Post AhMaZfClhJuVDb3ZXU by bcdavid@hachyderm.io
(DIR) More posts by bcdavid@hachyderm.io
(DIR) Post #AhMUEEgoUF39AyVdGy by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-04-28T23:05:19Z
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When people talk about the days of mass media in the form of the evening news, Dan Rather, everyone "on the same page" with wistful longing... I get why. The current landscape is chaotic. But, that period of more centralized media left a lot of people out. It made certain perspectives impossible to contemplate. Like during the early days of the Gulf War: the antiwar movement was invisible.
(DIR) Post #AhMUbg0D6WueXtl8jY by KatLS@ohai.social
2024-04-28T23:09:35Z
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@futurebird I remember
(DIR) Post #AhMUpsJ69WtylJMeLg by CStamp@mastodon.social
2024-04-28T23:12:09Z
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@futurebird SM has given voice to a lot of previously-silenced voices. The cost has been clickbait journalism, in which journalistic integrity, while still to be found, has been woefully thinned. I hope at some point the good stuff will be merged. Integrity and diversity.
(DIR) Post #AhMaZfClhJuVDb3ZXU by bcdavid@hachyderm.io
2024-04-29T00:16:26Z
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@futurebird As a kid in the 80s, I remember being confused about how many wars I'd hear about, and how nobody ever explained why they happened. Panama was the first one; the way it was reported was no different than a hurricane. The first Gulf War was similar. It wouldn't be until much later that I realized that most adults also did not know why these things were happening.That is what a highly centralized media environment is like.
(DIR) Post #AhMc8uS967XMbBcU2i by pelha@mstdn.social
2024-04-29T00:34:03Z
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@futurebird even worse, the guns & drugs exchanges, the corporate takeovers of central & so am democracies, the industrial poisoning of us black communities, etc, all were left out of the polished evening news.
(DIR) Post #AhMcQ2dBwdOWsyxIhc by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-04-29T00:37:08Z
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@pelha Well now some of us are more likely to learn about such things even as others sit around convincing themselves that evolution isn't real. Is it a win? I think it's mixed.
(DIR) Post #AhMcyS4DsfPNcV0VTE by justafrog@mstdn.social
2024-04-29T00:43:21Z
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@futurebird The main reason I was drawn to the internet in the first place, was to get out of that silo.Surprisingly often, I've managed to talk to people who were present for things which the news talks about.Once you learn to understand how news reports match up to real events, you get a very different feeling from them.
(DIR) Post #AhMd4n4qg8QGWFK3VY by not2b@sfba.social
2024-04-29T00:44:29Z
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@futurebird I remember how things went in those days. There would be debates, and there would be two sides: mainstream Democrats vs mainstream Republicans. Anything to the left of the mainstream Dems or to the right of the mainstream GOP just didn't get on the air. For example, in the Contra wars of the 1980s there were debates over whether we should fund the Contras (backers of the former dictator) to fight the Sandinistas, or instead try to undermine the Sandinistas with economic sanctions (which was the centrist Dem position). The idea that we should just butt out of Nicaragua was unspeakable.It did cut out some of the true whackos on the right, but the Reagan people were crazy enough.
(DIR) Post #AhMeH8QrCtcABC4DCa by pelha@mstdn.social
2024-04-29T00:57:55Z
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@futurebird having lived both I personally prefer this present day model, but yes, I can see the advantages of homogenized news.
(DIR) Post #AhMlxORAn2t7ezJPCy by stevenbodzin@thepit.social
2024-04-29T02:24:01Z
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@futurebird true. In 1991, a group I was in, in SF, organized a rally outside a TV station to demand coverage after it decided not to cover a series of 100,000 person marches against the war. It had little impact. People need to understand how much better we have it today.
(DIR) Post #AhMmC3k4176voo8pM0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-04-29T02:26:38Z
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@stevenbodzin They literally called all the protestors "terrorists" or "terrorist supporters" after 9/11Just thinking back on the absurdity of that claim and how well it worked. I mean the same things can keep happening, but it was wild how such a thing claim worked.
(DIR) Post #AhMmQrKcRODVfjIT8y by stevenbodzin@thepit.social
2024-04-29T02:29:20Z
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@futurebird but by 2001 there were alternatives, which exploded in popularity because of that McCarthyist overreach. In 1991 we felt so helpless before the media machine.
(DIR) Post #AhMwHkUnUC1LPGLtsO by maz@mastodon.online
2024-04-29T04:19:44Z
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@futurebird I would also like to hear from people that had to deal with letters to the editor and secretaries and other assistants that "managed multi media" pre internet. I remember quite clearly at least one magazine that featured hate mail regularly. Media Pros and Celebrities are continuing to engage trolls but obviously ignorant that they are no longer controlling the kill switch.
(DIR) Post #AhMxanuP7XGrRpynw0 by kc@social.coop
2024-04-29T04:34:18Z
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@futurebird a good example to look at right now is Canada which today reflects how the media landscape was back then elsewhere.When I was growing up a number of independent media companies (CHUM group being the weirdest of them all), doing different things with different ideas. One by one they all got vacuumed up.Now the Canadian media is owned by Rogers or Bell
(DIR) Post #AhN1rebNNO7ZK4Mya8 by VulcanTourist@mastodon.social
2024-04-29T05:22:11Z
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@futurebird When has stumping in the town square not been a popularity contest? It has always been so. People whose notoriety gives them advantage being heard, even with topics fully divorced from the source of that notoriety, have been commonplace long before "mass" media.
(DIR) Post #AhNV39J0STASP9bwBc by llewelly@sauropods.win
2024-04-29T10:49:16Z
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@futurebird would you rather the new media of the damned, or the Dan Rather of old media?
(DIR) Post #AhNXNc4UwU7QnlvWYy by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-04-29T11:15:14Z
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@llewelly This used to be an easy question. I’d say bring on the new bring on the chaos. But with the way money can dominate the current landscape— either how easy people can be to manipulate— I don’t know if we have the safe guards needed to make this new landscape safe from spiraling into right wing extremism. I liked it when things like evolution and basic tolerance were “cannon” for a shared national reality.
(DIR) Post #AhNXxpg1pr4zQHkhFI by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2024-04-29T11:21:09Z
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@futurebird @llewelly ...I suppose the limited-bandwidth, three-networks model also has the problem of everything being dependent on limited points of failure--lots of sensible things COULD be "canon" for the shared reality, but it also means that a tyrannical regime could find it easier to flip that and make the canon be anything they want.Whereas the primary mode of attack in the media reality we have now seems to be not to suppress the truth but to bury it in a flood of nonsense. In that sense it's more like pamphleteering in the old days than like TV.
(DIR) Post #AhNaeVHXjrm8Wtm3nc by gordoooo_z@borkr.one
2024-04-29T11:46:42.835340Z
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@futurebird You may find this of interest: "Structural Changes in Media and Attitude Polarization: Examining the Contributions of TV News Before and After the Telecommunications Act of 1996"Link: https://sci-hub.st/10.1093/ijpor/edv012I'm of the opinion that the profit motive is poison to reliable, impartial news, without solid protections/regulations in place (the Fairness Doctrine comes to mind).
(DIR) Post #AhNyMRHKHb1BngakJE by neekerbreeker@mastodon.green
2024-04-29T16:17:32Z
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@futurebird @llewelly About money, I also wonder if it's easier nowadays to hide at least some of the players.Recently I was trying to stop some snail mail for my retirement account. It took me a lot of googling, and I was astounded at how many firms were involved in simply mailing me a postcard.I think tech has opened a lot of doors for niche providers, which can hide them as well (maybe unintentionally, but still...)
(DIR) Post #AhQX8QKws8XTXPG556 by llewelly@sauropods.win
2024-04-30T21:56:45Z
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@futurebird 1/8on evolution: I read essays and books of Gould and others at what seems, in retrospect, a very young age. And yet I grew up around many people who rejected evolution. The few who "accepted" it thought of evolution purely in terms of the outdated "Great Chain of Being" concept that Gould criticized so frequently. And in those days, any scicom that wasn't aerospace or physics adjacent wasn't especially popular.