Mainstream Media You are the Product

Mainstream News outlets are in a business. The business is not to sell news. It is to sell an audience. Many magazines will offer demographics of their audience for the advertiser to know what audience they reach. They are not selling truth. They are not even selling news. They are using news to amass an audience which they in turn sell to advertisers. It occurred to me that we are not the customer for the news companies, we are the product they sell. It’s not some conspiracy. It just takes a little thought and analysis to realize this, or in my case read Chomsky, because that’s where I got this from.

Those of you reading this who reject capitalism already see the problem inherit in this. I am going to direct some of this article to those who are capitalists. If you are a capitalist I am not trying to attack your beliefs. I am simply going to show a problem inherent in the current media model, mostly in the United States. The product they are selling is the audience. The media outlet will be driven to gain ratings. This is not a drive for truth. Investigative reporting is thus discouraged in this model because there is a desire to please the customer which is the large corporations who have the funding to purchase this product. It is not a conspiracy to deceive,it is simply the idea ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds.’

Listener supported media would have a better tendency to report in the interest of the audience. Major corporations are intertwined with the state. The interests that drive politicians to please major corporations for donations and support are the same interests that drive media. This will create a sort of magnet that will draw both politicians and media outlets to a similar path. The politicians are seeking the audience of the media outlet. They are also seeking the corporate donations. In this model the advertisers which are large corporations hold much power. This is simply by default the hand that feeds or the invisible hand working not in the interest of the people, because we are not the consumer for either the politician or the media outlet. The consumer is the one paying for the service. This makes both media and politicians naturally retailers who sell products to the corporations. The interests they will naturally be more concerned about will be the interest of the Corporations. This is easily seen in the Monsanto milk, Fox news incident.

It is also useful to consider while watching or reading media. It is wise to remember that the media outlet will naturally hold a bias and the bias is easy to spot. Perhaps with the changing face of media in the twenty first century we can remember this and begin to build media models that have the interest of the general population in mind. Perhaps we can move towards the audience being the consumer as opposed to the corporation purchasing the audience.

Smaller news outlets often rely on the larger news outlets for much information and direction. This is out of their lack of resources. The major news outlets have the resources paid for by the sale of audiences to major corporations. This works almost like a trickle down effect to direct other media in the direction of corporate interests. Is anyone really shocked?