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by sid-kap
2896 days ago
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I think you missed the point regarding whiplash. He's saying journalists should have been more skeptical about these companies all along, and should have dashed in some skepticism into their reporting throughout the last 10 years. Instead, they didn't pay attention to these things until recently, at which point everyone realized there are some things about Facebook and Google which seem questionable. So they waited too long to start looking at these companies critically, and when it became a salient topic and everyone started criticizing Google and Facebook all at once, they also had to jump onto the criticism bandwagon seemingly out of nowhere, causing the readers whiplash. Does that argument make sense? |
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That said, I don't believe his analysis is correct. I remember the short period of time in which coverage of Google and (a bit later) Facebook went from glowing to extremely nasty. It wasn't due to any sort of intellectual awakening amongst journalists. The cause was much simpler: Google launched Google News, and Facebook's news feed started to really begin kicking off major referral traffic to news sites.
Journalists and their editors started to realise:
a) How dependent they were becoming on G&F for traffic
b) How the decline in their profitability was terminal and not going to be easily turned around via some superficial "digital strategy"
c) How profitable these tech firms really were.
They started attacking G&F not due to any actual or real problems but as part of a negotiating tactic, which you can see still playing out today with the various EU attempts at a "link tax" which is really a tax on Google News. Rupert Murdoch in particular was decisive in this war because at some point he concluded that the iPad was the future of newspapers (because it looked like a newspaper) whereas Google News was a horrible dystopian future. I remember that once Murdoch gave a speech outlining this belief his stable of newspapers turned on a dime to begin attacking Google and praising Apple, often with the most spurious of stories. But hey, they thought (wrongly) that Big Tech was taking away their employment.