Episode 84: Critical Mass Holes

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)

Sometimes the conventional wisdom consists of nothing more than reasonable assumptions overlaid atop evidence that, without those assumptions, appears incongruous. Worse, because of those overlaid assumptions, we avoid looking more closely at those incongruities, at otherwise implied but obscured-by-assumption machinations lurking in the evidence.

That's what I do in this Episode 84: Critical Mass Holes. The assumed culprit hobbling the newspaper industry over the last 40 years has long been capitalism and the short-term profit incentive. I suggest otherwise. After all, short-term profits have long been an incentive; why have they only attacked newspaper productivity only recently?

For evidence, today I quoted three books: Robert McChesney and John Nichols' The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (First Nation Books, 2010) Robert McChesney's Digital Disconnect (The New Press, 2013);" and Mitchell Stephen's Beyond News: The Future of Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Audio-wise, I sampled the voices of: David Simon, giving testimony before the Senate; Orson Welles in his role of the Citizen Charles Foster Kane, newspaper mogul; and Tony Randall playing Felix Unger from the television show "The Odd Couple." Since this is a Powell Movement episode, I also play the Memo Reading voice of D. L. Myers.

I kept the musical interludes to a minimum for this show, mostly because of the heat wave turning the Attack Ads studio into a toaster oven; but I had to open the show with the usual KMFDM samples from "Attak," today backed by Henry Giroux; and I'm close the show once again with Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today."

I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 share-alike, attribution, and non-commercial license.