Tuesday, June 25, 2019

A funny Creighton column

Adam Creighton has decided that the big tech companies (Google, Facebook etc) companies have too much power.  He's particularly concerned that they have drained traditional news media of advertising money (true), so much so that he's willing to contemplate direct government subsidy of the news.  

Well, you might think, isn't that what we get with the ABC?   No, that's not enough:
Publicly funded media organisations can’t do as good a job. Private media companies have a powerful incentive to dig out bad news, even if it upsets governments, because it sells.
Huh? I thought Adam's paper has been complaining about the ABC "digging out bad news" (when it is about a Coalition government in power, anyway) for decades, which kinda proves public broadcasters don't have to be in the "selling" business to be interested in "bad news".

Creighton appears in The Australian - a paper for which the content over the course of a year is about 95% pure ideologically driven right wing opinion to 1% investigative journalism.  (And some of the latter is just true crime stuff - hardly matters of national political consequence.)    If he would actually come out and note that about Rupert's pet paper - as well as make some kind of observation about the heightened propaganda machine that is the money making machine known as Fox News - he might have a skerrick of credibility.

How much "investigative journalism" does Fox News engage in so as to be bring in the big money, Adam?   You know the answer - nil.   Your boss has monetised ludicrously biased spin as the way a "news" network can thrive, and you have the hide to argue that private media is better at investigative journalism.

His column goes on to complain that the big tech companies real danger is to democracy - because of the way their search filters sought out the news.   It doesn't take too much to read between the lines that his problem is that he thinks that filtering has a "left wing" bias he doesn't like - Right wingers have been complaining about search engines conspiring against them for years now.   (Because they have trouble understanding that, with the awful "we don't care about the evidence" path the Right has taken over the last 30 years, facts now have a clear Left wing bias.)

Nor does he not mention the true and clear danger from IT companies, which is via the spread of deliberate misinformation and lies (masquerading as news), sometimes via foreign governments interested in seeding political disunity, via social media.   

As usual, Adam's a just a silly lightweight who attacks all the wrong targets. 

He's dumbing you down, Jason.  


2 comments:

GMB said...

Facebook, Google, Quora and others are Oligarchical. The oligarchy is at war with the public. Now when you are at war you can have some admiration for the people who are on the other side of that battle. You can have some regard for them. What you cannot do is LOSE.

Whose side are you on Steve? I know the answer but I want you to say. Since google and facebook both came about due to stolen value, via the fractional reserve central banking thieving racket, its quite okay for the rest of us to take action to replace or outcompete them. Once again the libertarian ethical theory in this regard is for useful idiots. As NON-RUSSIAN once phrased it. Lenin didn't have a Russian bone in his body.

GMB said...

"Nor does he not mention the true and clear danger from IT companies, which is via the spread of deliberate misinformation and lies (masquerading as news), sometimes via foreign governments interested in seeding political disunity, via social media."

Every word true. I find it quite interesting that you were the one to type this. There is only so much the poor bugger Creighton can fit in his columns. And only so much he can do and say without giving Rupert the drizzling shits. If he doesn't mention something its probably because he's hit a Rupert barrier, a time deadline, or a word limit. I think he does a very good job. Do you think you could do better? I don't think I could unless I was really running hot.

In the old days the newspaper businesses had the most reliable cash flow of pretty much any known businesses. Because they had very little operational risk, they could take on a lot of financial risk. So Rothschild and their proxies (particularly in that outfit that Jamie Diamon hangs out at........ JP Morgan or something.) ............. They would have all these low interest 18 month loans that allowed them to pick winners.

So Rupert was chosen, and one must say that the oligarchy are very good talent scouts. Its okay to have some admiration for the people who are slaughtering everyone and making many peoples lives miserable.

When they create Moguls they make sure they can punish them, and I think they have punished Rupert at least twice. They punished Conrad Black so badly that he was down to his last 7 million dollars. Judge Posner, who everyone seems to love, was part of the punishment of Conrad Black.

And they murdered Robert Maxwell at sea, after depriving him of a rollover over of funds which forced him to loot his employees pension funds ...

So all this talk of Fox News and Rupert is a bit besides the point. The oligarchy keeps a waiter for every table. One that will be pleasing dependent on who the clientele is.