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:
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 not 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.
You see, that’s where New Media have been the most successful: our dedication to truth, individual liberty, and common sense forced the corporate media out of the leftist closet. Had CNN and the rest chosen to compete with new media by doing their jobs honorably — to cite one example — Barack Obama would have been vetted and never had a chance at becoming president. Instead, the media went rabid, the country saw them for what they were, and now they’re going broke.
It’s not just print and online outlets facing their just desserts.
The streaming revolution is already undermining cable and satellite T.V. Without those carriage fees (that have nothing to do with the merit of ad revenue based on ratings), outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central are doomed. Like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, they cannot survive on merit. Nor can Paul Farhi…
You want to fix journalism? The following three words of advice are the only chance the corporate media might still have: Stop fucking lying.
Over the last decade, my contempt for the media has become complete. The fascists contribute nothing but dishonesty, division, and violence. I hope they all lose their jobs. I hope they all go bankrupt. Our culture would be much better off without “journalists.”
Hey, there are plenty of us out here to pick up the slack, and we’re not a bunch of entitled crybullies who believe we’re so vital and irreplaceable we deserve a taxpayer bailout. Instead, we’re out here trying to earn and deserve our pay by respecting the truth… You may not agree with Breitbart News or with me, but we don’t lie, and we don’t cower like a 14-year-old girl behind a phony shield of objectivity.
Paul Farhi jumped out of bed with the Russia Collusion Hoaxters at the Washington Post and right into bed with the Atlantic fabulists. People who care about “journalism” don’t whore themselves out like this.
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