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| He may look weird but he is simply a product of his time. |
Anyone who has engaged me in conversation about the state of journalism knows that the whole world is in deep shit because the mediascape is totally barren. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a short summary:
- Journalists used to have normal salaries allocated to them, so they could work hard and do good work.
- Newspapers used to have enough journalists to cover every day issues such as parliament, police beats, court rooms, council meetings, business meetings, conventions etc.
- Now with falling revenues, increased possibilities for media syndication (copy/paste content sharing) and an ever increasing appetite for new snippits of information from bored office workers who sit on the refresh button on news websites, the quantity of journalists has decreased (perhaps 10-fold) and the quality has withered.
The powers that be feel pretty comfortable in the world as it is. The fourth estate (the media) is basically a blind old toothless dog that sits at the bottom of the steps waiting to be thrown a bone, no matter how small or mangled it is. Gone are its sharp teeth and energy. So when you have authoritarian governments sitting pretty in their information bubble and suddenly someone comes and radically rocks the boat, of course there is going to be trouble.
It comes as no surprise that governments around the world are condemning all these leaks. After all it makes them look like liars to the people they allegedly represent. It also comes as no surprise to me (perhaps I'm just cynical from working with public officials for too long) that they should try to shoot the messenger and try to shroud the message in uncertainty.
The question is whether people are just going to sit there and do nothing or if they are going to have a good think about it for once...
Wait, are you saying that governments are overreacting now that journalism is in the state that it is? Would it be different if an old-fashioned investigative journalist had published these documents?
ReplyDeleteThe powers that be don't like it when people tell everyone about what they are doing. Well actually on second thoughts, they probably don't care at all, but they have to act like they do care to keep up the illusion that you have the power with your vote to change things. If they flatly said "we don't give a shit about what you all think about what we are doing" then they would be called dictators and not "democratic leaders" which is important because in some nations there could even be a revolution if the people found out their life is worthless and their voice meant nothing.
ReplyDeleteThe point is that everyone was happy before wikileaks. The proles were always hearing good news about how their government was fighting terror, the financial crisis, immigration, the Chinese and Koreans, swine flu....blah blah blah. Now some conflicting information has come out and it came all in one hit. Thats why they don't like it.
Well i think this whole wikileaks-thing is bullshit. sry 4 my pronunciation
ReplyDeletein my opinion it smells like a sidetrack tactic. i don't know who or why or against whom. but i'm pretty sure, that wikileaks isn't what we, or better the general public, think about them.
it's too much information in an interesting time-context.
i just wish that the general public will be halft as much interested in the future in normal life, political context, social context, etc. as they are know in wikileaks(-shit).