Read Now Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization PDF
“The most important book in media theory that has been written in 40 years.”Paul Levinson, author of “Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium” “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” starts with analysis of how the news media commodified Trump while fighting him. The book unveils the economic and cultural mechanisms of agenda-setting in the news media at the last stage of their historical existence.Revising Herman-Сhomsky's Propaganda model, the author argues that all we knew about journalism was related to a news business funded by advertising. Because of the Google-Facebook duopoly, advertising has fled to the internet. The media are forced to switch to another source of funding – selling content to readers. However, they cannot sell news, because news is already known to people from social media newsfeeds. Instead, the media offers the validation of already-known news within a certain value system and the delivery of the “right” news to others. The business necessity forces the media to relocate the gravity of their operation from news to values. Media outlets are increasingly soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. To attract donations, they have to focus on ‘pressing social issues’. However, for better soliciting, they must also support and amplify readers’ irritation and frustration with those issues. Thus, the media are incentivized to amplify and dramatize issues whose coverage is most likely to be paid for. Ideally, the media should not just exaggerate but induce the public’s concerns. The ad-driven media manufactured consent. The reader-driven media manufactures anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization and Trumpism.The need to pursue reader revenue and therefore the dependence on the audience, with the news no longer being a commodity, is pushing journalism to mutate into postjournalism. Journalism wants its picture to match the world; postjournalism wants the world to match its picture. The media are turning into crowdfunded Ministries of post-truth not because of some underlying conspiracies but due to their business needs and the settings of a broader media environment. The book investigates the origins and propelling forces of this mutation from the perspectives of media ecology and the political economy of communications. The author explores polarization as a media effect, seeing polarization studies as media studies.Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media expert and journalist with twenty years in the print media and ten years in media research. He is the author of “Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship” (2014) and a number of books on media and politics. His dissertation in journalism and linguistics (1996) focused on the linguistics of the Soviet media and propaganda. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His blog: Human as Media (human-as-media.com). Twitter: @Andrey4Mir
