The Media

How difficult it has become to live in the media and how difficult it is becoming to stay in the media. It is melancholy to see what is happening. 

If you look at the media and journalists, from the perspective of a reader who knows their ins and outs, you can see how they dissolve every day in a reality that is almost no longer a reality, that what it is, is a huge mass of disorderly information. Like an agitated sea that encompasses everything and does not allow a breath. Capturing the most obvious is relatively simple, the activity of governments, events, culture, sports, in short, the classic sections that by dint of being repetitive and maintaining their constants, do not complicate much the work of informing. They are pure mechanics, but in these "hyper-informed" times they do not sell as they used to and they are not taken care of with care. 

And that's where the problems begin, because it is necessary to jump over the simple, over that "known" reality and "create things", so that companies acquire audience, awaken commercial attention, generate "clicks", attract young people, keep jobs, discover characters, pollinate misguided consciences, etc, etc, etc, etc.... 

And the jumps and assaults grow so much that they overflow the media and those who elaborate it. In the meantime, the company's executives only think about profitability and remunerating the shareholder or paying the interests of the substantial debts contracted. That is why they ignore the "content" and any type of journalistic standard, written or not, to achieve their objectives. Objectives that are increasingly scarce in added value, achieved with little effort and poor quality, which have been elaborated with the explicit connivance or fear of losing their jobs, of those who carry them out, the journalists. There is no one free from "sin" in this delicate game of reporting. 

Thus, the media and the political actors are dissolving. They consciously destroy each other as they confuse information with opinion, entertainment with enlightenment, reality with desires, humor with ridicule, prevention with paternalism, publicity with news, the exercise of power with truth, the headline without content and so on. All this combined and permuted, gives pitiful results that allow to survive a month, a year or maybe a few more. By scratching publicity from some companies and others, which in the hands of effective agencies, do not ask for quality or solvent contents, only results. Returns on investment and sales for their insatiable and valuable clients. Or obtaining income from the rulers who grant campaigns to those who accompany them and sweeten their finances in exchange for submission.  

As a result, the media are treading lightly the path of discredit. Shareholders, the media and journalists, with their mistakes, have managed to make the weakness of the sector more and more evident, to make the reader distrustful, to make advertising overwhelming and annoying, to make uneducated people feel it, the ideology of the powerful commands them and the disaster approaches like Melville's white sperm whale to those who wanted to turn it into oil for lighting. 

I do not know what is to come or maybe it is already here, but it is certainly not good for the sector. The last crisis of 2008 and technological advances have highlighted the weakness of the communications industry, not to mention the current one, generated by the pandemic. Both have revealed, as if it were an X-ray, the fragile interior of an information model that was based on trust. In the credit that citizens granted to the media and its makers, who, with the ethical criteria they considered appropriate, could use, as long as the barriers of credibility of what they told, were not exceeded for the benefit of other spurious factors. And those barriers are nowadays unabashedly jumped. Almost by everyone and also seeking to reap rewards for it. This forces the rest of the media to move the line and surpass their own ethical and moral barriers, trying to persuade us of their truths and inculcating in us thoughts suitable for their purposes, not ours, which are to be well informed.

There are many examples and all of them painful, but it is not worth mentioning them, perhaps it is their economic situation, the fervent followerism, the flight of advertising, idleness, the multiplication of media and supports, political polarization or simply tiredness, or all of these things and some more. But that is what makes us change from that once credible territory of the media to a sterile lot loaded with alarming headlines, flashy news, meager and consciously intentional content. This causes those of us who walk this path of information to take refuge only in certain firms that still, when they speak or write, one can intuit that they tell the truth, or at least try to approximate it. Even at the risk of being reviled by the holders of the true faith. Opinion is one of the few redoubts where truthfulness can be found, and not always. The rest are leaves blown by the wind. 

To all this, the consumers of information, that is to say the citizens, have grown in culture and experience, we have learned, we are more subtle and capable of understanding what is happening. And so, the confidence of many, when watching the spectacle they offer us, has been defrauded by the profitable imposture of others. But of course, most of the media do not play with the informed, they look for the informed majorities with headlines and vain dichotomies.    

The atomization and sectarianism of a large number of journalists and media, which seek to grow in their preferred fishing grounds, is creating groups of citizens who barely show their curiosity towards places other than those that feed their ideological beliefs. And that produces fed back faithful, uncritical and convinced that their truth is the only one. Truth that shared with their sectarians and the media that support them, makes them feel that they are many, (although they are not), and possessors of the definitive truth. And so in the technological nooks and crannies, where these informative plants grow, which the clever ones use for their purposes, are born from terraplanists to congress robbers. All of this, derived from the lack of integrity of the "mature" or "conventional" media and from their following of issues that are not, and do not resemble, good journalism. 

Not all journalists and media are part of the party, but they are all subject to the mainstream. And yes, many no longer see the difference, because this is the norm. Therefore, there is not even a slight awareness of the errors. And unwittingly, they are drifting a profession that should be rigorous, towards the cliffs of the new technologies, whose algorithms will replace those who think, because they are more efficient, do not charge and are more obedient.  

Bad business for democracy, which needs a serious and rigorous fourth power, bad business for the media and journalists who see their jobs, audiences and operating accounts fall. Bad business for those who dedicate themselves to politics, who without the media are left helpless and, like them, vilified. It is bad business for the shady journalistic ethics of many to drag down those who would like to stay in their natural territory. It is bad business for the media to drown in a quagmire, because citizens and democracies need their good work and honest diversity in order to remain free.