Reuters kindly reminds us that the only persons genuinely finding actual enrichment through the online sphere are the owners of the technology and platforms, with a substantial amount of their ample proceeds actually coming not by happenstance from the public’s taxes paid. I have said for years that print media is not dying, only bad print media, and the same absolutely applies to the virtuals. Marketing has grown so ingrained that “professional” journalists and reporters today simply have no fucking clue what to do with themselves unless paid to either advance or suppress whichever spins on whatever stories. Nothing can be done anywhere unless money is at stake, with news personnel scrambling all the more to collect the meager, shit-stained pennies falling down from on high, and only ever for the chance to sell the dream that everything is indeed manageable and most of us might actually make it out of here alive.
The public of course, receiving exactly what they pay for, because who doesn’t love the sight of beggars dancing for coin?
I’m not merely condemning mainstream/corporate/commercial news, but any agency that does it for pay. Needing money for booze and pills and video games is not the same as having to support oneself. The New York Times is such a self-righteous clusterfuck of ableist centrism, its clownish imp roster earning 6- and 7-figures for dutifully refusing to be objective about anything unless in open promotion of Uncle Sam’s thrusting his militarized 5 inches into foreign interests, that it falls upon unpaid op/ed contributors to give its readers any real knowledge of the world. On that note, educator Suketu Mehta has written the smartest piece to fly under the NYT banner in years, simply by asking citizens of the USA to consider turnabout as fair-play where regards immigrants, refugees and migrants crawling for their lives from the dirty bombs and dirtier policies Uncle Sam offers the world with all the abundance of shit and piss that pot-bellied desk jockeys are prone to.
But why would anybody, no matter how dire their circumstances, choose to come to the states, when the annual global index is declaring that 127 of the almost 200 nations on Earth are more peaceful domestically than the god-blessed US of A? I mean, by this day and time, one would think that it be common knowledge, how our domestic policies are no less maniacal than our foreign, prompting what NBC calls an all-time high for suicide rates and drug overdoses. The recent G20 summit of international finance ministers and central bank chiefs are announcing advanced aging as a new global risk, with its side-effects of prolonged healthcare costs and diminished jobs causing troubles for the societies of first world nations in particular, rather than the greed and unbridled selfishness of the taskmasters and change agents who own the means to create these problems, along with every other problem of the modern age. You know, these same international finance ministers and central bank chiefs, and their golf buddies heading the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry, the weapons contractors and the Saudi/Israeli oil conglomerates and the blasted tech sector granting them one and all anonymity where needed and sex appeal where really needed.
It’s all in the marketing. That is why people with nowhere else to go inevitably land here. They know their lives will be every bit as doomed thanks to the same Powers That Be making beggars dance the world over, but at least they will have easier access to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll before their respective bough breaks. When society hungrily indulges this mass hallucination where progress is an environment so rich in reassurances that anything unflattering or uncomfortable is just fake anyways, then I say nothing but to holy hell with this opprobrium ideology of I will support your fantasy as long as you enable mine.
Nobody so inclined with the means would ever willingly pay for *real* news. The closest they’ll come to higher truths is jacking off to Abby Martin vids for free. Well-fed or starving to death, all will happily pay arms and legs for distractions from the reality underlying said *real* news though, working so hard for their life-saving entertainment as they are wont to do, dancing for coin to play the slots once more while dry-humping the conga line waiting to finally, finally, keel over and die forgotten.