The corporatization of the news media literally started with Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes who eventually found Rupert Murdoch to fund their vision with Fox News.
You know why they wanted to start their own media organization? Because they didn’t like public broadcasting, the organization for public broadcasting, the organization created by Lyndon B Johnson and Congress to fund public media (which helps fund NPR and PBS). They thought that public broadcasting would favor Democrats too much (you know that whole the truth has a liberal bias thing). So they decided to create a media organization in which they could control the narrative instead of letting independent journalists do their job.
It took until 1996 for them to get everything together with Rupert Murdoch and the rest is history. The corporatization of other media outlets was in direct response to how Fox News ran their business because they cared more about ratings and making money than actual journalism, which caused the other news media organizations to follow suit.
So you could very much make the argument that Fox News was the root of the issue, depending on how you look at it. You can either say Fox News ruined the atmosphere around journalism and they started the backslide on the slippery slope, or you can argue that it was an inevitable outcome of deregulation. It becomes a philosophical argument at that point.
Do you know why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996? Because on January 3, 1996 the Telecommunications act of 1996 was enacted. This completely deregulated the American media market and led to market concentration and is the reason corporations like Sinclair now reach 39% of the American market. (The max reach they are legally allowed to have). Murdoch announced Fox News less than a month later on January 31st, 1996 before Clinton had even signed the bill into law.
So even if you think the outcome was inevitable, Fox News certainly jumped on it faster than anyone else and were the ones to start the enshittification of news media.
I have to agree with your overall sentiment. However, there’s at least a valid argument to be made that providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths in a way that few examples of protected speech do.
George Bush is considered by many to be a war criminal
Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
“First of all, it should be remembered that Putin is not just a president of an aggressor country, but he is wanted by the International Criminal Court and accused of genocide and war crimes,” MEP Urmas Paet, who previously served as Estonia’s foreign minister, told Newsweek.
we being free people can discern fact from fiction
Hmmm. I’m not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Where, exactly, should the line be draw then between “reporting” and “being a mouthpiece”.
Not sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, nor that it can’t be apparent when it’s been crossed.
The EU has good reason to fear anything that emboldens Putin or works in even the slightest to increase his chances of prevailing in Ukraine. It’s quite clear that a victorious Russia is an existential threat to its neighbors. With all this discernment of fact that’s going on, it seems like that should be fairly easy to understand.
push for platforms to not give airtime to hacks like Tucker.
How is this not exactly that?
The easier solution is to not grant the government that kind of censorship power,
To my knowledge he’s not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where’s the censorship?
I read that. And I read the rest of the article, where they were very vague about what those might be aside from travel restrictions, said it could be a long time before anything happens if at all, and that the folks trying to do this don’t have the power to do it alone.
Consider that optics matter just as much as the actual content of the sanctions. Even if it’s basically a nothingburger of travel restrictions, he will play this up to his audience as being persecuted by The Establishment for speaking truth to power.
In other words, they’re giving him what he wants. Or do you think he interviewed Putin just for fun? Or because he really likes him?
Notably, Putin doesn’t really need a mouthpiece. He’s not some unheard of hermit with no power to spread how ideology, he’s a dictator of an extremely large country. This is seen as in poor taste because it’s implying the former, while being an expression of the latter.
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Tucker isn’t a journalist, he’s an entertainer, or at least, a propagandist.
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Tucker is one of the people helping delegitimize the press.
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I didn’t say anything about persecuting
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The corporatization of the news media literally started with Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes who eventually found Rupert Murdoch to fund their vision with Fox News.
You know why they wanted to start their own media organization? Because they didn’t like public broadcasting, the organization for public broadcasting, the organization created by Lyndon B Johnson and Congress to fund public media (which helps fund NPR and PBS). They thought that public broadcasting would favor Democrats too much (you know that whole the truth has a liberal bias thing). So they decided to create a media organization in which they could control the narrative instead of letting independent journalists do their job.
It took until 1996 for them to get everything together with Rupert Murdoch and the rest is history. The corporatization of other media outlets was in direct response to how Fox News ran their business because they cared more about ratings and making money than actual journalism, which caused the other news media organizations to follow suit.
So you could very much make the argument that Fox News was the root of the issue, depending on how you look at it. You can either say Fox News ruined the atmosphere around journalism and they started the backslide on the slippery slope, or you can argue that it was an inevitable outcome of deregulation. It becomes a philosophical argument at that point.
Do you know why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996? Because on January 3, 1996 the Telecommunications act of 1996 was enacted. This completely deregulated the American media market and led to market concentration and is the reason corporations like Sinclair now reach 39% of the American market. (The max reach they are legally allowed to have). Murdoch announced Fox News less than a month later on January 31st, 1996 before Clinton had even signed the bill into law.
So even if you think the outcome was inevitable, Fox News certainly jumped on it faster than anyone else and were the ones to start the enshittification of news media.
I have to agree with your overall sentiment. However, there’s at least a valid argument to be made that providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths in a way that few examples of protected speech do.
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Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
Hmmm. I’m not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Not sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, nor that it can’t be apparent when it’s been crossed.
The EU has good reason to fear anything that emboldens Putin or works in even the slightest to increase his chances of prevailing in Ukraine. It’s quite clear that a victorious Russia is an existential threat to its neighbors. With all this discernment of fact that’s going on, it seems like that should be fairly easy to understand.
How is this not exactly that?
To my knowledge he’s not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where’s the censorship?
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I read that. And I read the rest of the article, where they were very vague about what those might be aside from travel restrictions, said it could be a long time before anything happens if at all, and that the folks trying to do this don’t have the power to do it alone.
Consider that optics matter just as much as the actual content of the sanctions. Even if it’s basically a nothingburger of travel restrictions, he will play this up to his audience as being persecuted by The Establishment for speaking truth to power.
In other words, they’re giving him what he wants. Or do you think he interviewed Putin just for fun? Or because he really likes him?
Notably, Putin doesn’t really need a mouthpiece. He’s not some unheard of hermit with no power to spread how ideology, he’s a dictator of an extremely large country. This is seen as in poor taste because it’s implying the former, while being an expression of the latter.