Imperial dark Emperor Rupert Murdoch, who through his shadow tentacle company News Corp, is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, was once quoted as saying... "it's not about red or blue its about green".
Hard hitting journalism, which speaks truth to power, is deep hard work. It may not always be physically hard work like digging ditches in the July sun but it is mentally very much hard work. The more truthful it is, generally the more difficult it is, the more stressful it is because the more it requires going up against sources of entrenched power, and sometimes sadly, the more life-threatening it can be for writers, reporters, documentarians, or photojournalists. It's also straight up hard work not only for those creating it but also for those consuming it. Who's gonna sit down and search through troves of Wikileak archives or read the Panama Papers? Only real journalists. And then only more sophisticated people who want to be properly informed are going to be interested in what real journalists are publishing about the real truth. So like anything to do with self-development, it requires both ethos (credibility and ethics), pathos (emotions and feelings) and logos (logic and reason) and is thus more work than entertainment. But it's mature, sophisticated, and important.
Because of the consolidation and corporatization of legacy and big business internet news organizations, owned by mustache twisting aristocrats or Sith lord oligarchs, the main underlying important dynamic in media becomes the same corrupting force in any industry. Being that it's all about the money. And how much money can be made off the industry. Real deep journalism or documentary filmmaking require time and money. They are an investment. The 2015 American biographical drama Spotlight follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into a decades-long coverup of widespread and systematic child sex abuse by numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Although the plot was original, it is loosely based on a series of stories by the Spotlight team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For that one story alone, the newspaper had a room in the basement paying a handful of journalists salaries for over a year continued by multiple additional years of follow up stories. That's a lot of time and money for essentially a single huge story that ultimately challenged a rich and powerful corporate institution - The Catholic church.
So what corporatized, consolidated, only all about the money legacy media and new media organizations, who are beholden to add dollars, do at best, the larger they become, is transmute journalism in a degrading way into what is called "Infotainment". which is a portmanteau of information and entertainment - also called soft news as a way to distinguish it from serious journalism or hard news. The term is used disparagingly to devalue hard news subjects under infotainment or soft news subjects which sensationalize and prioritize fluff stories over informative or relevant content. This can lead to a focus on entertainment rather than providing in-depth analysis or context. Because their business models are based on advertisers, with staggeringly depressing amounts of money given to political candidates just going into media advertising by the way, the larger the audience the more big business media companies can charge for advertising.
So legacy media learned long ago, that because of the way low low educated or low information psychology works, that it's more about providing entertaining information that distracts through misdirection at who to be pissed off at then to provide real hard hitting truthful information that pisses off entrenched sources of power. So ethos, pathos, and logos are replaced with only logos and it becomes not about credibility and ethics, logic and reason, and most importantly truth, but making money off emotional infotainment at best. And even other things at worse, which we'll get into in the upcoming insights in this series.