In the U.S., the new law is: Everything just gets worse.

Here’s a recent instance of the law, as applied to what used to be genuinely alternative news sources in the U.S.:

The Village Voice has now been politically eviscerated, along with the other city-based alternative weeklies bought up by Michael Lacey (nice picture!  maybe he doesn’t want to be recognized?) and the New Times corporation (check out those ads!  Lots of alternatives there), which now operate “without the
burden of a political agenda”.  To get a taste of we’ve lost here, check out these excerpts from this April 13 Democracy Now segment:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to former Village Voice
reporter Jim Ridgeway in our Washington studio. And here in New York
we’re joined by Sydney Schanberg, the former press critic at the Village Voice,
Pulitzer Prize winner. He resigned in February, following the sale of
the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Cambodia during the
1970s. His story inspired the film The Killing Fields. We’re also joined by Mark Jacobson.  He’s a reporter with New York Magazine.  In November, he wrote a major piece on the Voice-New Times merger, entitled "The  Voice from Beyond the Grave."  He’s a former writer at the Village Voice. 

And I also want to say, we did try to reach Michael Lacey, who is the new Executive Editor of the Village Voice and co-founder of New Times Media, as well as Christine Brennan, the Executive Managing Editor of the Village Voice, but they did not return our calls. And New Times Media is now called Village Voice Media. 

Sydney Schanberg, you attended a meeting in early February with Michael Lacey and the whole Village Voice staff. What happened?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey
came in and very quickly told the staff that he was disappointed and
appalled by the fact that the front of the book was all commentary and
that he wanted hard news. He said if he wanted to read a daily or
regular critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the New York Times, and that’s not what he wanted  in the Village Voice.
He was insulting to the staff. He figuratively or in effect called them
stenographers. He said they had to stop being stenographers. When I
objected to that, because that was so insulting, and I said that you
can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you
couldn’t call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking   notes from public figures and just passing them on.

Lacey’s
charge is such a bunch of contradictory bullshit—stenographers to
what public figures !!?– that I can’t read this
without becoming enraged, but maybe that’s just because I can still
remember the fast-disappearing good old days:

AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the   telephone by Tim Redmond.  He is the  executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Tim, why is this a story that you feel is a national story?  We’re talking to you from  New York. 

TIM REDMOND: I’ll tell you why it’s a national story.
It’s a national story, because the alternative press has always been
kind of feisty, independent, challenging the status quo, and the
alternative press has always been about independent media, has been
about independent voices. And, you know, it sounds kind of hokey, but I
got into this business 25 years ago, because, you know, I thought I
could help change the world. And I’m not saying the alternative press
has changed the world, but I think the Village Voice has made a huge difference in  New York, and the Bay Guardian, where I work, has made a huge difference  in San Francisco, and that’s something.

And what the folks from New Times, now known as Village Voice
Media, want to do, they want to buy up alternative papers all around
the country and make them all the same. You know, I don’t think anyone
should own 17 alternative papers. And I particularly don’t think a
company run by people who despise activism, who are not activists and
don’t think of themselves journalistically as activists, who don’t
endorse candidates, who don’t take stands on issues, who haven’t even
come out against the war, should be taking over the Village Voice.  It’s really sad. I mean, the Voice
was always part of the activist tradition of the alternative press.
And, you know, in the same way that a few big chains like Gannett have
bought up and control most of the daily newspapers in the United States
and a few big corporations like Clear Channel control an awful lot of
the radio, a few big corporations control most of the TV, if we go that
way in the alternative press, it’s going to be very sad, particularly,
as I say, when it is an operation that doesn’t believe in activist
politics. That’s not what the alternative press has been about.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Tim, a question. New Times has a
reputation, supposedly, for hard-hitting local investigative stories in
many of their other chains. How do you reconcile that "reputation" with
their current moves, in terms of the Village Voice? 

TIM REDMOND: New Times has some good journalists, and
they have done some good stories. I’ve never doubted that. But they
don’t believe in providing progressive community leadership on issues.
They’ll do some investigative reporting, and there’s nothing wrong with
that. But when it comes to the role the alternative press has always
taken, which is to provide activist leadership, they don’t believe in
it.

Besides, you know, I don’t care if Mike Lacey wants to run a
kind of neo-libertarian paper down in Phoenix and say whatever he wants
to say and do whatever he wants to do. But once he tries to take papers
all over the country and make them all the same, you know, it’s kind of
like the Borg. They sweep into town, they take over a paper, and they
remold it in their own image so it’s exactly like all of the other New
Times papers. If you go from city to city to city, you know, Denver,
Phoenix, you go around, Houston and Miami, they all look the same. They
all have the same voice. They all have the same tone. And that’s not
good for the alternative press, and I would say that’s not good for the
United States. It’s not good for progressive politics. This is not what
the alternative press is about.

It’s bad enough that we are losing what we once had.

Even worse is that lots of kids coming up these
days—those not lucky enough to have progressive parents or get
plugged into progressive blogs, in particular—are not even going to
know what things used to be like 20 years ago. 

They’re going to think it’s just the way things are that every single
thing you hear from the media is aimed at selling you something (or
keeping things cool for the sellers) rather than telling you what is
actually going on.   That the corporate message—and indeed, the
entire cultural landscape— is always the same, no matter whether
you’re in New York, or LA, or Denver, or wherever. 

They’re not going to know that there once was a genuine alternative.  Correction: genuine alternatives.

Say goodbye to one more thing that used to make the U.S. a place
worth living in; say hello to the new law of ever decreasing returns.