You’re paying for and supporting more media than you realize
Even though you may have stopped getting your news from TV, you click and click and give away revenue to every news page you visit in the form of more ‘hits’ and advertising revenue. Print newspapers, television, and radio news programs used to be the only way to get news. Today, the print newspaper is heading towards extinction, with television news not far behind (by one account, today roughly half of Americans get their ‘primary news and information’ from the internet). With this march towards extinction of traditional news media, the dollar value of internet media sites goes up and each ‘click’ you possess becomes more valuable. As strange as it may sound, you should use your click wisely and responsibly.
Consider regular visits to those news sites that champion what you believe (hopefully they include commendable journalism qualities such as honesty, integrity, and critical thinking) and think twice before regularly giving money, through a site visit, to media that ‘never seems to tell it like it is’ or that fails to ever be critical or take a side. At the risk of opening a different can of worms in supporting Google, if you must soak up what the US ’mainstream’ media world has to say, try browsing some headlines on a site like Google News- looking at a screen full of headlines on the same subject/event can be a startling experience in itself. The tone and angle of a headline can instantly attempt to arrest any reader neutrality, like say ”Chavez ready for war” or “What is Iran up to?”, before the article is ever read. Also, just browsing headlines without visiting a site reduces the revenue generated from actual visits to a news web page. Since news pages have to pay Google, there is no benefit for the site until you click on their headline and story.
Yet bringing Google into the fray is, in a sense, like putting it all on Visa and thinking it’s ‘all good’. Google’s ownership mimics that of virtually all of the world’s largest corporations, with a half dozen to dozen of the same banks owning nearly all things media, utilities and resources, weapons and military contracting, to name a few…Yet, to take it further, all corporations do their own investing and if not owned by these dozen banks, there’s a good chance that corporation has investments in these banks directly or indirectly. Before wandering off topic further, please just strive to click more responsibly….
An interesting post and one that has unique interest for Alaskans… While corporations like Google can make things cheaper and more accessible to remote areas, it also makes local businesses here more prone to collapse. It is a terrible dilemma… I rarely if ever click on random ads… If I buy online, I prefer to use a source that has come recommended.