One of may Markisms goes like this: "A gift is something to give to another person that they want but would not get for themselves. A present is something you give to a person that you want them to have. Know the difference" (this is important later).
I found this the other day: (Here's the link if I can't get it to play)
https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz/video/7327628729058856223
A young woman, a random media person, is lamenting on camera that the entire news media, across all networks and websites, are laying off most, if not all, of their work force. If you didn't notice, Sports Illustrated is no more.
This is what happens when you try to run news/journalism as a for-profit venture. Because profits had to be shown, news coverage had to go from balanced and in-depth, to the loud, salacious, grandstanding, inflammatory "be first now let the facts catch up later." The viewer was forced into a state of near-panic, kept on the edge of their seat, anticipating the next and new detail or word. And because when you're loud, salacious, grandstanding and inflammatory, each new story has to be even more so. And it's at this point the lies start.
Leftoids have been told for seven years, "WE'RE ON THE VERGE OF GETTING TRUMP!" and all of the other lies the other way, like "Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation." Up until now, when even these Leftoids are waking up, realizing that they've been lied to on a daily basis. Tens of thousands of proud, faithful Democrats are now collectively going, "Say it ain't so, Joe!"
In certain professions, integrity is beyond critical. Without a clear an unquestionable level of integrity, professions like journalism cannot exist. A lie once discovered, can be passed off as "an honest human mistake." When the lies go on and on, continuously repeated, unapologetic, getting exponentially bigger to cover the pile of lies already out there, the trust and integrity of those who spread the lies are destroyed permanently.
This is what happened here. The hubris of these news networks, newspapers, magazines and all the others lost sight of their true purpose. That purpose is to inform their consumers about important events. Inform them with all the facts, with as little bias as possible. Instead, they have mutated into people who think their consumers are imbeciles who need to be told what to think. They lost sight of what the consumer wanted.
I bring up Sports Illustrated to put an exclamation point on this. Since SI started in 1954, it reported the major events in all of the various sports. The primary purchaser of the magazine were men. In 1964, SI started publishing an annual Swimsuit Issue, dedicated to showing off the beautiful curves of female athletes and supermodels. In the past few years, SI lost sight of their primary consumer base and what content these men were looking for and thus their reason for buying SI to consume. In 2019, the models started having "different body types" (plus-sized), and in 2020, SI started having transgender women in the swimsuit edition.
In case you didn't know, the vast majority of men want to see healthy (i.e., thin), beautiful women in skimpy suits. Men in matters of sexual drive are visually driven, so this should be an obvious given. Men are not interested in or even repulsed by "washe" females, or women who are overweight. So, the primary consumer of this product stopped consuming it. The editors of SI were producing content that their consumers did not want.
The #1 rule of Capitalism is, "Make something people want. Make it better than anyone else and sell it cheaper than anyone else." These journalists have stopped making gifts of their product, namely giving people what the people want. They now present us with what they want us to have, which most of us didn't ask for and don't want.