The Media's Unending Fight For Truth, er, Profit

A couple of good posts on by Jonathan Schwarz on A Tiny Revolution, on what really drives mainstream media. (Hint: it ain't Truth.)

From the middle of last month: There Is No Santa Claus.

One thing I repeat is that the mainstream media does a FANTASTIC job. Day in and day out, they turn in an extraordinary performance—at what they exist to do. And that is to make as much money as possible.

Of course, in terms of helping people learn about the world, they are an eternal catastrophe. But why would we ever expect any different? The mainstream media is made up of gigantic corporations. Like all corporations, they manufacture a product, which is their audience. They sell this product to their customers, which are other huge corporations.

Informing people about the world is not just irrelevant to the purpose of making money, but in many ways actually HURTS a corporation's profitability. No business goes out of its way to piss off its owners and customers.

Now, obviously it's true you hear constantly about the media's Unending Fight For Truth. But you also hear constantly that a fat man wearing a red suit breaks into America's homes at the end of each year to distribute new X-boxes. Neither of these things is real.

He followed that up last week with further evidence in the Washington Post, with the post A Shocking Outbreak Of Honesty From Ted Koppel (quote by Koppel, emphasis by Schwarz):

This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap.