Great speech at Ole Miss

Nothing you don't know, but well-said:

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all most newspapers have Web sites, and have had for a while, newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue. Advertisers have not gravitated to newspaper sites, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of older media. And the decline of revenues means an assault on the very heart of the news – the ability to gather and produce news. No internet site will ever bring in the kind of revenue that allows a large newspaper, such as The Los Angeles Times, to field a newsroom staff – a staff which even with all its lay offs — still employs 700 people. ...

Those who rely on the Internet gravitate to sites that reinforce their beliefs. The filtering of information through an ideological lens, which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t care what you think. Reporting challenges, countermands or destabilizes established beliefs. Reporting, which is time-consuming and often expensive, begins from the premise that there are things we need to know and understand, even if these things make us uncomfortable. If we lose this ethic we are left with pandering, packaging and partisanship. We are left awash in a sea of competing propaganda.

-- Chris Hedges

Later (and not in the excerpts) he refers to newspapers by the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune being "ruthlessly cannibalized by corporate trolls like Sam Zell."

Excerpts here:

http://mrmagazine.wordpress.com/

Full video here:

http://mcast.blip.tv/#2042151

 

I wish to subscribe to his newsletter.

Dead on.

 

What he (Chris Hedges) said, underlined and in italics.

That's why I fear for the future and my son's future. No newspapers/journalism = game with no refs.

 

No basket. You traveled. My ball.

 

. . . transitioning to the typical Gilded Age formula:


Heads, Mr. Moneybags wins. Tails, worker loses.

Quit breathing my precious oxygen, little man.

 

This made me throw up. And I want so bad to take part in a rebellion before this country gets too dangerous to have a realistic chance of succeeding in one.

 

A bit about Hedges background:
On 5-17, 2003, just two weeks after president George W. Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" speech, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, although some applauded. Hedges' microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try to prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal denounced Hedges for his anti-war stance. His employer, "The New York Times," criticized his statements and issued him a written reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." The paper's editors demanded Hedges cease speaking about the Iraq war. Hedges, refusing to accept these restrictions, left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

 

The man's a hell of a futurist. He and Faith Popcorn need to hook up

 

You are too late by roughly two and a half centuries.

 

Newspapers were dead in 1759? Hey, just found this:

Poor Richard's Almanack, citing the downturn in advertising from local blacksmiths and the overall volatility of the colonial economy, has extended enhanced retirement benefits to its publisher and founder, so that he may pursue other interests.

Wish I had a font where the "s" looked like a lowercase f ...