Nolte: Atlantic Contributor Wants Taxpayers to Save Media from ‘Extinction Level Event’

    0
    258

    by John Nolte, Breitbart:

    The far-left Atlantic’s Paul Farhi is calling on taxpayers to save the corporate media from an “extinction-level event.”

    Farhi was once the left-wing media reporter for the disgraced Washington Post. During a recent round of layoffs at the failing Post, Farhi accepted a buyout. Now he believes that the same people the corporate media insult, demean, and misinform (you and I) should bail out this fascist institution:

    TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

    The outlook for 2024 seems especially cloudy to Sewell Chan, the editor in chief of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit publication that has been held up as a sustainable news-business model. Chan told me that the past year has been as gloomy for the news industry as 2008–09, the start of the Great Recession, when a number of titles went under. “I fear 2023–24 could be another extinction-level event,” he said.

    Chan ticked off a handful of ominous trends: slow-growing ad budgets; rising inflation, which has stymied subscription growth; and a shortage of engineering and newsroom-tech talent that has crimped innovation. Chan suspects that audiences are experiencing subscription overload—too many streaming services, Substack newsletters, and digital publications chasing not enough would-be customers. Then there’s the decline in public trust in news media, a long-running phenomenon on the right that has recently become more bipartisan. An October Gallup poll showed a decline of 18 percent in media “trust” among Democrats and 13 percent among independents over the previous year. Chan also suggested that the media is turning off potential readers by being too relentlessly negative.

    That makes some sense to me, but then we come closer, to the moral of the story…

    The news industry has been in steady decline for two decades. Expecting some kind of free-market-based turnaround is lunacy. If journalism is essential for preserving democratic self-government, perhaps only democratic self-government can preserve journalism.

    In other words, the taxpayers should now prop up a rotting and corrupt institution that hates us. You’ll note that Farhi doesn’t want the media to change, or to improve, or to become something Americans might find valuable, useful, honest, and worthy of a subscription. No, he wants a taxpayer bailout, so the liars responsible for this…

    …can continue to go right on doing it.

    You see, liars cannot survive in a free market. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, Gawker, Jezebel, BuzzFeed News, Vice, and CNN are all shuttered or shrinking for only one reason — in a free country, there’s no market for their lies and propaganda, for their superior snark and cultural bigotry.

    When the internet made it possible for people without millions of dollars to compete against the corporate media, the media had two choices: they could either clean up their act, tell the truth, and have a chance at survival — or — they could do what they did: become even more rabidly and shamelessly dishonest to protect the Democrat party.

    Read More @ Breitbart.com