This week on CounterSpin:
Years ago, when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, many would respond, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, more people understand that constraints on a news outlet’s content have little to do with whether it’s on paper or online but on who owns it, who resources it, to whom is it accountable. The phrase “crisis of journalism” is often heard, but one thing hasn’t changed: If we ask the same questions about what we need from journalism, we will arrive at the same old, unsatisfactory responses.
Victor Pickard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, from Oxford University Press. We talk to him about the crisis of journalism and its future.
Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of criminalizing journalism, gag rules, and diversity data.