Thanks a lot, media assholes

[veronica_rich]

I knew Big Media would eventually make it rougher for their smaller (and more honest) counterparts to do their jobs, but this takes the cake.

I won't go into details, but suffice it to say this is not the first time I've run into something like this. We're wanting to cover an upcoming event, and the organization has a "media policy" that purports to control the content being broadcast or otherwise coming out of the event - and you have to agree to it in order to cover it. OH HAI, FURST AMEMMENT. Fucking hell. This bullshit was not common practice before Big Media owners started making it OK to suck cock with politicians to get tax breaks and break antitrust regulations so they could buy up more and more little outlets to pad their own pockets.

I hate this profession. I do not want to do it for the rest of my career, what is left of it. Ugh. I need another kind of job when I leave this one in a few years.

Comments

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

If you want to get technical on media, it started with Reagan, when he removed the antitrust, anti-monopoly legislation FDR had put into place 40 years earlier, to prevent dominance of the message and ensure several sources would give varying POVs. But, Reagan and his cronies had buddies who wanted to make money by buying up everything in sight (*coughtedturnercoughrupermurdochCOUGHHACK*), and he made it legal to do so. But then came the Internet, which has done more to kill ad sales and remove financial support for publications (and even TV) than anything else. I'm all for free information, but the average reader is not educated well enough to understand the difference between somebody's possibly uninformed opinion on a blog, and an article or editorial written by a professional who has to use their real name and back up what they say with data or examples - and they tend to see those blogs on the same par as legitimate publications. (This is not to say some blogs aren't valuable or accurate, but a blog is a blog is a blog to Joe Q. Public.)