Study Hall Digest 12/4/2017

Hi

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Everything fuckin’ sucks, huh? I guess the thing here in these dark times is to identify the enemy. I have to remind myself constantly that the country isn’t dying, it’s being killed by specific people. That fact doesn’t exactly cheer me up, but it provides a clue to my next steps (step 1: learn to build a guillotine). Similarly, to fight through this current media hellscape, it’s important to remember that the media isn’t dying of some kind of untreatable disease, it’s being slowly murdered by specific people. We can blame ads and we can blame digital ecosystems, but that ignores the fact that specific people created those ecosystems and are benefitting immensely from them while the rest of us suffer. Google and Facebook take 60 percent of all ad revenue online, enriching the companies’ shareholders, creating a paltry number of jobs and no value outside of their stocks. And federal regulators let them get away with it. Jeff Bezos pushes down the price of books and media and everything else so that we all make less, and he’s now worth $100 billion.

There is a war being waged by billionaires on the media and media workers. It turns out that the new owners of LA Weekly, who fired all but one editorial staffer, are a motley crew of psychopathic Trump supporters who may want to use the publication to push their right-wing agenda. The Koch Brothers have their fingers in Time Magazine now. Sinclair, which owns more TV news stations than anywhere else, is quickly consolidating power and pushing out pro-Trump propaganda. And places not directly owned by evil billionaires are nonetheless affected by them: BuzzFeed is going to cut jobs soon because even they can’t make enough money on the duopolistic ad-supported internet.

We need to see this media mess as part of the same systemic shit affecting the rest of society: vast and increasing wealth inequality and our march toward proto-fascism. The media is not unique, it’s just an industry in a society being bludgeoned to death by billionaires. We keep searching for media-specific answers to a much wider problem. And while there are undoubtedly tweaks we can make within the media, the solution to our media crisis is the same solution to all our other crises: political change. An FCC and FTC that do their jobs, higher taxes, a stronger working and middle class (which can really only be achieved through unions) — these are the solutions to nearly every problem the U.S. faces today, including the problems with the media. So I guess it’s time to get political….which makes it all the more sad that many of these media companies being murdered by billionaires insist their employees stay mum on political issues (one day I hope unbiased journalism is seen as they great travesty it was/is).

Anyway, who wants to help me build a guillotine?

Live in LA? Boycott LA Weekly! Send me pics of you kicking over those newspaper boxes! But don’t get arrested!

Speaking of people with too much money: Nationalize Matt Lauer.

Somewhere between these two tweets lies my work ethic.

A media company did something admirable for once.