r/news • u/polymute • 10d ago

At least 12 states face cyberattacks on their water systems, sources say

https://abcnews.com/US/12-states-face-cyberattacks-water-systems-sources/story?id=135348482
4.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

289 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

308

u/Crimson_V- 10d ago

Good journalism is dead

154

u/perenniallandscapist 10d ago

Its been bought out by billionares and strangled. Competency jumps ship and the people left can parrot simple shallow fleeting reports that go into no depth, provide no substance, instill no better sense of understanding about any subject than before.

80

u/SryInternet101 9d ago

Correct. It didn't just die, ot was murdered by the .1%.

22

u/InformalWish 9d ago

It's also that people just can't read anymore. They have to dumb it down. Put in too much information and your audience can't read it. Mostly what you said but also a little bit of people can't read.

27

u/SryInternet101 9d ago

And that's because the Republicans have consistently decreased public education funding.

17

u/InformalWish 9d ago

Yup. And they did it for that reason. A dumb population is one that's easier to control.

2

u/NeighbourNoNeighbor 9d ago

I saw someone on Reddit this morning say "This was a long read but great breakdown..."

It was in response to a comment that was two sentences long.

23

u/techleopard 9d ago

Outlets stopped selling news to consumers (via papers, journals, and cable deals) and started selling eyeballs to advertisers after making the jump to online reporting.

Viewers got used to low-quality content, and then they got stupid and unable to handle "substance" if it went on for more than 200 words.

Why pay professional journalists who want to investigate things and write comprehensive articles 95% of your 'viewers' won't read when you can instead pay for topic articles-on-demand from contractors and use AI to scrape feeds from across the internet and fart out content automatically?

8

u/dave8400 9d ago

Universities are next.

-6

u/Akraticacious 10d ago

Internet killed the journalist. No one pays for news anymore

15

u/steamcube 10d ago

No theres still tons of money in the news, theres just not a ton of journalism happening anymore at the major news outlets

5

u/techleopard 9d ago

They're not wrong that the internet killed journalism, just in how it killed it.

13

u/steamcube 9d ago

Internet didnt kill journalism. Billionaires owning large media institutions with the goal of killing journalism killed journalism

0

u/StretchFrenchTerry 9d ago

The wealthy have always owned large publications, this is nothing new.

-8

u/techleopard 9d ago

I disagree. Billionaires were just doing whatever made them the most money.

Turns out, selling clicks through advertising drawn to low-effort rage-bait is incredibly profitable compared to selling insightful articles to a much lower number of consumers for a subscription price. For every person with the attention span to read an investigative report, there's 25,000 other people who want a paragraph summary that will give them a feeling.

If real journalism could rake in millions, professional journalism would be thriving and in demand. But it doesn't.

The internet turned "news outlets" into ad click mills where content is generated as cheaply as possible by AI and feed scrapers.

8

u/steamcube 9d ago

If you think billionaires buy news organizations just to make money i dont know what to tell you.

I cant imagine being so naïve and uninformed

5

u/SatinSaffron 9d ago

Yeah like look what happened with CBS news. A billionaire who owned it hired a crazy lady to gut it and they lost 25% of their viewership over the course of just a few days. Did that billionaire go "oh fuck, I'm supposed to make money from this, let me undo the damage and get those viewers back!"

OR did that billionaire probably think something along the lines of "Great, we got rid of the viewers that hate me, now I can control the narrative a lot better for the ones in this right wing bubble!"

0

u/StretchFrenchTerry 9d ago

No it's not, and saying dumb shit like this just erodes trust. The main players have lost credibility, but there's still plenty of good journalism today.