The content is irrelevant
Andrew Sullivan posted an excerpt from from an Atlantic story about media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Here’s part of it:
This is how Murdoch understands journalism—as content, a word he uses all the time, rather than as a form of literature or public service, and as a commodity whose value largely derives from its instant retail malleability.
It reminded me of the closing sentences of the chapter on the press from Understanding Media:
May this not explain the strange obsession of the bookman with the press-lords as essentially corrupt? The merely private and fragmentary point of view assumed by the book reader and writer finds natural grounds for hostility toward the big communal power of the press. As forms, as media, the book and the newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.
Calls to improve the “quality” of journalism are kind of ridiculous, as are concerns about Murdoch’s outlets style and tone. I’m not giving the guy a pass. It’s just that he succeeds because he’s not quibbling over news as “literature” or “public service”—he understands that the quote-unquote level of quality has next to nothing to do with how well the news companies he owns perform. I may find that offensive or obnoxious, but if I actually want to do something about it, I have to acknowledge how the media in question function before I call him out for simply taking advantage of their natural strengths.
