@Maj. Bill Martin @Smokin Joe
Thank you for the detailed response. I'm not quoting it just because it would make my own response longer than it already is. I'll just quote the bit necessary to get a clarification before maybe finding out we mostly agree
Just to start, the specific statement I made was:
1) The first thing that was running through my mind when I said that were the almost unlimited number of media companies, organizations, and "press" out there, many of which not only disagree with but actively hate each other. That's all the major print legacy media -- NYT, WP, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, etc.; the network broadcast and cable news (CBS, NBA, FoxNews, NewsMax, MSNBC, CNN, and a variety of upstart news organizations that seem to pop up all the time; "Alternative Media", which is everything from Breitbart and Drudge down to the never-ending geyser of bloggers and news aggregation groups of all political persuasions (Conservative Treehouse, Gateway Pundit, etc..) ; a multitude of publishers of all kinds, journals, etc.... That's not even mentioning local news, talk radio, etc.. Anyway, the list of disparate media members and sources is just massive, and they all certainly are not aligned into a single "institution" of any kind. Even the "major media" is not in agreement on every issue. The Wall Street Journal was a great source of dissenting opinions on Covid right from the start.
The best evidence of that is that all of us actually did acquire the information and evidence necessary to oppose a lot of what was going on. All the stuff you mentioned in your post is knowledge you acquired through "the press". Really, the problem isn't that we can't get access to information -- the problem is that there is so much information available out there in the press/media that it can be very difficult to locate and discern the "good stuff".
Nope. I didn't acquire my information through the press. After reading the article in
Nature, a paywall journal under ordinary circumstances, I searched medical journals. Peer reviewed papers of generally limited scope in ordinary circumstances, targeting specific audiences in the medical field and specialties, mainly used to either convey findings of studies conducted or to keep afloat in a 'publish or perish' university environment.
I did not rely on the WSJ (don't have a subscription), NYT, WaPo, ABCNNBCBS or FOX (except to tell me what I should be looking for as they denied it).
Generally, it took a bit of finagling to find the same peer-reviewed study results that were not behind a paywall (Elsevier, for one, controls access to an awful lot of scientific information, and for just 39.95, you, too can read the article, or log in with your institutional account).
As for generally available media, however, the vast majority of that is controlled by relatively few corporations. Rather than reproduce the content of the Wiki article on that, I will just post this link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States Consider that most news stories which are not local originate with the wire services, AP and Reuters being the dominant two. Which is why virtually any newspaper or local TV station will have the same story, same sources, same spin, and yes, the same buzzwords. "an obvious threat to our democracy" being a favorite.
(2) The second thing that was running through my mind was the First Amendment, which is still unique to the U.S. and still very powerful. What it basically means is that there are no barriers to entry, at all, into the "media' world. Any chucklehead with a computer can start a blog, email list, etc.. Give the chucklehead some money and backers, and you have something any of the other newsletter-type groups running around. We still have the complete freedom to do that. So that again argues against the idea that the press as a whole is some kind of "institution". No central control, no ability to limit membership, etc..
...and with rare exception, that 'chucklehead' might get a few clicks a day. Their news or commentary, if not posted on a major platform, will be buried by search engine bias.
Sure, some go viral, get monetized on YouTube, but they have to get past the platform censors first. As I said, I attempted to post links to peer-reviewed scientific papers on Facebook and got flagged, twitter was a complete nevermind, and that was WITHOUT COMMENTARY. This was science, in the NIH library, and because it did not march in lockstep with the narrative, it was censored. Yeah, I could have started a website, but how many views would that have had?
3) The corollary to the ability to create a new member of the press at will is that we also don't have any capability of eliminating members of the press we don't like, nor can we prevent individual media organizations from choosing to be government lapdogs. The First Amendment gives them the right to parrot the government line if they so choose, and there is nothing that can (or should) be done to prevent that by law. You can advocate for boycotts, etc.., but those are doomed to fail. Media is sufficiently fragmented and niche-y at this point that a successful media organization only needs to appeal to a relatively small percentage of the citizenry to be successful. So as long as there is a faction that supports that POV, they'll survive. Maybe even thrive.
Again, most of what passes for news out there is controlled by seven major corporations. Those corporations are commonly controlled by one person or family who has the majority of stock in the corporation. That leaves us with a room full of people controlling the vast majority of the so-called information out there. You may (or may not be) free to post what you want on line, but the effects of this were readily apparent in the manifestation of mass panic during COVID, for example.
Yes there were alternatives, but people had to lose that deer-in-the-headlights attitude of doom so effectively imparted by the MSM to even be rational enough to look for other answers.
I'm a scientist, and picked up on a few lies right out of the gate ("hydroxychloroquine kills" being notable, because I know someone who had been taking it for seven years who was then, and is still alive), so I went looking in the scientific journals for information, but not many people will do that, or can even interpret the results, check the validity of the conclusions based on the data, and verify whether the study was set up to produce a desired result or whether it did a fair and complete assessment of the question at hand. I saw a lot of 'bad' science done during COVID, and the number of scientific journal articles withdrawn/retracted in a short period of time has been unprecedented. But you won't read about that in the NYT, nor hear about it on ABCNNBCBS.
Okay, so I suppose I'd call all of those the "content creators", and for those groups who are all part of the press, I think thinking of them as an "institution" is just wrong.
As I have indicated, those 'content creators' for the mainstream media are limited to a handful of people who feed the upstream end of the wire services. That content is widely distributed through the handful of media networks that control the major markets. It is like finding scattered placer gold and following it upstream to the mother lode. Aside from local news and human interest stories unique to that local market, the vast majority of what you read in the papers is from one or two news wire services, and Gannet owns a tremendous chunk of the smaller newspaper market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Gannett along with USA Today. The others are the NYT, Tribune Publishing, Hearst, Bloomberg, Newscorp, Advance Publications, and Nash.
So, all of this may fly a lot of banners above the headlines, but essentially has the same content and format.
Even online, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft control a tremendous amount of content or access through search engine bias.
About the only relatively major independent out there is The Epoch Times.
In a complete different category are the very large social media companies that can act as an information gateway for a significant percentage of the population -- YouTube, Twitter, etc.. If those are the groups to whom you are referring, then I think that is a point definitely worth discussing.
See my comment about online content above. Consider that with the revelations after Elon Musk bought Twitter of definite Government collusion and even extensive "former" three letter agency employees on staff at Twitter and other Social Media Platforms influencing what content was even allowed on the platforms (AKA: censorship) some severe violations of the First Amendment were commonplace, because those violations were not just a platform deciding what they wanted to allow (legal under the 1st), but were heavily influenced, if not dictated by, government entities, a violation of the 1st Amendment.
Do I think that's right? Oh, Hell no. But it happened. Government took a hand in what was allowed on Social Media.
As I said,
Major media is still a government institution.
Even the protections granted under
Section 230 did not require removal of harmful content (and some of it undeniably is), censorship of content based on government input creates something different than an unbiased platform for discussion and debate, it creates a government controlled narrative. That narrative was used to convince people to push for lockdowns wear (useless) masks, and to get injections of questionable value and possible harm.
Did the word get out otherwise? Sure. some of us out here posted not only what, but why, the narrative was at best incomplete, and at times downright wrong. We also indicated where following the narrative (official policy, like putting COVID patients in extended care facilities without the means for isolation, but with a population of vulnerable patients with multiple comorbidities) contributed to unnecessary deaths. But we aren't the NYT or WaPo, we don't have that distribution, and censored from major Social Media platforms, were left with 'the grapevine' of comments on news aggregator sites (which is why I posted links to the research papers, so any out there could look and assess, and spread that information,with the peer-reviewed studies in hand).
But the Major media did their job, and induced such panic that some out there were calling for rounding up the "unvaccinated" and putting them in camps, if not summary execution for not getting the injections that were supposed to protect
them from getting sick, not considering the cognitive disconnect that if they, themselves, had those injections, they were supposedly immune. That's how deep the panic was, that these 'miraculous' injections were at first offered, then made a condition of employment, and in some areas the whole idea of travel and commerce was proposed to be linked to a 'vaccination passport'.
All of this was ginned up in under a year, despite street riots and other goings on, despite 'elites' behaving as they damned well pleased off-camera, that Americans would so severely react to fundamental rights, and decry the physician-patient relationship to the degree that doctors were not allowed to use their best judgement for their patients, and that two drugs which had been administered billions of times were suddenly claimed to be ineffective or harmful.
Yes, elements of out Government were behind that, and those still exert heavy influence on what gets out through any major media platform (with the possible exception of Twitter, now X).
There are alternatives, sure, but how many who have none of the political savvy found here will go there to look for information contrary to the Government Approved Narrative that is so perfusive?
More, every day, I hope.
YMMV
