be.

When interests converge you don’t need to gather around a table to set the agenda, as George Carlin used to say.

> When interests converge you don’t need to gather around a table to set the agenda, as George Carlin used to say.

Sooo.... what is this converged interest of the MSM? Why do some people feel so threatened by it, why do they hate it so much? It's unclear to me what the actual accusation is: the term MSM feels like a shibboleth, an accusatory phrase that doesn't inform, but only keys in those who already feel a certain way. But it's unclear to most I think what basis this hatred & disgust stems from.

I think most of us can broadly agree that a lot of news media is not super fantastic, is somewhat problematic for a variety of reasons. But it feels like there is a radical & extremist faction that has frankly incendiary opinions about almost all media is in cahoots, is diffusing some unseen truth, without anyone ever pointing to or saying what that truth is. (I want to give it more credit, not be uncharitable, but: sometimes the unseen truth feels like it's just whatever D.J.T. says the truth is, facts be damned.)

I can broadly allow that most media is to some degree a tool of a capitalist system, that there is some influence from those at the top on what happens at the generally well-meaning-ish news-rooms in the mass-audience moderate, left, and right leaning markets. It's been a bit distasteful to me across my whole life that there's kind of a simple shallowness, a simple-minded bland Americanness that hides the darker substances, but it's never felt particularly conspiratorial or vile, more a product of what the market wants, a product of the mass-market nature.

But the various news medias recognizably have varying flavors & textures, and it's certainly not something I could lump into a single evil category; there are clearly many involved, aware, caring people who have a chance to report the simple truth of what's happening & what's going on. And there's no clear signs that there is a concerted converged interest- there feels like real dynamic tensions expressed, many sides with different stakes. It's hard for me to imagine what vector might guide & direct so many different view points, hard for me to imagine the specter of convergence lying to us always. It feels like a dark fantasy to think that way, driven by dark forces, to fabricate an image of media that is all somehow so very very fallen. And to so deliberately imprecisely never say how or why or what the real threat is: to only allude, in broad strokes, to convergence: it feels like propaganda, a desire to believe something beyond the simple reality of what is known.

How about "any publication operated in the expectation of profit" vs "publications operated to illuminate and propagate ideological views" ... Still doesn't cut out much of "Main Stream Media" but might be a more useful distinction to draw.

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