Michael Moore Says Capitalism Killed the Newspaper Industry
By Heather Monday Sep 14, 2009 8:28pmh/t TheWrap.com
At the Toronto Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Moore excoriated newspapers for seeking profits and for "slitting their own throats".
©2009 Crooks And Liars
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this guy has hit so many things RIGHT on the head over the years, ESPECIALLY the last 8... So be sure for ANY spin on this ESPECIALLY in the media to be about Moore just "looking for attention" again or some other such fucking nonsense with NOTHING of valuable input.
The reader-based model is probably also responsible for the British tabloids.
That's not to say that the reader-based model isn't a better model; it surely is. Just realize that there will be positives as well as negatives, as with anything. I'm sure that Moore would agree that there are trade-offs.
Profit Rules!
Actually, we'd be better off if that was the motive. In fact, it's more like "Greed rules, even at the expense of profit!"
Fux News will be upping their attacks on Moore starting now
God bless him.... he's fighting the good fight; but any newspaper analysis that leaves out the development of the web (! - where content is expected to be free, and where the revenue model was missing in action for 5 or more years) is just plain stupid.
Moore just sounds naive here, again. As he does in 'Capitalism; a love story' when he says "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil, You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."
We already have democracy, dummie; y'know? it's our POLITICAL system. Capitalism is our FINANCIAL system. And in Late Capitalism it's corrupt from the top down.
And we 'regulate evil' all the time. Not thinking you can regulate evil may be the dumbest thing he's ever said.
I worked within the Gannett system for more than 12 years. Here's the thing... in the late 90s and in the early part of this decade, they bought up as many major papers across the country and in Britain that they could. Then they slowly started to close them down, one by one, citing costs. But then, why did they buy so many? For the express purpose of closing them down and to make the USA Today the only paper that they would produce. You could see them letting each paper die by pulling away all marketing, cutting back severely on customer service until the inevitable happened... people just didn't even know a paper existed anymore, and if they were a subscriber, they got so fed up they let their subscriptions expire. This is a much larger plan, folks... call it what you will and call me crazy, I don't care. But this was a cool and calculated corporate move to stem the flow of information in this country. Believe it or not at your own risk. You will see fewer and fewer local papers until the only thing you can get is USA Today. They bought them all up to kill them off. This is like shooting yourself and saying you were shot by somebody else. You will soon have your national mouthpiece newspaper telling you what the news is... corporate controlled information delivered conveniently to all locales thanks to their old local distribution systems which, among all Gannett's recently jettisoned resources, remain intact. USAToday. The world's newest Pravda. Coming to a corner newspaper box near you.
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