Fairfax – the future of truth…?

So we’re morphing from traditional Editors, and physical papers. Partly that is the ‘Net taking over, in the way it has taken over from traditional Post. Partly it’s a generation moving on, and a culture change. The big societal danger is in the latter – dumbed-down  flat-screen-watching short-soundbyte absorbing high-opinion-of-self (compared to nature, the planet, other species/biota) consumers.

They will now go to the Net for their info. So what? Newspapers were guilty of bias, ignorance and obfuscation before the Net – our own ODT being a classic example. (An outfit with ‘Truth’ in its mission statement – but an OP/ED of mine binned, because ‘the readers would choke on their muesli’. If my op/ed was the ‘truth’, that reply didn’t live up to the mission statement…..).

So presumably we will get more ‘Stuff’ and Huffington-type offerings online. Supported by advertising – which begs the question: how many site-owners (keen to pay their mortgages like everyone else) will make sure they don’t upset their advertisers. Deeper, how many will fail to challenge a system which in itself (advertising to gain profit which will be spent thus generating growth) is unsustainable?

Or does it matter. That isn’t being addressed now. Newspapers full of pages of Real Estate, cars, insert handouts….. they don’t challenge the regime now.

But – we have to have the debate, or society goes off the cliff – resource-depletion until we die off quick-time en-masse. The media is/was the only stage on which to have that debate. Maybe, both formats cannot survive the peak of ‘growth’, and the funding collapse for both advertising and lobbying/spin, will remove the problem. I doubt it – my pick is that the poor will fall off the list first, the powerful will hang on longest, thus the lobbying/spinning will outlast those who seek and proffer the truth.

Ha – it’s probably always been that way. Flat Earth, Eternal damnation, unending economic growth – the mass have always swallowed what they’re given, and lynched/pilloried the Cassandras and the Galileos.

Time for an online Mediawatch, methinks. Something to keep them honest…..