I hate mergers and think they’re dumb, but maybe this is for the best. Isn’t the problem with internet news is that it comes from everywhere, enforcing a kind of chaos of truth and a race to the bottom? Maybe we should have near monopolies in media, so that a certain laziness pervades and people don’t care about ratings?
> Isn’t the problem with internet news is that it comes from everywhere, enforcing a kind of chaos of truth and a race to the bottom?
No, the problem with internet news is that it's getting easier and easier to promote a lie as truth. With a monopoly in media, promoting lies will become even easier (for that monopoly).
I upvoted you not because I agree (or disagree) with you, but because I think you politely presented a well-reasoned opinion and shouldn't be in the grey.
I didn't downvote, but I don't see it as well reasoned. It's essentially the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy[1]. In this case, increased media consolidation has nothing to with how fake internet news is.
In fact, I'm of the opinion that further media consolidation will move us further from low-bias information sources and towards more MSNBC / FoxNews extreme partisan news sources. It will likely continue the convergence of entertainment and journalism which only serves to dilute the little media literacy that we still have in the USA.
This worked, once upon a time, when the major media outfits were close to the center, and cared about doing their jobs of reporting rather than trying to push a viewpoint. If we got those conditions again, sure, this could work.
That only existed for television news and only because the FCC required television stations to air after-work news without commercials (making it a cost center) as a condition of their FCC airwaves licenses. Reagan's administration dropped that rule, deregulating television stations, turning news departments in to potential profit centers, and further merging entertainment and journalism.
As far as I can tell, the current administration and Congress are more interested in moving further away from regulations than closer to the pre-Reagan regulation regime.
To be fair, I don't think it will work today even if that regulatory rule was re-implemented. At the time, the vast majority of the US only had a choice of 3 major television networks, which were more or less equally non-partisan. Currently, there are too many channels and people that tune into certain channels do so to avoid being challenged by ideas they don't already believe.
