I thought of this when Jeff Jarvis made a comment on something Tom Friedman wrote and could not help but disagree. Jarvis, of course, talks a lot about the state of media. We had an exchange of thoughts which led me to ponder the balance between message and media.
When wanna experts and pontificators like yours truly examine why traditional media’s business is eroding, we point out to the well-known social and technological trends:
- consumers migrating to the web
- broadband penetration reaching 70%
- advertising supporting free content, etc.
These all have to do with media, mainly.
But, has anyone stopped to ask if the message is also a problem?
I’ve covered the paralysis and impotence of mainstream media quite a bit on our WorldMojo.com blog which covers politics, but without getting into the usual debate surrounding American foreign policy, ask yourself if the 18-24 generation that is being shipped off to fight wars really trusts mainstream media to get its news and intellligence on these wars.
My gut says: hell no. Sure, you’ll occasionally get NBC’s Keith Olbermann talk against the administration, but NBC is part of GE, which produces weapons for the administration’s death machines. FOX is News Corp.’s mouthpiece and its supreme leader Rupert Murdoch encouraged former British PM Tony Blair and current US President George Bush to invade Iraq because it meant “cheap oil”. Both have fantastic media companies that I respect, even GE is an admirable company I applied to work for back in 1999… but the fact remains: these companies are not going to offer a very anti-war perspective, even though the 18-24 segment will probably want to hear something more balanced than what these pony up.
If you are 18 years old and read that 6 more soldiers your age were blown up in a land that you can’t even identify on a map in a war based on lies that mainstream media pimped, would you really turn to said media?
Probably not. You’ll turn to the Web, you’ll skip over mainstream media news and go to smaller sites that offer an alternative perspective.
What do you think?
Subscribe: