[techostritch]

I don’t think I fundamentally disagree with anything you said, except your conclusion, my position would be, that it’s macro forces that make news organization ABC untenable and untrustworthy. if ABC kept being ABC the pattern you noticed would have happened anyway, maybe just faster or differently.

And maybe counterintuitively, I think a real ABC would be the least trusted source of all.

The only alternative I think would be to go back to a time where there was only an ABC(haha).

I do think it’s interesting that the only solution people come up to these problems is something authoritarian, this isn’t a criticism of you actually, I don’t know your politics but it’s something I’ve been wrestling with lately. Is the only way to have a free/informed/unified society to have total control of the information flow? Or total control of the culture?

Or maybe asked another way, how do you create the ABC that people want to watch when there’s so much other media out there customized to your exact perspective.

There’s also the fact that ABC is inherently conservative(small c) because what about D! And E! and L!

[yesco]

Honestly I don't believe these sorts of issues can be resolved with authoritarian approachs, in fact I believe any kind of top down approach is doomed to make this kind of thing even worse really. We would end up with populations A, B, C and just News Org Z! I wasn't trying to offer a solution with my prior comment, but a post-mordem of how legacy media has declined, and how this could have been avoided.

We had a period where the FCC only offered a limited amount of airspace so News Orgs has certain obligations to keep the public at large informed. This required a more diverse set of perspectives and I really do believe these perspectives helped keep each other in check. However with these obligations gone, and the collapse of the integrity fostered during this period, legacy Journalists have grown into smug elitest who, drunk over the reputation they gained while they had this integrity, now think of the public as a group to be guided rather than informed.

Looking forward I believe the proper solution to all this will emerge naturally as legacy media's decline continues to glide downwards. Personally speaking I simply get my news from the front page of Wikipedia, maybe more options like this will come about as the priorities of society at large continues to evolve as it gets comfortable with the internet? I don't think we will get anywhere though so long as "unbiased" is treated as a taboo word, something I believe legacy media has grandly succeeded in spinning the public on in recent years, atleast in my eyes...