On the media, one good thing about the crisis is that slowly but surely legacy media in television, print, were already losing eyeball share. And the crisis will hit them harder than most sectors, as media and advertising are among the most recession prone sectors there are. Not for nothing Sarkozy is now proposing to subsidise newspaper subscriptions for youth. And, it won't work. We get upset when the media bias is so blatant, but we have to remember, the audience is more and more not representative of the public at large, it is older, much more conservative in many ways, but it is not one very important thing: by virtue of the fact they are older, they are not the future.
I strongly suspect new media and indepedent media (don't work in media anymore so no recent studies to back this up, but it was already true 5 years ago) have audiences which skew heavily young. This trend will continue; therefore, old Capital's access to eyeballs will be more and more limited, the ability to manipulate public opinion against its own interests more and more limited.
I personally am far more hopeful today than I was five years ago. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
The crazy oldies are much louder in the media than any progressive voices, and it would be wrong to pretend there's no sympathy among younger demographics. But they're certainly a solid foundation for the neolibs, and once they start dying off there could - possibly - be room for some new ideas.
