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Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

So the other shoe has finally dropped: If it hasn't been apparent to everyone yet, the vast majority of "anti-tech"/anti-FB articles has been the dying gasps of attempted relevance from an antiquated media ecosystem.

Old media is upset and angry that they no longer have a monopoly on controlling the narrative. They're scared that their business model is no longer viable. They're worried about their loss of credibility (of their own making).

This is just the latest attempt (as blatant as it may be) to wrangle the state to help them survive. Let's see if it'll work.

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While it's true that this is the reason for companies like Murdoch, the small and mid-sized ad and journalism industry suffers from this consolidation and market power as well and just brushing the issue off by appealing to unsympathetic entities like Murdoch is just as wrong.

It's not at all wrong to be concerned about the diversity of the news and ad ecosystem and what Facebooks or others role is in vacuuming up economic rents due to sheer size.

I sometimes thought I was a singleton set of people who believed this. I'd add that the old media is also in a vicious cycle wherein they can only attempt to gain dwindling share of attention by reducing their credibility. At the micro level, (e.g. on Twitter, where a pan-outlet collection of journalists "mutually discover" the preferred narrative) this sometimes looks a bit like fixed point iteration about a circular firing squad.

I would predict that in this case, Facebook is probably right that news content could be excised from Australia without much cost to the company. It may hasten the demise of the old media in Australia.

While I will celebrate the fall of NewsCorp, old media does include a swath of local television and print media that are doing good work for the communities they're part of.

I often hear that concern met with unsympathetic calls to get with the times, but making a media company purely out of social media isn't profitable either. We'll be left with nothing but social media if we're not careful.

I somewhat agree (though I do think local TV news often makes Anchorman look more like a documentary than a farce), but some of the local papers really are more of a community institution. In my experience, most of their problems involve inability to have reliable operations, e.g. setting up billing accurately or delivering the paper accurately and on time, which angers subscribers.

I don't believe that's entirely true. There is a lot of anti-facebook/social-media that's mostly stemmed from the tangible negative influence it's had on society. We can disparge Facebook and News Corp in the same breath, as it seems to me that they were cut from the same cloth all along.

I agree that the old media is worried about losing control of the narrative. However, i think that sweeping all negative coverage of Facebook under this rug is not helpful either.

There is a real loss to the community if newspapers don’t have the money to pay journalists to do real, investigative journalism - and it’s tough to argue that Facebook has not accelerated the decline of newspapers.

Unfortunately it seems like the vast majority of content churned out by newspapers is not "real, investigative journalism", but rather clickbait that seeks to heighten anxiety and inflame tribal relations within a population.

I love and want more real, solid pieces of reporting. But it's not there enough to make it worth defending the whole lot of them.

The issue is that this clickbait anxiety is what Facebook et al. are good at anyway. But investigative reporting has mostly been done by established news orgs. So by losing the news media, we would still have more than enough crappy clickbait articles, but lose the good parts.

What kind of new media can replace the value old media had? Good journalism and investigative journalism is needed for a healthy democracy and is also costly. It's almost a pillar that holds it up. What is this new media you speak of? Clickbait articles that consist of a bit of text with embedded tweets?

It was a Wall Street Journal (owned by Murdoch) investigative journalist that led to Theranos being exposed.

It's not even really about controlling the narrative though, they still do to some extent. They're angry that they don't have a monopoly on advertisement anymore.

Old media is upset and angry that they no longer have a monopoly on controlling the narrative

But they do: Facebook doesn’t produce any original content. It has its own narrative that it want to push of course but it has to get the raw materials from somewhere.

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