Is the Bezos self publishing manatra really a free speech ideal or another example of capitalist overreach? (From the start, Bezos was determined that nothing should interfere with the company’s relentless quest for scale. He instilled in employees an almost dogmatic rejection of gatekeepers — those intrusive editors and critics who stand between authors and readers, deciding what the public should or shouldn’t consume. “We want to make every book available — the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Bezos explained in a 1998 speech. “And when you’re doing that you actually have an obligation — if you’re going to make the shopping environment actually conducive to shopping — to sort of let truth loose.”)
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-hate-store-amazons-self-publishing-arm-is-a-haven-for-white-supremacists?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations
2020-04-13
Roper himself was inspired by “The Turner Diaries,” which depicts in gruesome detail the genocide of nonwhite people across the world. It was published in 1978 under a pseudonym by William Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance, then regarded as the most dangerous neo-Nazi group in the U.S. As of early April, it still ranked among the top 65,000 books sold on Amazon.
Top 65000? What worries me is how many of the other 64,999 espouse something as loony and possibly more consequential?
‘When I entered journalism, the press of the country, with only one exception that I can now recall, was clean, dignified and sober minded. It had various aims in life, aims political, literary, scientific, social, religious, reformatory and mixed, which were deemed by the conductors of the papers advantageous to the commonweal. To make money by pandering to the vices and follies of the community, and thus adding to the mass of vice and folly, was generally unthinkable.’
Horace White, 1904.
https://portside.org/2020-02-13/can-journalism-be-saved
Nicholas Lemann reviews some topical books on the state of journalism in America and puts the current state of flux into a condensed historical perspective.