Everyone is always bemoaning the death of traditional media. "Everyone" being mostly the traditional media. The rest of us are quietly destroying them with our clicks and pageviews and facebook posts. Good. They deserve to be destroyed.
My distrust of traditional news media began in the late '90s/early '00s. This was a time when I got most of my news from the Yahoo homepage "News" box, and I actually read the whole articles. Columbine, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the creation of Homeland Security--and all I saw in the "News" was an objective reporting of facts.
I believe traditional American* media's focus on objective reporting is a bug, not a feature.
-The fourth estate relies on insider access to politicians and other public figures in order to get interviews. If they publish material that is too critical of public figures, they could lose this access. They therefore have a very strong incentive not to be overly critical of the powers-that-be. This leads to the press being basically the establishment's lapdog, supporting whoever happens to be in power.
-The media clearly is not actually objective, and we all know it--the New York Times is liberal, the Wall Street Journal is conservative. Before the Internet, people chose what newspaper they wanted to read based on its political stance. It is dishonest and hypocritical to claim to be objective when everyone knows they're not.
-The focus on being "objective" on every story, no matter what, leads to the normalization of fringe viewpoints. Like, "That was so-and-so, director of the new Holocaust exhibit that just opened. We go now to some neo-Nazis for their views on the subject." The media has the ability to determine where the Overton window falls, and they seem to take perverse pleasure in pushing it to the extreme.
-The media's ability to determine "what is news" is impaired by their focus on the bottom line. The more salacious and juicy the news, the more people will buy it. This leads to the over-reporting of crimes, scandals, etc. to sell more papers/airtime. The media also thrives monetarily on creating a climate of fear.
-The media, like any large bureaucratic company, is entrenched in existing systems of power. Straight white middle-class men dominate the journalism scene. Those in minority and marginalized groups have even less representation in the media than we do in politics, because at least we get a vote on our politicians. So what do we get? A lot of news that straight white men care about, and not so much of anything else. I get the sense that the focus on "objective reporting" is just code for focus on "what straight white men care about."
Cherry-picking our news from the Internet solves all of these problems with the traditional news media. Since you can determine the news you read, you can set the limits of your own Overton window. You don't have to hear what the neo-Nazis think if you don't want to. You can listen to the voices of the marginalized in the quantity you desire, permitting more democracy in what gets reported. You don't have to see all the salacious fear-mongering crap if you don't want to.
*The media in other places does not follow this model. In France, each newspaper has a clearly identified political stance.
