2/ "The American mainstream media, and its vital watchdog role that once made it a trusted, major institution in a flawed yet functioning democracy, imploded in 2024, and it happened in two ways — gradually and then suddenly.

The sudden part came in the days immediately after the Oct. 25 revelation that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos — the third-richest person on Earth — had spiked his editorial board’s long-planned endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris over the GOP’s Donald Trump."

5/ "...it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism & increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect-storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on soc media or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests & ideas or prejudices.

But esp their prejudices"

10/ "A few quick points:

— Self-interested billionaires can’t be trusted to save the news...
— Local news matters, a lot...
— Yes, there needs to be a reality-based community of podcasters, influencers, etc. No, I have no idea what that looks like or how it happens...

12/ "The worst part is that this has to happen not in healthy environ but when America is led by an authoritarian & his billionaire allies who have an arsenal of tools— lawsuits, licensing fights, pub pressure, maybe even arrests—to stop this reinvention from happening. We will have to save free press in America...while getting whacked by a baseball bat. But we have to try, because history has shown there is only one place where democracy can survive. In a place called Reality"

Plz read it all

@GottaLaff

One "add":

In their scheme to reverse human rts, one exchange Alito set up in his SCOTUS rulings was to remove FEC donor caps for Media Oligarchs in 2014. After this, Media Moguls hugely "bought/donated" to politicians/PACs to encourage laws that benefited Media. As Moguls spiked their donations, their net worth also spiked (Bloomberg was one).

Soon after, MSM published towards far-rt. extremism, which became most of the news USA receives.

Quid Pro Quo?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/