Roasting the Press Episode 51 for Sunday, December 8th, 2024
Legacy Media’s Nieman Lab and its Very Foolish 2025 Predictions for Journalism, the Clock is Ticking for TikTok & Oncology Nurse Talks About Vitamin B17.
Legacy Media’s Nieman Lab and its Very Foolish 2025 Predictions for Journalism
The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has published its 2025 predictions for the future of journalism.
Founded in 1938 as the result of a $1.4Mln US bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of The Milwaukee Journal founder Lucius W. Nieman as the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Nieman Lab was intended to promote “the standards of journalism in the United States,” according to the March 29th, 1938 St. Louis Globe-Democrat post, “Authority to Sell Paper's Stock Asked.”
But lately the grand old lady of journalistic academia has seemingly fallen on hard times, much like the current industry the foundation was intended to uplift.
The current crop of predictions on the future of journalism misses the main problem with current failing legacy media.
No one trusts legacy media to tell the truth or even provide useful information.
The latest Newman Lab predictions are essentially an attempt to help legacy media figure out its future. It’s a shame that they’ve mostly avoided entirely the question of their lack of credibility with their audience and the need to re-establish trust.
While most of the twenty or so stories compiled by the Nieman journalists are anecdotal there are at least three common threads to the discussion:
Reinventing Political Journalism, most notably discussed in the undated post “Newsrooms reinvent their political journalism“ which argues that current political reporting and journalism methodologies increase “polarization,” and drives audiences away from legacy media outlets.
Its a perception which neatly sidesteps the need to discuss why most people don’t trust the legacy media. According to the post:
What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting?
What’s not obvious to Nieman Labs is that people are assessing the legacy media arguments and statements and drawing conclusions at odds with legacy media,
At least the Nieman Lab acknowledges that the current political landscape doesn’t “support” the legacy media’s conclusions. The Nieman Labs post argues only that the public is in error.
First and foremost, it doesn’t serve humanity well in the case of imminent and severe threats like climate change or attacks on democratic institutions where bothsidesism is not an option. Also, newsroom metrics have shown again and again that audiences tend to be put off by news content that just amplifies opinions and intentions of decision makers without linking it to people’s lives. News avoidance is real and has been growing.
The result of the 2024 U.S. election and the rise of authoritarian leaning extremists in other democracies should have served as the final wakeup call for political journalism. What if the media’s calling out those who don’t respect democracy and its institutions doesn’t deter people from voting exactly those politicians into office? What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting?
As can be seen from the above statements, the legacy media “authorities” believe only that the leftist, democratic party supporting politics currently advocated by the legacy media would be more palatable to a public if surrounded by a more benign container.
They don’t concede that their message is divisive, demonizing everyone who doesn’t believe their message:
If newsrooms really want to reach people beyond the community of like-minded news consumers, they need to explore how these audiences can be attracted.
The post suggests doubling down on noncontroversial topics like science or sports to rebuild legacy media audiences.
Given that sports and science reporting has been overwhelmed over the last ten years by social justice warriors demanding a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) plus appeals to “trust the science” as dictated by political authorities unwilling to allow appropriate “peer review“ or share their raw data or methodologies for drawing conclusions, this uncontested belief from the Nieman Lab that legacy journalists are the best judge of current events, seems to be the height of academic folly.
As noted previously, its not the container the public distrusts. Its the message.
Legacy media isn’t the only media opining over its future. For a distinctly “new media” perspective on journalistic opportunities and challenges, check out the July 12th, 2022 Corbett Report podcast, “Episode 420 – Mass Media: A History,” by clicking on the image above. Don’t worry too much about the cost to further explore the topic. The legacy media charges far more for its services. Embrace AI, as discussed in the post, “AI companies grapple with what it means to be creators of news.” The post at least notices that “The media and tech industries, frequently to the dismay of both, are deeply and inextricably intertwined,” but fails to draw the logical conclusions from their connections and rivalry.
According to the post:
As generative AI creeps further into news delivery, discovery, and consumption, both the media and the tech industries will increasingly find themselves in a strange new digital landscape where tech giants aren’t just aggregators of journalism, but creators of it.
The post notes that, while the technology hasn’t yet been perfected and provides numerous examples of this, but can’t evade the obvious:
Of course, right now, AI tools aren’t actually reporting — they’re swallowing the work of human journalists and regurgitating it into something just scrambled enough to evade copyright law.
Doing so, though, marks a step for the tech industry beyond offering algorithm-organized links to news; editorial choices are inherent to even short news and search summaries, and accurate information and attributions are just as important.
The post concludes by noting that formal collaboration between legacy media and tech giants won’t happen anytime soon, especially in Canada where, as outlined in the November 29th, 2024 The Guardian post, “Canadian media companies sue OpenAI in case potentially worth billions,“ major Canadian news organizations including the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, the CBC, the Toronto Star, Metroland and Postmedia have sued OpenAI for copyright violations.
The suit is following in the footsteps of some of their American counterparts, most notably The New York Times, who’ve done the same in an effort to keep AI algorithms from learning and absorbing information from previous examples of human generated journalism.
No one in the legacy media really wants to abandon the media landscape to automation any time soon. But over the short term, this competition between AI and the legacy media, will lead to the diminishment of both.
Besides, as outlined in the September 11th, 2024 Media Party on YouTube post, “Sam Guzik on AI and Journalism: What Lies Ahead? | Media Party 2024,” artificial intelligence applications are tools, not a business strategy.
AI is available and being used now. The Nieman Labs perceives of AI as being an unperfected future technology which journalists should “tinker with” for future use.
Nieman Labs is in error. Everyone but the legacy is using AI now.
Influencers are Journalists as discussed in the post, “Influencers become journalists,” which notes that “Joe Rogan is a symptom of changing media systems, not the root cause,” but forgets to mention that Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and other new media commentators now have larger audiences than any legacy media outlet.
According to the post:
Before the dust had even settled over the results of the U.S. presidential election, finger pointing began.
Influencers had been a hot topic of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but their impact had been gravely misjudged. Instead of trying to understand why the Democratic National Committee had invited over 200 TikTokkers and YouTubers to its convention, including those who never talked politics on their accounts, there was scoffing and backlash.
But then, with scores shocked at the re-election of Donald Trump, many finally realized they had been overlooking influencers’ power.
The term “influencer,” is essentially just a modern rephrasing of the earlier “citizen journalist” moniker used by legacy outlets to diminish and discount the capabilities of anyone who hasn’t received proper training (or “programming“) at the appropriate facility.
The Nieman Labs post doesn’t appreciate those people, even when they do the job better than legacy journalists.
According to the post:
These are influencers, not journalists.
But as media industries have converged across the broad, we must rethink our understanding of how individuals get and receive information. We must think about how the lines between entertainment and information continue to blur at problematic and rapid rates. It’s not simply about watching the nightly news, or labeling something mis-or-disinformation.
Journalists are influencers, and influencers are journalists, but if that’s hard to swallow, think of them as op-ed writers or cultural commentators.
Content creators and influencers are doorways to information and ideas, and our volatile political and media landscape make its enticing for audiences to walk through them.
The Nieman Lab doesn’t seem to appreciate all those multi-faceted influencers running loose on the internet, polluting the public with actionable information from a variety of mostly unsupervised and unedited sources.
They’re not even real journalists. They are instead “op-ed writers” or “cultural commentators.” No where in the post is there even a dawning recognition of the fact that the audience disbelieves most current legacy media pronouncements.
The packaging doesn’t matter. The message matters. Legacy media outlets have abdicated their skepticism and ability to call out truth to power in favor of reading scripts promoting their bosses interests.
So they’re no longer considered the authorities they once were and they’ve been replaced by others.
Be they “influencers,’ “citizen journalists,” “op-ed writers” or “cultural commentators,” here’s the December 2nd, 2024 Liberum Arbitrium on Bitchute post, “Joe Rogan and Mike Rowe discuss how 𝕏 is replacing the legacy media all over the world,” with two real journalists calling out truth to power. To view the video, please click on the image above.
The Clock is Ticking for TikTok
TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal as outlined in the December 6th, 2024 BBC post, “TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal.”
The reasons mostly have to do western nations not controlling the data, being able to scape data from users at will and the TikTok algorithm, which sometimes encourages western locals to at least consider ideas unapproved by their political masters.
Other companies have addressed this publically:
The March 31st, 2023 Shaped.AI post, “X's Open Source Algorithm - Unveiling the code, but not the secrets” and the December 6th, 2024 TechCrunch on YouTube post, “Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the need for social to recapture the open web's spirit at StrictlyVC SF,” both address this situation, if in different ways.
On the other hand, here’s what TikTok seems to think about its plight.
Oncology Nurse Talks About Vitamin B17
While no one working on this program is currenntly involved in the healthcare system, we’re still going to finish up with the December 7th, 2024 Mongo Minds on Bitchute post, “Oncology Nurse Talks About Vitamin B17.”
We’re bastards.
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