[ethbr1]

A prior ill doesn't excuse a subsequent one.

That Sinclair, Nexstar, CC/iHeartMedia were allowed to consolidate in the 90s is bad.

That Google et al. decimated newspaper revenue from the mid-00s onwards without replacing their newsrooms is worse.*

I wouldn't have as big a gripe if Google or Facebook had started their own news bureaus and funded them with their profits. It still would have been a rounding error on their balance sheet.

But instead they destroyed a social good, took their bonuses, and called it a day.

* See 2007, the year Google was allowed to buy DoubleClick https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...