Most people find out the media is owned by a handful of billionaires and think:
That sounds like an incredibly bad idea.
Although journalists are tasked with holding the powerful to account, however, they don’t seem to notice this issue themselves – largely because the people who notice it aren’t the sort of people the corporate media promotes.
Evolution
We spoke to a biologist who explained how the UK has evolved a media with zero ability to self-analyse:
What’s happened is a form of natural selection. The environment these journalists find themselves in is one of corporate media. The ones who adapt to this environment are the ones who thrive. The ones who don’t are kicked out and treated like lunatics.
It’s like cave-dwelling lizards. They’re all blind, because they don’t need to see. If you stick a regular lizard down there, they question why it’s dark and then leave.
Adaptation
Jeremy Corbyn has suggested that journalism could be funded by taxing the tech giants. Of course, a lot of journalists are scared by the prospect. They’ve adapted to the corporate media. Transplanting them into a writers’ room that wasn’t primarily motivated by protecting its rich owners would be like throwing a leopard off a cliff and expecting it to fly.
Still, though, journalism needs to change. Because the inbred mess it is right now is an evolutionary dead end.
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Featured image via Sutha Kamal – Flickr [IMAGE WAS ALTERED]
