IMO it does. It’s reflective of these news organizations not caring about their brand reputations and instead just looking at the $$$.
Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.
There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.
Doesn't Google also punish small sites that do similar things? Like if I made a site that was sincere as an individual where I review kitchen utensils where I add affiliate links I'd be penalized, but the larger established domains are allowed to do the same thing without Google punishing them?
Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.
Online reviews are completely gamed IMO. My wife still looks at them, talks about the "highly rated" stuff she finds, and I tell her it's all fake she doesn't believe it.
I have been telling my mum the same thing and she don't listen. Googling for reviews used to work very well to like 3-10 years ago. I don't speak English nativly, and I suspect that it worked better in my native tongue for way longer then English. It is like it takes time for it to sink in for people, when they are trusting a process or institution.
I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.
I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...
Monoculture in journalism definitely matters. News media has a profound ability to shape and direct the discourse in society writ large, and the slow consolidation of news media in some countries is extremely problematic because it enables private individuals to exert undue influence in pursuit of their agenda that may or may not be at odds with the public interest.
In Canada, for example, it's hard to throw a stone and not hit a foreign-owned PostMedia news outlet.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
>What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
As we've seen time and time again, the content produced is only "valid" if your personal interests happen to align with those of Rupert Murdoch, or whomever.
CBC definitely has its own problems but being beholden to the biases of the billionaire class isn't one of them.
From what I'm to gather by reading Part One, the author runs his own affiliate link SEO sites and is mad that big-name brands are doing it better by leveraging business deals and brand recognition.
It's disclosed on a banner across the top of literally every cnn-uncensored page that's being 'outed' here. He could have saved the entire research/dig by simply screenshotting the top of any of the pages. That wouldn't have the same energy or 'Ahah!' though.
Wikipedia is the most reliable source of news/perspective on issued but it can get contaminated if entities given the "reliable sources" label republish unreliable or biased dreck.
Indeed.It's a nice effort...but specially for these two organizations, is a bit like taking a sinking ship and before it disappears underwater...Deciding to set it on fire...:-)
I am absolutely shocked to read the replies from everyone thinking "journalistic integrity" was a thing practiced by American Media. Clearly, everyone runs the same stories, same soundbites, same focuses. How could one think "the news" nationwide across 1000s of different outlets just happened to hone in on the same dozen-or-so topics on a daily basis.
