Name: The Real Reason Quality Journalism is Disappearing
Uploaded: 2024-06-14T23:56:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Real Reason Quality Journalism is Disappearing' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Real Reason Quality Journalism is Disappearing' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-14. Transcript available.

information is power. And what I'll tell you is that the most powerful have
access to better information today. I think that the disparity of information
between the powerful
and the everyday person has just grown. Like we always talk about income
disparity, and it's a
real thing, totally. I get it. But information disparity, man, it might even be
worse.
100%. Even just to go to accredited news sources online, not to get information,
you have to pay for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Even to get what used to be just a
newspaper,
right? Yeah. You have to pay for that information. So whether you even believe
that it's going to be true or not, to have information that's even kind of sourced,
you know, that's put together, that's formatted, that's not done by AI. You're
having to pay for
that. Yeah. And I hope that we get back to more of that, man, because that's
how it used to be when
we were kids, right? Like you pay of a newspaper subscription. Right. I think
people decided they
couldn't trust the news anymore. I think a lot of that has occurred in the past
10 years for sure.
I feel like the news, every time I turn it on, I feel like it is, there's some
lobbyists behind it.
There's some, you know, I mean, people say big farm all the time, but we have
so many drug ads on
our television. It's like, you know, it just feel, I wouldn't be surprised if
it's compromised. That's
what it feels like. I, the news industry is in a tailspin and I'll give you my
two cents for what
it's worth. Cause I've been a journalist now for like 25 years, some insane
amount of time. I can't
believe that. Um, but when I started, um, as a daily newspaper reporter, like
we had a nice big staff,
man. Like we had, we had librarians on staff. We had researchers on staff, you
know, we had
photographers, a sports desk, a business desk, you know, and, um, and I, I
think, I don't know, man,
was it like, there's like a third as many journalists as there used to be,
right? Like if
there's fewer people doing anything, it's going to be a shittier job. You're
going to get a crappier
product. Right. And so, and, and, and, and the trend line that, that gutted
journalism wasn't
initially that, cause I totally agree. All the stats say what you're saying.
People don't trust
the news like they used to, but it wasn't, the trend line wasn't that people
stopped subscribing.
What happened was, is that newspapers used to make huge profits from things
like classified ads,
right? Like, you know, we used to read the classified ads in the back, right?
Like you could meet a woman
or even get a adopt a pet, get a new BMX bike or like a dirt bike, like a new
car, like it was all
back there. Right. And that stuff, man, that subsidized the journalists. And so
of course that went
away and that was like a lion's share of the profits. Right. Craigslist kind of
killed that.
Totally. And it's fine. Technology is going to do. And like the newspapers didn't,
they didn't react
in time. You know, they lost this big thing. And so like, you just started
seeing the industry
shrinking and shrinking. And now the layoffs in the last two years have just
been like brutal. But the,
the, the problem there is, man, it's like, I could quit journalism and I could
go become
a private researcher doing the exact same thing I'm doing now as an
investigative journalist,
but instead of giving it to the public, I would be giving it to hedge funds. I'd
be giving it to super
wealthy people that would literally, I'm not shitting you would pay me four to
five times
what I'm getting paid now. Right. And, and, and that's actually what's
happening. Right. And so like
you, you, you have the public who is increasingly just getting not as good as
much information,
especially if you're in like a local news market, right? Like you're not
getting information.
People aren't paying for it. There are fewer journalists and then the wealthiest
are paying
for it still. And they're getting incredibly in-depth information.
Right. And now you're starting to see privatized spaces have the journalists
almost on their side,
working for them to give them information that better helps them to market to
the everyday person.
Yeah. And I wouldn't say call that person a journalist, but that, that same
like deep
research or investigative project, right? Especially in tech, man.
Well, I think it's like, you know, they had, even if you look at the case of,
uh, the opioid epidemic,
right. And that there was a documentary, there was a television show. I can't
remember the name of it.
Um, all the beauty in the bloodshed was a doc that came out that looked super
deep at the opioid,
or I can't remember Alex Gibney, maybe on HBO looked at the opioid epidemic too.
This one had Michael, uh, Keaton. Okay. You know what? Is that a real person?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know Hollywood's, I don't know actors
and I don't know
the space as well, but yeah. Yeah. They had this, there you go. Dope sick.
They had this, this series came out. It's unbelievable. It's how, um, it's how
the opioid
companies pay, like basically hired people that had been working on the food
and drug administration
to come and work for them so they could work the loopholes. Totally. And I'll,
I mean, I'll just
tell you my two cents. The reason that we often know stories like this, like
how FDA former employees
were then going is because a journalist went in and dug it out and published it.
Right.
Right. Like these types of fictionalized versions get written off of like hard
work of investigative
journalists. And there are fewer and fewer people pulling out stories like this.
And I'll tell you,
man, as a journalist, like my problem 20 years ago was that I was always
worried that some other
journalist was going to scoop the story and get it before me today. My problem
is that people are coming
to me with important stories and I don't have the time to work on them because
I'm already working
on something and I don't even have another journalist. I can tell them to go to,
right?
Like we're just not getting out as many important stories like that as we used
to, because there's
just fewer of us like, and, and, and, and there are more people working for the
lobbyists. There are
more people working for the PR firms that are spinning stuff. And so this is,
we're getting into this
really imbalanced place of information and a dark time. And that's why
conspiracy theories rise.
I totally agree because it's like, well, people are going by their gut. People
are looking to fill
a void and people want some truth. I think if you don't have truth, you can
feel it.
Yeah, I think so. And I always say, and this is the other thing, man, is for me,
journalism,
it's okay. So like take a football, right? Like the, the surface of a football
is imperfect,
right? It's why a quarterback spirals the ball. Because if you, if you throw
the football without
spiraling it, because the surface of the football is fancy. Yeah. Yeah. It's
like imperfect. It just
flops around. Yeah. And, and, and, and, but you spiral it and all of those
imperfections get
smoothed out. And journalism is the same way. Like no journalist is the voice
of God. But when you've
got 10 journalists covering the same thing, you're going to get as close to the,
to the obtainable
version of the truth as possible because you have 10 different people that are
competing to get it out.
They're going to, they're, they're going to check each other. They're going to,
they're going to point
out if somebody else, you know, misses something or screw something up and you
get at the closest
possible obtainable version of the truth. Now, when you just have one person,
it's like a football
that's not spiraling anymore. It just gets totally off kilter. And I think we're
getting closer to that.
And, and I think that's like in a democracy, when we're supposed to be an
informed group of people
that are going to go to the ballot box and vote, you know, it's a problem. If
we were in China,
it wouldn't matter because the government's going to tell us what to do anyway.
But in a country where
we're like, no, no, we need to be informed so we can go to vote. That becomes a
problem.