Pre-Internet Journalism Was Optimized For Information Transfer Efficiency, Post-Internet For Inefficiency

Was it always doomed to be bad from the first day of its invention? Or did successive cohorts of bad actors figure out how to make it bad?

Was it always essentiallistically shit from the start, or did successive waves of enshittifiers enshittify it on purpose, step by step by step?

Would it be possible to create de-shittified “internet polders” which are protected by dikes and are kept de-shitted below shit level by a process analogous to that used by the Netherlanders to poulderise and de-waterise sections of land below sea level?

Taking this a step back, let’s talk about the nature of the incentives. Both pre-internet and current journalism are mostly done for profit. But the incentives were different.

Pre-internet, newspapers were sold as a whole unit. You bought the whole newspaper, or you bought nothing. So, the profit motive dictated that you had to make that unit as tempting as possible–you had to create a product that would, overall, give the customer what they wanted. Hence, articles structured to be useful to the reader.

Journalism on the internet is sold by per-page advertising. Nobody reads “The Guardian” cover to cover, there IS no cover to cover. People maybe do a search, or they have stuff come up in some sort of feed, and they click on that headline. The longer their eyeballs are experiencing the ads on the page, the better. So the profit motive leads to those clickbaity behaviours.

I think the only way to change that, given the way the internet is structured with hypertext links, searching and so on, is to remove the profit motive . . . or at least, divorce it from that sort of click-by-click action of the individual’s momentary whims. Basically, fund internet journalism by means other than advertising. I’ve thought about a system where the government has a sort of tax-funded patreon page; every citizen gets $X per year of Gov-Patreon, and they can go pick what online presences get that money. And, people trying to make money delivering content online can choose to be in their country’s page and take that money, but they can’t also use ads. This would change the incentives–a website would want to be, overall, memorable and high quality, something people would remember and want to support. But there would be far less point in clickbaity titles, none in misleading ones, no incentive for the content to lead with teasing.

I kind of forget why exactly newspapers and broadcast journalists ever concerned themselves with integrity and accuracy. Why did a scoundrel like Henry Luce make a big deal about “separating church and state” at a reactionary rag like Time? As metropolitan dailies became near-monopolies, why did they adopt the neutral voice of objectivity?

Simpler times, blah blah. Were we ever better? Skinnier, perhaps with our beef tallow McDonald’s fries and $0.15 cheeseburgers.

Politicians banded together to limit corporate media ownership and impose the broadcast fairness doctrine. Maybe it was only a desire to preserve free agency against lobby groups, but it was at least that.

Politicians seemed interested in controlling or managing the news ecosystem. Their fear now seems to be that voters might want something not approved by their lobbyist masters.

I get your point; titles, even in MSM like “5 ways to become better – here’s how”

However, post-internet, we have a proliferation of non-mainstream media and commentariat (like this site) which gives us access to facts and comments that the establishment does not want us to see. Admittedly we (admittedly a minority) have to do more work to sift through the dross and figure out the closest approximation to truth.

Pre-internet ‘establishment endorsed’ information was efficiently transferred. Post internet, efficiency is sacrificed for the possibility of actually finding out what is true. At least until the Ministry of Truth steps in.

Well, I hate to be Captain Obvious a couple times in a row. I was recently in clarifying someone’s blinkered conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, noting the long history of the former in England and the US, and that the latter has only built since the Oct. 7 revolt, and open genocide.

I think the commenters (I can see up to Jan Wiklund, first 4 comments) make good points about the commercial & state imperatives that are behind Crap Journalism, and chronophage (time-eating) distractions. Now, it’s not like the Western press was ever much of a disinterested scribe of truthfulness, and we all likely recall the rise of “Truthiness” in the first Trump admin, fake narratives even earlier, like Sarah Palin predicting RomneyObamaCare “Death Panels” when we already had market-driven death panels, which of course can’t be questioned. And the Dimmies have this too, of course, Pelosi and the other gerontocrats (by July 2025 7 “died in office” since January, 0 Rethugs did; at least 3-4 since then, thus Trump had majority for the Big Bootie-ful Poison Bill) “taking a knee” while holding up Kente Cloth, to show how “anti-racist” they could gesture.

Let’s go back to the 19th Century. Both the Hearst papers and the Pulitzers were crap mainly driven to boost the fortunes of their owners, not just from direct profits but various side-schemes.

While I disagree on the whole with Ian’s conclusion that the ‘Net has on the whole been bad for humans, I understand that there is room for debate on that. Personally I benefit from it directly, invaluable for research, recently read a Will Self piece and he uses such highfalutin vocabulary it was great to look up 5-7 new vocab words. PLG makes a good point about commercial drivers of the past, and cc viz state propaganda, which is and always has been pure garbage and lies. BBC very bad, not surprised CBC is Orwellian also, I’m so old I remember when PBS (which is dying an overdue death) had actual Left-Wing, oppositional stuff on, well-researched, e.g. “Frontline.” Later they had dreck like Ken Burns’ Vietnam program, “Well, we meant well, so those stupid little yellow people had to die en masse coz our hearts were in the right place.” Even with respect to social mores, PBS was at one time cutting-edge, they had lots of stuff on gay rights, They did a series on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, I had time to watch it working remotely during Covid, some full-frontal nudity on the beach, very outre for broadcast TV. A show about gay, black men almost caused Jesse Helms to die with rage. But I was done with them forever years ago; in Trump term one they brought in Juan Guaido and pretended he was “el presidente de Venezuela” (appointed by Pompeo and Trump), Zero Credibility from thenceforth.

Overall, there is a problem with some media users. I think of the brilliant filmmaker Adam Curtis who did a lot of stuff for the BBC, then went more Indy. He was on Chapo Trap House, and I recall a joke they all had about Media, “The Little Piggies Want Their Slop.”
Think of people who read the Daily Mail in UK, or watch Fox News, MSDNC and the rest of the Audience Capture utter shit out there. Now it’s gotten so bad (to be topical) that Bari Weiss’ ZBS (formerly CBS, now the Zionist Broadcast Network run by the Ellison Billionaire family) just drove out Anderson Cooper, an anodyne non-entity who may (or may not have) joined the CIA due to family prestige and connections. When someone like that won’t work for you, you are bottoming out likely below the earth.

People want to bask in their own little slop kingdoms, whether it’s pornography, false history, celebrity worship (never would’ve known of the actor married to Melissa Gilbert until his recent pedophile arrest here in New Mexico), Lego-Land or any other silly false idol.

Ian once said there weren’t a lot of Zionists on this site, I dissent a bit. I recall soon after Oct. 7, there was a regular commenter here who maintained there WAS “systematic mass rape” as part of 10/7, after Max Blumenthal and the Electronic Intifada had convincingly proved earlier, later Ryan Grim and Drop Site News, even the Intercept admitted to the hoax, not even a single “victim” has been named. But brown people raping beautiful white people is a popular obsession, see Pam Bondi not answering Epstein question but bringing up endlessly victims of immigrants to distract. Another commenter, as best as I recall, claimed the “60 beheaded babies” was true for months . . .

There have always been great journalists out there telling the truth, if one cares to look– the late I.F. Stone, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce in their days (Bierce disappeared, never seen again trying to cover the Mexican Revolution), Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and the folks at Consortium News, too many others to mention. Even Bernhardt at Moon of Alabama generally does well.

What’d we have before the ‘Net? Michael Franti knew:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD9pJzZ1XGI&list=RDhD9pJzZ1XGI&start_radio=1

As stated, both TV and the Net are “extensions of your central nervous system”. Buyer Beware what slop you imbibe.

@Nat Wilson Turner,

This sounds like it would be worth finding and reading. (Hopefully it is an article and not a whole book.)

And yet, if you avoid the Infomercial SuperSewer / SuperSpy aspect of the crosswebbed internetted galaxy dustcloud of computers and use various parallel and deep-weeds approaches to finding things, you can still find interesting things.

One of the random-within-a-subject search methods I enjoy the most is to type in a word or words for things which could be pictured in images and then type ” image”.
So . . . ” word or words image”.

Each image lists the URL ( or “subURL mini-address” or whatever we call that thing) and each of those URLs is clickable to see what resides there. So, for example, when I type in the words ” cherokee white flour corn image” I get a bunch of images like this . .

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrJ.a8By5RpX6EVSPJXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=cherokee+white+flour+corn+image&fr=sfp

Some of the URLs link back to obscure web-only seed companies which offer interesting corn-types and other things. One could call it image porthole url diving, or something like that. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, sometimes links break, URLs die, etc. Something else I was going to offer as an example of something only findable by image porthole url diving is gone now.

But still, many interesting things can be found. Such as this place where an amateur Andean Roots & Tubers vegetable expert sells roots and tuber samples to pay for his hobby. Maybe he even makes a little money at it.
Cultivariable.
https://www.cultivariable.com/

You talk about the ease of looking up information, but it’s getting harder and harder to find actual good information, and the internet makes it much easier for bad actors to spread false information than it was pre-internet.

The ease with which one can find fairly reliable information is remarkable. I ran across this Substack from a librarian this morning — probably you already know about these, but it is a good reminder that such exists still.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/a-non-exhaustive-list-of-sources?r=7ly2zw

Sadly, and tellingly, the BBC had to be omitted. That is just one example of many of institutions that once guarded their credibility as a valuable asset and have long since been made to squander it.

The idea that it is now “easier” to spread false information (or hateful sentiments) has become a talking point for political forces determined to censor. Apparently, it has also become much, much easier to drive a false consensus in support of any nonsense Power wants to promote. And, spreading false information is coordinated with measures to suppress unwanted opinion and possibly-true-but-inconvenient-information.

The “True Narrative Framing” may be especially dangerous today, because so many people do not have the bandwidth to deal with the rising flood tide of conflicting claims about so many topics. People are herded together with the like-minded into echo chambers and overstimulated, assured that they know all the facts they need to know and encouraged to vent against elite betrayal. But, not given an opportunity to deliberate together, let alone act in concert with people holding a spectrum of opinion but a recognized common interest.

You know, I think the word “wormhole” is better than “porthole” in my comment up above.

Url diving through the image wormholes.

This sounds like a book I will need to read, then.

Even before I have read it, I am left wondering . . . as the entire InterTube-WebNet carries more and more stuff able to be surveiled, will it outrun and outflood the InterSpies’ ability to analyze it or even keep up with it? Does that huge NSA facility in Utah now contain more captured data than the NSA analysts can get around to analyzing? Or even skimreading? Or skimlistening?

At what point will they decide to use AI to read everyone’s emails, blog comments, social media comments, etc. to look for the people they want to find? If that point arrives, would it be possible to spoof, jam and grind-to-a-halt the language keyword finding AIs by conzdentally rispulling menny wurdz en weighs thought Ayy Ieee wood knot bee aybul too reed butt datt peepal wood bee?

Then again, the purpose of collecting a million dots is not to “find the connections between related dots”. It is to inVENT connections between chosen dots to inVENT a crime against a pre-chosen target. As Lavrenti Beria once said . . . in one form or another . . . ” Give me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_give_you_the_case_against_him

So given that reality we might as well do whatever we like within the limits of the dusty old obsolete lawbooks law, till someone decides to invent some connections between some dots to apply to us in person.