The full title of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization by Andrey Mir says it all: the delivery of news on Twitter and social media to an increasing majority of people has… Read More ›
Trumpism and Fake news
Rage on social media: signaling intensities instead of feelings
Signaling intensities instead of feelings has become a built-in setting of social media that encourages socializing through rage. For platform owners, it is a good thing, the bread and butter of business. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of… Read More ›
Postjournalism: Subjective modality in the guise of objective modality
Postjournalism passes off the opinion as the fact, the connotation as the denotation, the attitude as the referent. To put it simply, in postjournalism, reporting is commenting. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). Subjective modality in… Read More ›
Advertising-driven media: merchants of happiness
Digital advertising tools have simply and candidly exposed what was known in the industry long ago: advertising does not like the news because the news is often bad news. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). On… Read More ›
Postjournalism: from the world-as-it-is to the world-as-it-should-be
Advertising dominated the business of the news media, providing 70% of revenue and more. Ad revenue was so plentiful that it made media organizations the largest and richest corporations of the late capitalist period, on par with banks or oil… Read More ›
Polarization studies are media studies
Fake news is not the principal problem in the new media environment. The impact of fake news is already mitigated by the users’ growing immunity and also by the growing noise that diminishes the potency of fake news’ impact. A… Read More ›
The New York Times: from “We are not American Idol” to “We are not resistance” (which is gone, too).
The news validation within a certain value system is the only remaining function of news business that might have relative use-value for readers. The need for the business to survive forces the media to shift its operational emphasis from news… Read More ›
Sourcing: news supply in the media. The switch from news to opinions and from bureaucrats to “experts”
Herman and Chomsky thought that government and corporate bureaucracies subsidized the media by supplying news, as it was rather expensive to have correspondents everywhere. And they were right. But now it costs almost nothing to get evidence from wherever you… Read More ›
Postjournalism: Discourse concentration
The topics and discourses that do not support polarization will not circulate in the media for long or will be completely ignored. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). The polarization of stances requires the commonality of… Read More ›
The Trump bump in the news media: commodifighting Trump
The commercial motives behind the media coverage of Trump remain unrevealed to the public. Business stimuli for the media to cover Trump’s every move contributed to a media environment favorable to Trumpism. Meantime, the media themselves became more and more… Read More ›