Autopsy: What killed "The News?"
Forensic evidence points to technology, activism and good old fashioned commerce.
A couple of weeks ago, I broached the notion that Journalism was dead in America.
Let me clarify. Journalism as a seedbed of unbiased delivery of news is dead. Gone. Kaput. Muerto! Buried alongside is objective truth – truth independent from individual subjectivity.
We still get the news. Well, sort of. Replacing Journalism and objective truth is a daily dose of bias and sophistry. The news business no longer is based on fair and impartial reporting. Instead, we are $old outrage. And $pin. And doctrine.
Meantime, America fractured like a mirror into a thousand pieces, with each shard reflecting its own unbending conviction. The media are the complicit and calculating perps holding the hammer. They cull divisiveness because their very survival depends on it.
Over the past four decades, the news media have evolved from the traditional role as the trustees of Democracy – The Fourth Estate – to corporate enterprise, driven by technology, activism and good old fashioned commerce. Commentariat did what all industries do to survive … they “followed the money.”1
The deal was, in the words of Michael Corleone, “strictly business.”
Along the way, true Journalism got whacked.
Time for an autopsy.
“Medium is the Message”
It is necessary first to look at how all media function at a conceptual level to understand the integrants behind what we see today. As you might guess, technology plays the predominant role.
The societal shifts caused by the migration from analogue to digital delivery of information was foreseen by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the mid 1960s. McLuhan had gained prominence in the ‘50s with a series of works on advertising and communication theory.
However, in his groundbreaking book, Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan struck an international chord when he explained how media impacted social behaviors. McLuhan argued that a medium itself, not the messages it carries, was the primary force in mass communication. Thus was coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message.”
Think of it this way. The medium (radio, television, etc.) is a direct conduit to your frontal lobes, the part of the brain that controls emotions and personality. As a result, the medium inherently influences your personal behaviors and communal interaction. As the masses plugged-in — what McLuhan called “the Global Community” — it forever changed the way we all think, behave and interact. The message was a byproduct.
Many cultural anthropologists believe McLuhan’s epiphany foreshadowed the impact of the Internet almost 30 years later.
News as a product
Think of news media as you would a product. Like any product – laundry detergent, kitty litter or corn flakes – the news media is driven by market forces … i.e. supply/demand, buyer habits, consumer loyalty, branding, etc.
However, news media are unique because one key market force – consumer cost – is practically a non-factor. For more than a century, news media (print and electronic) derived almost all of its revenue from commercial advertisers, who marketed through them to reach the masses.2 The actual cost of watching the evening news or reading the paper was inconsequential.
As technology advanced, so did the means of news delivery. First to 24/7 cable networks (see below), then the Internet (1990s), and eventually to multiple platforms, mobile phones and social media. As options increased, and grew exponentially faster, audiences fragmented and attention spans shrank.
As options increased, and grew exponentially faster, audiences fragmented and attention spans shrank.
Consumer habits changed to “faster/shorter/easier” in the click of button.
Death of Newspapers
First casualties were metro newspapers and magazines. (See: Death of Journalism). Community newspapers dried up and disappeared. From 2000-2010, print languished as advertising dried up, not coincidentally with the growth of technology.
Advertising dollars flowed away from newsprint and towards the digital wizards of Silicon Valley.
With the decline of newspapers so too did the basics of organic journalism … long-form investigative reporting, regional (local) sections, “lifestyle” features and local columnists could no longer be supported. These essentials were the colors that separated metro newspapers from the dry pallet of the national network news. Newspapers were an important part of civic identity, a city’s lifeblood, its character. When a metro newspaper died, so did a vital organ of the city.
In the 70s, New York City had no fewer than 11 major daily newspapers. Today it has four.
Cable Network News
Cable television had been around for decades, but was remotely sold on an experimental basis. But in the late 70s, cable delivery expanded bandwidth far beyond the capacity of an antenna. Programming expanded exponentially. Suddenly there were 50 or more channels from which to choose.
The first nationwide cable TV news network to launch was CNN (pay television channel) in 1980, followed by Financial News Network (FNN) in 1981. Through the 1990s and beyond, the industry grew with the establishment of other round-the-clock news networks, including Fox News (1996) and MSNBC (1996), and specialty channels such as Bloomberg Television (1994).
CNN, founded by media broadcasting proprietor Ted Turner in Atlanta3, made news available 24 hours a day. Traditionally, news was confined to morning coffee and newspaper, or an encapsulation by a dry, monotone voice for the 30 minute period between 6 and 6:30 p.m.
Initially, CNN recycled the same stories hourly. Eventually, coverage expanded to include original programming, dedicated news segments (financial, world news, etc.) with high profile anchors. Audiences steadily increased. CNN dominated the 1980s with its more immediate, urgent, highly stylized format.
It wasn’t until Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes hailed the introduction of viewpoint television with the founding of Fox News in 1996. Murdoch and Ailes recognized the capriciousness of audiences and made a choice:
With such a crowded playing field, why compete for a mass audience? Instead, why not choose a demographic, grow that audience with combination of partisan news, entertainment and opinion, and dominate that segment? Murdoch’s media empire gave Fox News a foundation upon which to build, and it did just that … catering to an older, brand loyal audience with a decidedly conservative worldview.
… (Fox decided) why compete for a mass audience? Instead, why not choose a demographic, grow that audience via a combination of partisan news, entertainment and opinion, and dominate that segment?
The formula worked — to this day Fox News still dominates cable news viewership — and set the trend to what the news ecosystem would become two decades later.
The Internet
Within its first decade, the Internet4 made more information available than ever before in human history. And it was instantly accessible to the masses. This put even more options at the fingertips of consumers. News websites and newspapers began to migrate online … but with constraints (scrolling screens, limited bandwidth and little interactivity). Public forums in the forms of chat rooms and community bulletin boards emerged as the first online “town halls.”
News consumption quickly evolved. Long, time-consuming distillation gave way to quick-and-easy engagement. A 1,500-word story takes even the fastest reader 10 minutes to digest. Scanning a headline and smashing a link takes less than 2 seconds … so the news formats adapted to the truncating American attention span.
Then Social Media came along.
Social Media and the angry mobs
Interconnectivity through global networks, telecommunications giants and technocrats opened the entire world to instant communications. By 2010, “the news” had been fully absorbed, repackaged, cut to the bare bone and fully “corporate-ized.” The job of targeting news consumers was taken over by algorithms and doctrine.
Traditional journalism did not survive. The business models already had changed from advertiser-driven to subscriber-driven. Subsidizing straightforward “give-me-the-facts” style doesn’t filter well through massive piles of servers and fiber optics. But partisan and “bad” news does.
When Facebook, Twitter and Instagram showed up in the 2000s, the volume turned way up. Social media enabled the populace to talk back. But the platforms had limited capacity for nuance and context. Instead, exchanges filtered through algorithms that encourage engagement. Unfortunately, these same algorithms also foment conflict and vitriol.
And boy, are we addicted to conflict.
(Social media) exchanges were/are filtered through strategic use of algorithms that encourage engagement. Unfortunately, these same algorithms also foment conflict.
Significant segments of the population made either a hard turn left or steered even more right. Corporate news had to choose sides to survive. So it became Fox News and the Wall Street Journal vs. corporate media (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc.) the Washington Post, New York Times and a whole host of ultra-liberal online publications.
Today, the news media is unrecognizable from just a few decades ago. Veteran, seasoned journalists and reporters have either moved on, retired or dead. They’ve been replaced by 20-to-30 year old activists who have neither the experience nor the inclination toward objective reporting. They simply churn out content. Highly-biased content. The lexicon for this is click bait.
It does not make for an informed public. It’s journalism gone rotten.
“There’s no subsidy for news anymore,” says independent journalist Matt Tiabbi. “Right now the financial pressure to be ‘bad’ is just too great.'“
Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers and Art Buchwald would be mortified.
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Jim Geschke was inducted into the prestigious Marquis Who’s Who Registry in 2021.
During the Watergate investigation, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward frequently met with an inside source to help him and colleague Carl Bernstein stay on course. In the Woodward-Bernstein book All the President’s Men (1976), the source, using the cryptic name “Deep Throat,” famously told Woodward to “follow the money.” Three decades later, in a Vanity Fair article, former FBI agent Mark Felt was revealed to be notorious “Deep Throat.” Felt died in 2006.
For decades, the largest profits for legacy broadcast networks ABC, NBC and CBS were derived from nightly news.
On March 4, 2019, AT&T announced a major reorganization of its broadcasting assets to effectively dissolve Turner Broadcasting System.
The World Wide Web emerged in 1991 from the scientific labs in Cern, Switzerland, codified by English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee brought the WWW to life through Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), enabling the existing ARPANET network structure to carry moveable text, linking and images.
-30- has been traditionally used by journalists in the United States to indicate the end of a story