I take no pleasure in the misery of others, but as someone who recognizes that the mainstream media is the arch-villain in the fight for human liberty and the survival of an America that doesn’t resemble a European socialist country — yesterday, it was impossible for my heart to do anything other than leap for joy when I read that the New York Times lost $40 million in 2011.
No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and all the rest are nothing more than lairs for arch-villains, and when these hollowed-out volcanoes are bankrupted, the virtue of this outweighs what happens to the faceless henchmen who are now out on the streets looking for work. I wish them luck. I wish things were different. But this is about saving our country and humanity.
Over in England, some are openly panicking over the future of newspapers:
Online news sources such as Twitter and celebrity-focused blogs could put newspapers like The Sun out of business, its editor told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.
Dominic Mohan said that if such sites were able to report scandals that newspapers were forbidden to write about because of privacy injunctions, readers and advertising money could flow from the press to the internet.
Mr Mohan told the privacy and injunctions committee of peers and MPs: “We are competing for eyeballs with social media.”
New technology is part of the problem, to be sure, but the other part is credibility.
For instance, Politico isn’t a newspaper (though they do publish one in DC), but their traffic is bleeding because they’ve lost credibility. Five years ago, when that publication came online, we all liked it. Now they’ve lurched to the left, climbed into bed with MSNBC and Media Matters, and no one respects or trusts them anymore. Sure, Politico will, unfortunately, survive, but it won’t thrive like it would were it an honest publication.
The same thing that’s happening to Politico’s traffic is what happened to newspapers. I’m not discounting the technology angle, but again, this is also an issue of what it means to lose your customers over credibility.
The existential problem for dishonest media outlets is that blogs and Twitter are the tools used by those of us looking to expose the biases and dishonesty of the MSM, and these tools are extremely effective in communicating with thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands — something we weren’t able to do just fifteen years ago.
Through social media, we the American people are finally allowed to have a conversation amongst ourselves without the filter of the corrupt media skewing things in their favor. In other words, it’s not technology for the sake of technology that’s hurting dishonest media outlets. What happened is that this technology gave we the customers alternatives. No longer are we stuck with whatever newspaper or two is available in our area. No longer are we stuck with three or four channels that deliver news. We can now make our long-held displeasure known to these corrupt outlets in the most dramatic of means — by going elsewhere, by giving our business to outlets who don’t lie to us, by spreading their word about their lack of credibility.
You see, one of the ways the corrupt MSM held on to its power for so long was through their uncanny ability to create an artificial reality that makes the majority feel like the minority. For example, when the elite few with access to mass media kept telling you Uncle Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, there was no outlet for dissenters to challenge that. Therefore, that artificial reality became reality, and as a consequence, millions of innocents in Southeast Asia died.
Yes, the stakes are that real. I wasn’t kidding about the arch-villain stuff.
Today, thankfully, that’s no longer the case. We The People can hit back, respond to, and expose these liars and their lies instantly through social media. That’s the real threat to old media. As Andrew Breitbart famously said, “It’s not your business plan that sucks, it’s you that sucks.”
Another example of what I mean is my hometown newspaper. There are all kinds of free online outlets that will tell me what’s happening in my area, but still I subscribe to the local newspaper. It’s a good paper — informative, interesting, and no bias that I can detect. I also enjoy the ritual of reading it in a relaxing chair. When I lived in Los Angeles, though, if the choice had been between having no idea what’s going on and subscribing to the L.A. Times, I would’ve chose ignorance.
Obviously the MSM doesn’t want to face this truth, so they’re going to blame their demise on anything but. And I’m not saying the person quoted above is 100% wrong about why newspapers might go under, but he is ignoring a large part of the equation.
Let’s just hope he’s right about the most important part — about the inevitability of the villain’s volcano lair being put out of business.
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