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NO, you’re not reading an article from the Onion, but rather a news report of an an extreme and literal instance of the winner-take all culture.
This brief story from Poynter, “News station lays off journalists, will play Beyoncé songs instead,” quotes Houston Chronicle reporter David Barron:
Radio One owns the station, known as News 92 FM. Its employees “were notified shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday that the news format was being dropped and the station rebranded – for the moment – as B921, playing around-the-clock, commercial-free music by Beyoncé,” Barron reports.
Of course, I’m not worried about a larger wave of radio journalists being executed and replaced by overhyped R&B singers. But as a demonstration of where we are today, this is weirdly apt.
My soon-to-be-released book, Culture Crash, gets into the way the larger winner-take-all-society, which has been best described by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, works out for the creative class. Until then, this example will have to do.