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Political Opinion is Like a Virus
It’s fine if you have it, but please stay at home and shut the fuck up
Ideally, a media house should produce honest and neutral news and take ads, sales, or other forms of income as a necessary evil to sustain itself. Ideally, the sale of newspaper copies should be enough to ensure its neutrality and self-reliance.
Ideally.
Even in that world, news articles and TV shows would soon become a product like any other. Just like bakeries produce loaves and baguettes, TV stations produce shows. The competition for the market share wouldn’t drive up just the quality but also the content of the news, with journalists bending to public taste and likes.
Of course, that is not enough, so they have to sell ads too. Again, ideally, this would be a necessary evil (and perhaps, in the beginning, it was), but then it starts affecting the editorial policies. Can a magazine even think of an investigative piece on this or that industry if the same firm has been buying full-page ads for years?
One step further, the capital realizes (through politics or directly) that media can be purchased. They can hire talent to produce quasi-news-like programs, establish their own TV shows, and launch campaigns.
