Huffington Post, just fired a bunch
of their journalists and I don't
know maybe CNN, MSNBC should think
about hiring them as correspondents
instead of political operatives.
But I wanted to give you details on
that on Tuesday,
less than a month after BuzzFeed
acquisition of Huffington Post, or
HuffPost went through.
BuzzFeed laid off 47 workers of at
HuffPost and close the publications
Canadian edition, HuffPost had lost
$20 million last year and was
on track to do the same this year.
How do you lose that much money in
an election year?
I don't.
>> Well,- >> How did
that even happen?
>> Well I mean, it doesn't matter
how big the economics of online
writing have collapsed in in recent
years.
I mean, it's just there is no
model for writing takes online
anymore for writing articles it's
completely unsustainable.
I mean it's all been swallowed up
by Facebook and Google and so,
they're screwed no
matter what they did.
So yeah, I mean it's a sad state,
I mean it's why I think that as
we look at the wreckage of what
used to be a thriving journalism
industry which was never by the way
a profitable business in of itself.
It was profitable because it was
essentially subsidized,
by being allowed to be a monopoly.
The news business used to be
a monopoly in the cities in
which they lived, you can only have
one newspaper really I mean you
sometimes you had two, but
that most one or two you
didn't really have competition.
And so that was how the news
business survived, ditto the the
news networks in the sort of heyday
of like Edward R Murrow and things
like that and Walter Cronkite.
Were massive loss leaders for their
networks, they were just forced to
be there by the government.
The government essentially forced
the networks to have news networks
that lost tens of millions of
dollars every year.
And they saw it almost as a point
of pride, like the head of the news
division was proud to lose so
much money, right?
It was completely the opposite of
what it is now.
Once the news actually had to make
money on the open market,
it collapsed.
Because for profit news model is,
with very rare exceptions like TYT,
which is we are supported and
that's why you guys are able to
keep a lot of the independence you
have.
It's just unsustainable,
it's just not going to work,
it ain't going to work.
>> Yeah, it's hard, it's hard and
it's a grind, right?
Yeah, everyone at TYT does the job
of several people at once and it's
hard, it is hard, it is a grind.
And obviously it's hard to find
sponsors who, we believe in,
because there aren't that many
companies out there,
whose practices we agree with.
But, what you're touching on Nando
is important because, something
that most people don't know about
is the Fairness Doctrine and,
I remember learning about it
in college, but I mean,
I was a college student.
I was kind of dismissive of it, and
it wasn't until you mentioned it
that it sparked my memory.
And then I did some research into
it and did a lengthy decode segment
on it on a day when you weren't on
the show for weekends on Jacobin.
And, it was a great piece
of legislation, I mean,
it wasn't legislation.
It was FCC regulations,
that ensured that the public's
interest was the priority in news
reporting as opposed to profits,
and conservatives hated it.
They hated it because, what
the Fairness Doctrine also did,
was it ensured that if someone was
going to come on to a news program,
and they were going to be critical
of anyone.
Well then the person that they were
being critical of needed to be
notified, with enough time in
advance, in order to respond to
the allegations or the accusations.
>> Yeah.
>> And so of course conservatives
don't want to do
you want us to be fair?
And under the Reagan
administration, the FCC effectly
will repealed the Fairness Doctrine
in its entirety.
And that was when Fox News
exploded, when conservative talk
radio exploded.
So what you're saying is there's
a lot of truth behind it and
we have history to back it up.
People are wary of government
regulation of the news because they
think of it as censorship.
And there is something to that
there is something to that, but if,
if we, in theory live in
a democracy, government regulation
is us regulating ourselves if
that makes sense, right?
We have the control in theory in
a democracy, right?
So in and of itself,
government regulation over
the media should not be a problem,
but we've accepted private
regulation of the media.
Meaning that if you kind of leave
it purely to the private sector,
which is under no democratic
control, zero democratic control,
they're allowed to
regulate the media as much
any way they want, right?
They have a de facto veto power
over anything that is
published, right?
I meann Jeff Bezos, the richest man
in the history of the world owns
the most important newspaper in
the capital of the most powerful
country in the world.
We don't see that as some form of
weird censorship, but it is.
It's not that Jeff Bezos is calling
a reporter at the Washington Post
telling him not to publish.
But, come on, unless you have like
some weird personality disorder,
and like a sort of or
otherwise just insanely courageous
to publish something negative about
Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post.
You would think twice about it
if you were a rational,
self interested human being, right?
Maybe it even happens at
a subconscious level not even
on a conscious level.
But, so some sort of government
regulation over what is broadcast
over the airwaves is not in and
of itself should not be seen as
sort of tyrannical, especially
under a democratic system.
In a sort of dictatorship,
of course, that is a problem,
but in a democracy, if we have some
sort of input into that process,
then it should be a good thing.
And I think it's fair to say that
the Fairness Doctrine
which today would strike us as
very intrusive in the way we
think about the media.
I don't think that you can look at
what the news media was like
before the Fairness Doctrine and
what the news media was like
after the Fairness Doctrine.
And conclude that we were worse off
before that we were now no,
I think it's very clear that we
were worse off now.
>> Yeah.
>> You can do whatever you want in
the media now, you can publish
whatever you want, essentially in
this country with zero yeah.
>> Yeah you can publish whatever
you want as long as it doesn't
challenge your corporate sponsors.
Yeah and that's what you were
getting at, and it's just so true,
the personality that really
exploded after
the Fairness Doctrine was done away
with in the Reagan administration,
was Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh's career- >> Yeah
[CROSSTALK] yes yes Rush Limbaugh-
>> So it's all you need, I mean,
that's that's the only example you
need, getting rid of the Fairness
Doctrine was a disaster.
Now obviously you would need to
modernize it, given how the media
landscape has changed,
there's no question.
But Branko Marcetic wrote a really
good piece in Jacobin about how
even today still till this day, the
vast majority of Americans consume
their news media from television.
And so the Fairness Doctrine was
something that impacted
the airwaves in order to get
a broadcasting licence,
you would need to abide
by the Fairness Doctrine.
So, even if there were no
changes made and we reimplemented
the Fairness Doctrine as it was
back then, it would still have
a pretty significant impact.
>> Yeah, and maybe we don't have
time to get into this but like,
even beyond the Fairness Doctrine,
which was essentially a compromise
between a public control of the
media and the allowing of private
profits over the airwaves, right?
It was a concession given to
the private corporations that were
candid government spectrum on the
broadcast airwaves, allowed to make
tons and tons of tons of money.
The one concession that government
extracted was that they would have
to do at a certain hour every day,
which is 6 o'clock news programming
in the public interest or
whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And that was just the compromise,
in an ideal world,
the media should be publicly owned
it should be controlled and
owned by us, not private interests
making profit it should be
owned by us for the benefit of us.
Like TYT is model which is private
but sort of viewer supported very
directly viewer supported is
kind of like a hybrid model like,
the viewers of TYT feel like they
have a personal investment in TYT.
And then TYT therefore feels like
they have to advocate for
their viewers, right?
Imagine that on a national scale,
right?
If we were paying directly for
the New York Times or whatever in
some kind of way that was sort of
publicly on the New York Times
would then have to,
abide by our wishes, not the wishes
of advertisers, right?
Or CNN or whomever, so,
yeah, I mean but the public input
into the media is better than just
the public as a passive observer of
the media, and private interests
are the ones that benefit of it.