I don't want to shock anyone, even those who already
know there is something quite awry in the contemporary news media,
but I have come to realize that it is not merely a temporary condition
that will soon pass away, and that the problem cannot be simply repaired.
The news media, as we have known it in the three
quarters of a century since World War II, is disappearing much
faster than we realize. It might soon be extinct.
I am being very specific in speaking about
the "news" media. Communications, in some older
and innovative forms, will continue, but what we have understood
to be "the news" will come to us in other ways, perhaps
primarily as data and notifications. Advertising, promotions,
storytelling, editorial writing, gossip, etc., will still find their way
to the citizenry in a variety of formats, many of which we know today and
some of which are being now invented.
I am talking only about "hard" news – that is,
the communication of events, facts and other relatively
objectifiable information.
The U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 was not a sudden
news reporting phenomenon of excessive bias, but it was the apotheosis of the
breakdown of journalistic fairness and credibility that had been gaining
acceleration in recent years. It was inevitable that the ideological
polarity so evident today was a long time coming – not only in journalism, but
in virtually every aspect of U.S. political life.
During the late campaign, in order to explain the specific
reasons for the voter response to the confrontation between the two major
political parties and their nominees, I put forward a number of concepts,
including one that set out the existence of two American English languages that
employed identical vocabularies but produced different meanings for two large
groups. Candidate Donald Trump, in spite of his background, did not
publicly speak the establishment (and elite) version of American English,
the one spoken by most educated and professionals. He spoke directly
to less urban, working-class voters with fewer educational experiences.
The establishment print and broadcast media spoke and understood only the
former and, being provoked by Trump's speaking the latter, launched a
pre-emptive media coup d'état in order to sabotage his
campaign against Hillary Clinton. Ironically, in the run-up to Trump
securing the nomination, the same establishment media actually
helped enable Trump to win – not because they knew what he was doing (and
how he was adroitly using them), but because they knew he was a box office
attraction and boosted ratings.
In order to eschew fair new coverage of Mr. Trump in the
last four months of the 2016 campaign, the media had to abandon
even the semblance of fairness. Their problem was that the
media coup was entirely in the language spoken primarily by those who
already had decided to vote against Mr. Trump. The biased news
coverage not only failed to change the minds of pro-Trump voters, but also
backfired with most undecided voters, many of whom found the media language and
bias offensive and transparent.
But confidence in media news reporting had long been in
decline before Donald Trump appeared on the stage. Years of incessant
political correctness had been enforced in the establishment media generally,
not just in news reporting, and many Americans simply did not buy this
ideological product.
Self-communicating and self-congratulatory, the
establishment media had little idea of how perilous their public standing
was. By overplaying their hand in the autumn of 2016, they brought the
whole media credibility issue to its threshold.
The media establishment did have one major clue to their
fundamental problem: falling ratings, falling circulation, falling
advertising. Their response has been to interpret these phenomena as
simply a problem of technology, including the rise of the internet and
social media. The icons of the golden age of news reporting such as The
New York Times; the Washington Post; and the major TV, cable, and radio
networks are today often caricatures of news reporting. They survive
only because their primary audiences are in large urban centers, where
their bias coincides with their readers, listeners, and viewers. For this
reason, they cannot go back to fair and balanced news reporting – because
their own economic bases will not let them. Outside these urban
pockets, their national credibility is gone.
Thus, after Donald Trump was elected president, the media
establishment has, in many cases, doubled down on its bias, including
cooperating with the Democratic Party campaign to put down Mr. Trump's
appointees and his stated initiatives even before he takes office.
Although I might disagree with some of the Democrats' efforts, they are
their proper prerogative, and, I might add in fairness, Republicans have
behaved similarly in the past against Democrat presidents. But should the
news media be openly cooperating with a political party?
I also want to make clear that a laudable number of those
who were vehemently opposed to Mr. Trump are now adapting to the reality
of his election. That does not mean they now agree with him or support
him, but they are willing to give him a chance to perform in office before criticizing
him. Those who are opinion journalists will, and should, continue to
be critical and skeptical. No politician or elected official of any party
merits an uncritical free ride, and that includes Donald Trump.
My point is that those in the establishment news media
who continue to confuse the front page with the editorial page
are only hastening the long-term process in which traditional
news media institutions are disappearing and being replaced.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/the_news_media_as_we_knew_it_is_finished.html#ixzz4VqaPbES3
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