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The death of BuzzFeed News occasioned media thinkpieces one of which actually claimed that its passing pulls down the curtain on the “2010 internet”.
Nonsense.
BuzzFeed decided to create a digital news site in order for the cat gif/listicle site to be taken seriously. And for a while it was even though the only thing memorable that BuzzFeed News ever produced was the publication of the Steele dossier and a recent expose of TikTok’s lies about its China bosses. It was a waste of money that employed some media types in an era of easy money. After attempts to scale up, BuzzFeed has decided to use AI for content generation while jettisoning its pretense at seriousness.
Unlike Gawker, which did transform the media (for much worse) in terms of tactics and style, BuzzFeed was not influential. Its passing won’t even leave a mark.
So why does any of this even matter?
It matters because it marks the end of the for-profit lefty digital media model.
The lefty media consists of…
- Mainstream media TV and cable outlets that are prestige loss centers for much bigger companies like CNN, ABC News, NBC News, MSNBC, etc…
- Newspapers
- Startup digital media news
- Nonprofits
The third category, that was once going to take over everything, is gone. The second category is on its way out. I won’t bore you with a recitation of the numbers for how everything but the New York Times and the Washington Post is on the verge of going out of business. The first category is a mixed bag. I suspect that the huge media companies focused on streaming will keep some sort of vestigial news operations going, but they will care less and less. And cut costs further the way Discovery did with CNN.
That takes us to the final category.
I’ve been predicting for a while that for-profit news will disappear leaving behind non-profits. This is something that no conservatives are talking about until it suddenly emerges and then everyone will be talked about.
The media is being slowly converted into a nonprofit operation. For-profit digital media offered the only meaningful alternative and it’s gone now. The future will be a handful of legacy outlets like the Washington Post or Time owned by billionaires who want their own platform and startups owned by other billionaires like The Intercept.
If you thought media bias was bad before, wait until the media is entirely funded by lefty donors.
” wait until the media is entirely funded by lefty donors.”
I thought it already was.
I usually check the google news headlines before I come here. It is almost all slick propaganda all the time. But the normal reader probably doesn’t even notice. I just happened to have a neighbor who was part of the German resistance and had lots of material from German propaganda of that period, so I was exposed to that from childhood, as I played with their kids daily. Goebbels would have been proud to have produced such slick propaganda as MSM puts out. You do get so you can see through it after awhile.
My learning mostly started in high school. Our library had a real good book on WW1 and WW2 propaganda, theirs and ours, and a good one on communist propaganda. One of my high school teachers also had a subscription to, and old copies of, the soviet version of “Life.” I also found a good book on 19th century US political propaganda. A lot of that was surprisingly vicious and brutal.
In the 70s and 80s the leftward slant was in our msm, but it was more subtle and sophisticated. I think the msm have dumbed themselves down to the point that it’s obvious even to most casual consumers. I mean really, a CNN reporter with the city burning in the background, and the ticker at the bottom reads, “Fiery, but mostly peaceful protests…”?!?!