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Russell Brand: rape and sexual abuse allegations, grifting and general dodginess - discussion

Is traditional media immune to that? I would say very definitely not. If you have journalists covering specialist areas, then they always have a vested interest in making that area 'newsworthy'.
oh of course, 100%. and they still do set the talking points in action. I get that. It's the rest of it that is also of concern.
 
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Not sure I buy the argument that calling them "pests" is necessarily a diminution of the damage they do. Agricultural and environmental pests can ruin lives just as surely as the sexual ones can. Any alternative term would be just as liable to end up being used in a trivial or problematic way.
 
I don't think this is really true, or at least it's an environment that is changing rapidly... Traditional media does have some substantial advantages in certain (usually very important areas), but it also neglects vast swathes of our social/cultural environment.
The big problem is that while yes excellent groups do exist doing varieties of investigation from citizen journalism through to in-depth reportage they are, for the most part, totally buried by the dross and misleading work which is lower-cost, more popular, better funded and less likely to attract pile-on takedown attempts. The functional outcome of this form of monetisation is not generally favourable to either us or the balance of fact vs fiction more generally.

I'm not positing traditional commercially funded news journalism as a good model by any means - though I do think the partial collapse of its investigative function, partly fuelled by the shift of ad revenues towards big tech, is a bad thing. Because as Dispatches itself shows, when it works it has the chops to break through in a way that no amount of YouTube vids can.
 
The big problem is that while yes excellent groups do exist doing varieties of investigation from citizen journalism through to in-depth reportage they are, for the most part, totally buried by the dross and misleading work which is lower-cost, more popular, better funded and less likely to attract pile-on takedown attempts. The functional outcome of this form of monetisation is not generally favourable to either us or the balance of fact vs fiction more generally.

I'm not positing traditional commercially funded news journalism as a good model by any means - though I do think the partial collapse of its investigative function, partly fuelled by the shift of ad revenues towards big tech, is a bad thing because as Dispatches itself shows, when it works it has the chops to break through in a way that no amount of YouTube vids can.

Not gonna disagree with most of that. Though I'll say Flat Earth News was published in 2008, when youtube was 3 years old and still had a 10 minute time limit. And the Brand investigation... Again, it is an area which the outlets involved are particularly well suited to investigate. It is the media looking at itself. There's a lot of shit that gets covered today that just wouldn't in the past, and unpicking exactly how that picture has emerged and the effects of it is... nigh on impossible. <e2a: of course there's also a lot of shit that once got excellent mainstream coverage that now doesn't> I think my broad point is that we are absolutely not going to get rid of monetised 'journalism', and I'm not sure it would be good if we did (the right, after all, has plenty of alternative funding sources). So how do we proceed on that basis? Is it possible to regulate it? how does that regulation work with entities that are fundamentally international (and VPNs exist)? I think there are possibilities there, though it's hard and I don't think any of us are familiar enough with either the existing legal frameworks or technical details to really unpack it.

Might be worth a separate thread.
 
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Seems any old non Binary can get away with being a tit but woe betide any straight guy pointing it out...its fucking pathetic
 
You can read about it and listen to the audio of the pre-recorded show, that was then broadcast, here:


But no, there wasn't much comment.
Matt Morgan sounds like a pathetic worm, as do the BBC who let Olivia down twice. Hard to imagine how she must have felt in 2019. The Beeb's response to MeToo? Nothing.
 
I appreciate the sentment but...

A blue whale calf weighs two tons (1,814 kilograms) at birth

 
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