Jon: Welcome to episode 132 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hi Jon, did you have a nice Thanksgiving?

Jon: I did. It was just a great time to spend with family. Went down to Connecticut. We had three different kinds of roast meats, a lot of barbecue. Definitely a little bit of gluttony there.

Dirk: What's the third, turkey, ham, what?

Jon: Porketta, which is another pork. A pork shoulder roast on the grill.

Dirk: Nice.

Jon: Marinated and everything. My uncle's a great cook. It's a lot of fun. The kids got to play with the dogs. It was just a good time.

Dirk: That sounds wonderful.

Jon: How was yours?

Dirk: It was fine. Quiet. Family. Fun.

Jon: Yeah. Well Thanksgiving is in my opinion right on par or very close to Christmas time just in terms of the quality time that you get with family. Christmas can be a little crazy. Thanksgiving always feels a little bit more casual, at least for me.

Dirk: Yeah, I prefer Thanksgiving because unless you're one of those Black Friday participants, it eschews the consumerism that is so insidious in Christmas. I appreciate that.

Jon: Today Dirk I wanted to chat a little bit about an issue that I see coming up time and again, which is media splintering in the digital age. What drew my attention to this topic for this week was a very interesting article in Rolling Stone magazine about the decline of media and it's called "America is too Dumb for TV news". It was specific to the television broadcast news medium, but I think some of the things that the author said also related to news in the digital age generally speaking.

The writer, Matt Taibi, is discussing television news as related to Donald Trump's outrageous claims that he saw thousands and thousands of Muslims celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11.

The author says, "It's our fault we in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fattened sugar and violence and wait for your obese, overstimulated customer to come waddling forth. The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds."

Not only is Matt ... Can turn a phrase there, but I think he's onto something. There are a number of different views on this that I wanted to take today. First, I wanted to see what your thoughts were on the subject.

Dirk: Yeah, I mean, he's right. It's no surprise. I mean look, this is the ultimate byproduct of lightly regulated capitalist economic systems. It's all about profits and making money. There's not government oversight of structure of any kind to make sure that your broccoli gets through to you. It's all about how can create addicts who buy our stuff. How can we appeal to the basest animal instincts and reactionary aspects of the human animal. The human brain. The human neuro-endo chronological system.

The fact it's taken this long is the only thing that surprises me. The idea now seem quaint, that the media would have some sort of a more neutral, a more highfalutint perspective on things. The media now is just like any other profit driven organization and lacking government regulation or government role in the process. That ain't going to change.

I'm not surprised in the least. We have gotten exactly the "media" that our economic system would inevitably lead itself to. Why are we surprised and outraged?