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Episode Synopsis "FAP296: Independence from the mainstream media"
FAP296: Independence from the mainstream media What is the media? - A set of corporations - The business model: get audience. sell audience to advertisers. collect money. - The true customers of the media are the advertisers, NOT the audience. The audience is a commodity. Therefore, a business will rationally do things in support of these goals: - Get audience. As much audience as possible. This means producing content that is broadly appealing, engaging, and relatively non-controversial. - Likewise, it will try to get advertisers to pay as much money for the audience as possible. Demographics reflect a focus on audiences that have the most money to spend. - Because of time constraints, the media will filter down to a few sources for its content. - Why are the customers the advertisers? In MSM, the production of media is incredibly expensive. Television stations, radio stations, newspapers all require enormous capital to operate, and revenue from sales isn't enough. - Advertising is a logical step in the progression of a media outlet. - Where did MSM go wrong? In treating the audience as a pure commodity like cattle or sheep. In the 20th century market, they had no incentive to respect the audience because they had a captive market. So far, econ 101. Now, why wouldn't the media publish some stories, some music, some news? - Loss of audience. Avoid publishing something that will cause a major loss of your commodity. - Loss of advertisers. Avoid publishing something that will cause damage to advertisers and therefore loss of revenues. - Loss of access. Avoid publishing something that will cause you to lose access to sources. What does this mean? It means that the news you see, the entertainment you hear, the information coming out of news sources that are backed by large corporations, may be suspect. Things like the vote for American Idol and whether Britney is splitting up with Kevin are not accidental. They are broadly appealing, completely inconsequential, and supremely distracting from the issues at hand, whatever they may be. Is it a conspiracy? Oddly enough, no. What you're seeing are market forces at work. The media outlets that can produce the most profitable output will win. That doesn't mean the best quality, or the finest service, or anything other than lowest price for highest gain. Reality shows dominate because they are insanely cheap to produce compared to audience size. Think of it like mining. Who will do better, a mining company that handpicks the purest gold nuggets out of the ground with teams of PhDs in geology leading the way, or the company that scoops up an entire chunk of the ground with a machine, melts it all down in another machine, and extracts the gold? It's the same way in the media - produce the most of your commodity - the audience - at the lowest cost, and sell it to the highest bidder. What tools will the media use to hook you and retain you? Remember, the media is looking to lump you into a group called audience, which is its primary saleable product. It's selling you, in effect, to the advertisers. Like any commodity, it has to maintain you, to keep you from going bad. - Establish a form of rapport. Look at UPN and what audience it's targeting. Take advantage of stereotypes and heuristics to generate rapport that leads to familiarity and trust. - Shiny things. Believe it or not, this is a tactic that works. Create an aura of glittery goodness around something, and promote it as the next big thing. Look how many actors and musicians were simply the product of a marketing group that remade them. Leverage heuristics and virtue words to make something far more appealing than it really is. - Fear. Nothing sells like fear. Create fear and people will be paralyzed, unable to organize. Even better, create fear and present yourself as the solution. - Bandwagon. The power and the appeal of "everyone is doing it" has tremendous pull. We are social creatures, a
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