Does Anybody Know
Posted on March 9, 2007
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
What’s happening with the media. For about six months I tracked changes in the online media religiously but then got bored. The boredom coincided with the big media players taking a stake in various media companies. Not just Google and YouTube, News Corp and MySpace. I was bored by the fact that the big media players actually appear to be more nimble footed than ever. Over in the UK the television majors have been caught out cheating customers by overcharging for TV quiz phone-ins and for creating quizzes that are nothing of the sort which goes to show there are two ways of doing this media thing and only one of them is dishonest.
In Ireland the boredom is piling up as RTE and the Irish Times remain the only two sources of influential opinion. I have a lot of respect for both of course but they are the establishment and democracies need an anti-establishment when in fact what we have here is good journalism and not so good. Tuesday I sat with a media player who was enjoying a bagel while we talked about what might change and where does the incentive for change lie. Over the past six months most Irish newspapers lost readers but in the case of the quality press only a small percentage. A loss is a loss of course but at the rate of 1.2% per six months I can’t see anybody demanding radical change. It’s tinker at the edge stuff.
Worse, I can’t actually think what a radical opinion might be these days. I tend to my purple sprouting brocolli, plant out my beetroot seeds and rue the passing of the days while my seed potatoes lie lost somewhere between here and Scotland. My guess is the next political movement will be a reaction against change, a reversion to traditions like swapping milk bottles with the shop instead of dumping cartons, a struggle between the home spud grower and the potato growing sector which wants a ban on the home grown, real conflict like that. By and large the changes we want we can buy. And that leaves politics as the art of stopping other people getting an advantage over you and sowing up the tax breaks. International ruminators day comes but once a year.
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