Media Bits and Bytes – What We Don’t Know Edition

Two takes on Sinclair and Cambridge Analytica; Liberal media blues x 2; Mega Media got algorhythm

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Sinclair local TV anchors across the U.S., all saying the same thing. | Screengrab

How America's Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers In Trump's War On The Media

By Timothy Burke

March 31, 2018

Deadspin

Dozens of local news anchors looking like hostages in proof-of-life videos, trying their hardest to spit out words attacking the industry they’d chosen as a life vocation.

Local News is Shrinking From The Sinclair Effect

By David Beard

April 2, 2018

Poynter Institute

A recent Sinclair “must-run” on KOMO was produced by a former employee of the Russian propaganda agency RT and featured disgraced former Trump official Sebastian Gorka parroting official policy.

 

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Cambridge Analytica Scandal Reveals the Post-Democratic Order

By Benedetto Vecchi

March 21, 2018

Il Manifesto

Facebook’s terms and conditions might not spark outrage in the US, but in Europe it amounts to a violation of both privacy and individual sovereignty over internet communication. It is a legal, juridical and political difference that stood out in all its force in the Cambridge Analytica files.

Short Cuts

By William Davies

April 7, 2018

London Review of Books



It’s sometimes said that data is the ‘oil’ of the digital economy, the resource that fuels everything else. A more helpful analogy is between oil and privacy, a concealed natural resource that is progressively plundered for private profit, with increasingly harmful consequences for society at large.

It’s Time to Stop Yammering About Liberal Bias

By Osita Nwanevu

March 28, 2018

Slate

The right has plenty of representation in the nation’s opinion pages.

Same Old Media Parade: Why Are Liberals Cheering?

By Jeff Cohen

March 26, 2018

Common Dreams



Just as they did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, MSNBC and CNN now serve up a steady parade of war-hawks, spies and liars, presenting them as credible and almost heroic as long as they criticize the despicable man in the White House.

Google and Corporate News Giants Forge Alliance to Defeat Independent Journalism

By Elliott Gabriel

March 23, 2018

MintPress News



The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”