It was interesting to read this article knowing your critiques of the Huffington Post. In class, you said that the Huffington Post was once a very promising example of the future of independent media. It was performing very well, until it was sold to AOL and became owned by a corporation.
I will be honest, I personally, haven’t noticed much of a change to the HuffPost, aside from UI changes, since it switched ownership. That being said, I have not studied this site thoroughly, so it’s hard for me to say for sure. I was also a lot younger when the acquisition occurred and I was not nearly as interested in politics or media as I am now.
It seems to still does things differently from most mainstream media outlets. For example, when Donald Trump first ran for president, the Huffington Post decided to put Trump coverage in their entertainment section. I thought that was hilarious, but also a bad decision. That decision may have cost them some money, because it might have lessened traffic to the site. So that decision probably wasn’t driven by the corporate powers at play, but I could imagine that other decisions may have been driven at the corporate level and how that could be a problem as well.
My understanding is that this article was written before the AOL acquisition and then updated just a few months after.
When I first read this article, I was very interested in Huffington’s analysis of China. Many people talk about how China will rule the world in a few decades and how China would likely destroy us if we ever got entangled in a military conflict with them. While all those discussions can paint a dim picture about America’s role in the world, I have always thought that China has a very big weakness.
China is a very big country with a lot of economic, cultural, ethnic, and historical differences. There was a great article in The Atlantic about this. The government has been able to keep the country together partly because of its oppressive tactics and also partly because it’s been able to grow the economy so quickly. The economic growth has reduced people’s incentive to question the government and the government’s oppressive tactics have been able to limit threats to its power.
In theory, this can only last so long.
Huffington talked about how the Chinese government recently shut off the internet, mobile phone services, social media, and more in order to prevent people from seeing first hand accounts of the riots in Xinjiang. As she said in the article, the first-hand accounts of the incident that people could post online, would essentially enable people that weren’t physically present to witness the riots. This is why the Chinese government fears “new media.” New media is something that they can’t control, but traditional media – mainstream media, is something that they can control. This is why the Chinese government was inviting mainstream journalists to tour the sites of the riots.
Ultimately, this was a really great article that made a lot of great points. I think there is definitely still a need for journalists in the world. Having journalists, whether they are mainstream or independent, is crucial because there needs to be a group of people actively serving as the watchdogs of society. That being said, new media and citizen journalism also play an important role. Having both is extremely important.
No comments:
Post a Comment