Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Facebook was the end of the old media. Facebook didn’t start the downfall, but it ended it for good.

Mark Zuckerburg recently released a new manifesto for Facebook. The mainstream media is dead. Facebook didn’t kill that big, bad, old mainstream media, it just finished it. Of all things, talk radio on the AM dial and the wide availability of inexpensive computing did it. The new printing press overcame the old one.

And Facebook didn’t invent fake news, the old media already did that decades ago. I guess the old media started killing itself when it just couldn’t resist bigger sales. It couldn’t resist the lure of having media stars instead of news. Those stars wandered about and betrayed themselves to keep their stars shining brightly. It happened in TV. It happened in newspapers, and it happened in the rest of them.

The Internet let anyone publish news. The old media couldn’t stand that, so the old media made fun of the new. “Those aren’t professionals like us!” No, but the guys could read and write just like journalists could. I guess the professional journalists didn’t have that much of an edge in education, skills, visions, and all the esoteric stuff that they claimed.

So, out with the old. In with the new. I guess we have to wait and see how long it takes us to learn how to read the new news. This isn’t the end of the world, folks. It is just yet another new season. We will adjust.