Thats a tough one, from my view: 1. Most Americans are, by rule, poorly-informed. 2. The stoopid shyte right wingers watch will pump out unadulterated bullshyte, because fox, et al are no more than the PR arm of the trump org/gop. 3. The stoopid MSM are all about ginning up "the horserace" to gin up clicks/views/ratings, and avoiding saying nice things about Biden/avoiding saying mean things about Trump, to (snicker) "seem fair." Or some shyte. (As in, "Here's why thats bad for Biden.") Agreed that the news is good, but the audience is dumb, and the newscasters all have an agenda.
Core CPI for 12 months ending April at 3.6% which was in line with expectations and lowest since 2021. News was received well by markets as it keeps in play a fed rate cut for the year. Auto insurance got a special mention for heightened cost increase which is something I noticed with latest renewal. Increased replacement cost for vehicles and parts big driver.
So, CNN has this pretty stupid NYT-like article debunking a straw man argument that greedflation is “the leading cause of inflation.” I have not seen anyone anywhere state that this is the case. Maybe a wacko progressive has overstated the case, but that has not been the mainstream contention. It had been suggested that greedflation has been the main cause in *specific* sectors like gas, even eggs (on top of bird flu mass culling events), among many others. It had been suggested that it may have been as high as 20% of the cause of inflation generally (if I remember that correctly), but NEVER have I seen anyone make the claim that it was a leading factor. And then the article goes on to paint Biden and others pointing out instances of greedflation, implying that Biden and co are pushing the claim that greedflation is THE leading factor. No. Biden has talked about instances, such as snickers getting smaller and bags of food getting packed with less food while prices stay the same or even increase. What has happened to the once-lauded profession of journalistic editing?
It's a bunch of things. Years of cuts (More in a second), slow to adapt when the internet came, people being stupid enough to think video was going to be the next big thing (They seem to have not learned their lesson and are now trying for AI) the pay being that it only works if you come from wealth (And it's not enough for the stress), and a lot of people who think Fox News and MSNBC is news. Lastly, 24 hour news and Trump. On the cuts: There's a company called Alden Global Capital that is a hedge fund and it just strips local papers down to the point of bare bones. They legit tried to buy Gannett but failed. Basically, it's a company ran by real life Gordon Gekkos, its founder might as well have been the inspiration for it. And of course, he and his family are weirdo libertarians. That's not to say that journalism was always serious, it's always had its faults but the 2000s haven't been great to it. Anyway, the further away from Wall Street era and 80s thinking we get, the better.
I find it hard to get past the point that quality journalism, especially local journalism (e.g your city newspaper), was basically funded via classified and other advertising in a bundled product. The newspaper had just enough value as a bundle for you to want to have it - i.e a bundle of sports, classified, tv listings, the weather etc - and seeing you had it, you would scan the rest. Especially your favourite sections. Even if anyone would pay straight up for local or city news, where is the ad rev coming from? Publications are fighting for the scraps
So i got fascinated with the greedflation thing at one point and listened to a few detailed interviews about it as an emerging idea (especially oddlots had some good content). One thing that struck me is there is a bit of a disconnect as to what greedflation really is - and i think that partly is because its been decades since we really experienced anything like this, so there was a lot of learning going on, and some assumptions turned out to be incorrect. Obviously if costs go up and supply goes down, you will see inflation. But also companies are usually going to want to charge as much as the market can stand. This is actually quite expected and rational. What prevents them doing it is competition. If they put prices up they would typically lose market share. What was unusual and new about what we saw was that pricing seemed to become completely unmoored from any benchmarks such that companies could jack prices way up even sacrificing market share (volume) for higher margin (profit). They didn't worry that their competition would keep prices low and take their market share. Everyone just went in the same direction given the chance. I think we really saw this in europe with the energy shocks on top of everything else. The interesting theory that emerged is that governments might be better to prevent these shocks ever entering the market.
This seems to have amazed/baffled Argentinians, to hear tango music during a high profile ceremony: Seems it's not considered appropriate for ceremonies to use this kind of music.
The ad revenue is probably the majority of the problem. Only thing I’d add is that the problem actually began before online classified revenue ever came under threat. Circulation declined over the course of the 90s and evening dailies were dropping like flies even in the late 80s. In the States at least. A couple of things that predated even the classified bust: 1) decline of standard work hours like blue collar shift work and people being more active in their kids lives (emergence of helicopter parents). The newspaper was more of a morning or evening ritual when time was more structured. Evening papers in particular were hard hit there…and that includes most of the small/medium town dailies. If you don’t get home at 5 every night to eat and read the paper but instead you’re home at 6 or running kids all over the place, people don’t intentionally carve time to flip through the paper. 2) cable tv market penetration from 1980-2000 and the rise of 24/7 cable news on demand.
yep - see for example the magazine business. Agreed. This is also the great fallacy of online in the first place. Before you had a few valued properties to advertise in. Online there is essentially unlimited inventory. I think it is interesting that Netflix and Amazon are basically reinventing the TV ad business because they suddenly realised you are much more valuable as a viewer of advertising than you are as a paying subscriber.
All fair about the decline, but can these outlets seriously not find an editor worth a shit? Or is it intentional?
Budgets are so tiny at newspapers today. I had a couple friends who worked at the Chicago Tribune as photojournalists. Trips to economic summits, the Olympics, some sort of weeks long protest in country X was the norm. They got cut in the early 2000s. Then standard reporting was replaced by wires. Then random feature articles were cut and papers became smaller to save $$$. Editorial staff fell somewhere along the line. The last people standing were columnists with dedicated readership and even they are going away. Look at SI columnists and how many of them were forced to go the independent substack route. I’m not a fan of PE, but the print media industry is essentially dead. I don’t know why they even try buying a lot of it. There isn’t a good model moving forward. It will all be AI generated and AI edited before too long. speaking of SI. Jeff Pearlman has a series of really interesting 60 second or so stories from his reporting days on his TikTok page that are really fun and interesting.
Tango rose from the lower classes, and some elitists even today still see it as "the people's music" and they mean it in a bad sense. The music of the workers, the thieves and the prostitutes etc. Not appropiate for what they consider to be "respectable" events. That is also true in religious settings. One time when we were growing up my father who was a pastor took us to visit a Pentecostal church of another pastor friend of his. The other pastor looked at us from the pulpit and in typical pentecostal improvisational style he said: "We welcome today the family of pastor so and so.... We heard that his son is a musician, and we would like to invite him to play the piano. My brother, who I think was 13 at the time and indeed very talented, was caught by surprise, and he asked, what should I play? My dad said, play whatever you want. To my dad's (and the other pastors) horror, he started playing the famous tango "La Cumparsita". While the pastors were horrified, the people of the church started clapping, humming along, and even speaking in tongues to the tango. I guess the common folk and the Holy Spirit approved. It was awesome!
So basically the tangofilia among the Argentinians felt seen when they watched this happening at the royal wedding.
Pay's been garbage in media for ages and is one of the reasons I'm trying to pivot. If I get a media job and the pay is ok, I can deal with it for now. Otherwise my plan is to be in a different field within a couple years.
Interesting. I'm comparing that to Portuguese Fado, which had similar "disreputable" origins but seems to have been fully embraced by the cultural elite long ago.
I'm not living there anymore and I'm not in touch with the upper classes, but I suspect what I described is probably changing with the new generations. I saw that Milei invited some foreign dignitaries to a tango concert after his inauguration. But I think tango is still shunned in most churches.