People on both the Right and the Left get all bent out of shape about the media because they make the mistake of thinking that their objective is to give you the truth about what’s going on in the world. Unfortunately the true nature of any business is to make profits. The difference between things like a news outfit and say a company that rents heaters is that the company that rents heaters will simply not make money if their heaters don’t produce heat. And that’s because it’s very very easy to tell if you’re getting heat or not. Yet the news outfit’s prosperity is only very loosely tied to its ability to provide actual news and truth. What’s, perhaps even more, surprising is this is only really half the news industry’s fault. The second half, more like the other three quarters is our fault.
The mix up is that we tend to not see the real product that a news company is pushing. A heater renting company is very straightforward. Their product is definitely renting heaters to customers. Where it gets confusing is that a news outfit works a bit counter intuitively, or even backward. We think its product is current events provided in the form of video and audio commentary with a dash of overdramatized analysis and talking heads. But this is dead wrong. This is part of the shock and awe or really just the smoke screen. Actually to use a very crude analogy, the type of “current events” that show up on your TV screen every evening are as much the true product of the news organization as the color of the trucks that bring a heater from a heat company onto your hard. They may be flashy and orange, and that may even subconsciously play into your decision to go with that company over the ones with the beat up trucks, but at the end of the day that’s not the product at all. But that’s obvious. Again what’s not so obvious is the product the news outfits are pushing. Well if it’s not the news, what is it?
TO BE CONTINUED
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