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ADDING_EVIL

                                             October 04, 2022

That ad-supported media warps our perception of the world
is one of those stunningly obvious insights that simply
bores people to tears.  I suspect pretty much everyone
knows that it's true, but tries not to think about it,
implicitly behaving as though it's a minor, containable
problem.




The Scialaba quote above      See:  BROKEN_WEB
closes with an admission
of the obviousness of this:

   "The upshot of all these
   investigations is, from one     Back in 2015, I was willing to
   point of view, entirely         entertain the possibility that
   predictable: who pays the       that was an out-dated view:
   piper calls the tune."
                                     "But this is Scialaba discussing the way
                                     things work in the pre-Web world.  How
                                     does it work now?  Aren't things more
                                     wide-open?  Does the Establishment still
Looking around through               have a lock on collective discourse?"
the doomfiles pages
(both published and the                     After watching the 2016 election
many still unfinished                       play out, it's hard to give that
ones) I see I touch on                      thought much credence.
the point constantly.
                                                E.g. the cavalcade of Bernie
                                                hit pieces from WaPo, with
                                                Krugman piling on at the Nyt.
     PAGES_YELLOWED
                                                I guess you could argue that
                                                the conquest of the GOP by
                                                the crazies is a sign of the
                                                Establishment losing out to the
                                                barbarian mob.




An old observation with me (that I
can't find written elsewhere just now):           Ah: it's near the end
                                                  of this page:
For several decades, the left wing news in
places like San Francisco was ruled by                    OPENLEAKS
publications like "The Bay Guardian": free,
weekly newspapers that focused on local
entertainment news-- night clubs, live
performances, and other cultural events--
effectively using that to bring in an
audience for their political reporting.  This
was effective local news, from an advertising
supported journal, but despite this, it
escaped being biased toward the center-right
because of the sheer number of small
advertisers paying their bills.  This piper
wasn't paid by one set of deep pockets, so        But those monied interests
they could afford to thumb their nose at the      almost invariably
monied interests that ruled the other media--     controlled the election
                                                  results as well, and that
The point here is that you don't want to          might be another reason the
be too lazy at just presuming that the            Bay Guardian was tolerated:
obvious thing that everyone knows is              Speaking Truth to Power is
really the whole story.  The Bay Guardian         fine, provided no one is
example gives me pause about regarding            listening to you.
"advertising" as the primary source of
evil in the world: there might be strategies
you can use to work with ad money without
being bought by it.

And conversely, it could be you can successful
avoid ad money, but still end up trapped by
a *different* set of deep pockets: e.g. government
grants often come with strings attached.

It could be the winning formula is to work with a
wide range of funding sources, and virtuously
skipping one of them (presuming it's necessarily
contaminated) could actually be counter-productive.





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