The book Manufacturing Consent has an excellent analysis of how advertising is one of the major filters which affect the content of news. Regardless of whether it is surveillance ads or not, the model of advertising, while lucrative, profoundly compromises the integrity of news.
Of course, I understand (and I believe the book also suggests) most news can’t be expected to self-sustain and compete without having ads in their economic model. So this isn’t a rebuttal to the article’s discussion on “Non-creepy” contextual ads.
Bruce Schneier’s also echoed Chomsky in a way when he said that surveillance was the business model of the Internet.
I have started trying to pay more for news access the last couple years. I don’t regret that decision. Its less than I pay for streaming television.
I remember getting a lot of push back not too long ago, when I tried telling a group of people that ‘good news’ is something you have to pay for, because it’s difficult to do.
The MSM, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, all that crap is simply the most overt propaganda, tailor made for a mass audience, and free, precisely because it isn’t valuable. A subscription to something like The Economist, beats anything the average person wants to compare it to. Or those one-man progressive outlets on YouTube, who went to community college and left with a degree, run their gig out of a one bedroom studio, and think they’ve got the entire world figured out.
This has the added benefit of holding the news organizations accountable to you, as you’re their main source of funding. If they start to go down a bad path, you can pack up and take your dollars somewhere else.
ground news sponsorship.exe
