The Decline and Fall of the Media.

Posted by Pointman on February 16, 2018 · 31 Comments 

I wrote a piece in December 2016, shortly after Trump’s victory, that was a discussion of the mainstream media’s coverage of the presidential campaign. At its heart, it was a discussion of what a lowly creature it had revealed itself to be. Throughout the whole campaign, the standard of journalism barely scrambled upwards to the abysmal.

You name a vice it could possibly exhibit, and you didn’t have to look far to find it on brazen display; fabrication, omission, dishonesty, smear jobs, distortion, character assassination, condemnation by denunciation, trial by press, with them gleefully playing anonymous accuser, judge, jury and executioner – in summary, it was all a deliberate pack of lies and deception from beginning to end.

The article discussed the invisible migration of news consumers away from the mainstream to more truthful and less hysterical internet alternatives, and finished up asking if the behaviour of the mainstream media would change going forward into a Trump administration, but noted that the early signs weren’t good and in all probability they’d continue to spiral outwards beyond the fringe of any mainstream relevance.

That not too prescient assessment has turned out to be more than accurate, and indeed, if anything, not pessimistic enough by a long chalk. The term fake news has now entered common parlance and isn’t going away, since even fewer people than ever place any trust in them.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, you had newspapers like the NY Times publish a cringing apology, thinly disguised as not an apology, about their partisan coverage and promising, now the election was all safely over and behind us, they’d get back to some tattered impression of journalism. Things would go back to normal. Did it work? No, not unless you think working means having to subsequently vacate eight floors of your landmark downtown building and making a few hundred journalists, and I’m being charitable in my use of that term, redundant.

I mention the NYT only as an exemplar, since it seems representative of one of the few sectors which have been letting people go rather than joining in the general growth trend that has so far been a characteristic part of Trump’s rejuvenation of the economy over the last year. As early as April of 2017, the news/media sector was one of the few contracting according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and things have only got successively worse in the following months. To my mind, there are a number of reasons for this, and I’d like to discuss the salient ones.

The first was, like every other outlet now perceived as a peddler of fake news, they ramped up even further the full-on Trump lynch mob hysteria, with every story carefully backed up by an anonymous source. If there was any doubt, a second corroborating anonymous source could easily be found, or let’s be cynical here, invented. In passing, I’d like to nominate Mr. Anonymous Source for this year’s Pulitzer prize for journalism. He seems to have been behind every scoop what turned out to be nothing more than a steaming great pile of shit on the side of the road. The term pooper-scooper now has an entirely different meaning when used in a journalism context.

Such blatantly dishonest practices became seemingly acceptable and juvenile journalism now became the norm, and if anything, was amplified to a level where it verged on what people who’re interested in drama call the Theatre of the Absurd. As an example of such aberrant behaviour, Newsweek, in former years a much respected news journal, started churning out articles with frankly embarrassing headlines such as; “Here’s scientific proof that Trump’s hands are too small to hold a bottle of water like a normal adult”, “How Trump and the Nazis stole Christmas to promote white nationalism”, “How murderer Charles Manson and Donald Trump used language to gain followers” and a personal favourite of mine to be savoured over a long chilly Winter’s evening snug before a roaring coal fire with a glass of whiskey – “Hillary Clinton could still become president if Russia probe finds conspiracy evidence”.

After a scree of must-read articles like that, walking around with a copy of Newsweek sticking out of your back pocket became an activity purely for those with a strong contrarian streak, especially after the Manhattan DA descended on their premises with seizure warrants for all their servers. This was followed by the now de rigueur round of redundancies, which has now reached a second or third cull I believe, and the disaster Newsweek has become is heading into its last act before the final curtain comes down on it to put it out of its misery forever.

Give it a month or two, and you’ll probably be able to buy it for the fabled nominal $1 from the liquidator. For any company doctor running the slide rule over it, I’d say the real talent has years ago fled, but it still might be worth asset stripping for the back catalogue and the saleable tangibles. Granted, the brand is now tarnished, but I’d say there’s still a few morsels of worth to be had in picking over its corpse.

The second reason behind the decline is a little bit more subtle and involves how you as a journalist actually perceive the consumers of your product. People say the internet never forgets, but it’s all too easy to misunderstand what this actually means in the context of an Internet savvy generation. It really means nothing more than if you said something embarrassing a decade or so ago, someone with enough sleeves rolled up googling can find it.

In a mainstream media news industry increasingly populated by youngish people born after the internet watershed, they assume consumers of their news product are also afflicted with the average internet user’s chronically short attention span as well as with the attendant dose of Alzheimer’s forgetfulness. One of the more subtle protections of this blog is the TLDR reflex keeping those devoid of any original insight well away. They rarely have the stamina to read beyond the first few paragraphs, and I junk their junk comments as soon as I see that.

People really interested in news, won’t waste their time surfing around the Internet hitting new sites every day. On the contrary, they’ll settle on one, perhaps two sites at most, and visit once a day to catch the headlines.What happens is they buy into that site, its columnists and the mixture of opinion it offers. Sure, that’s a simplification of a situation that’s still evolving, but it’s close enough. They trust the news they’re reading is true, but over and above that basic consideration, they don’t expect their intelligence to be insulted nor their sensibilities to be deeply offended. I’ll give you a tragic and extreme example of a media organ making that mistake.

It concerns something that happened in 1989 that became known as the Hillsborough disaster. It was a football game between Liverpool FC and Notts Forest, which due to catastrophic crowd marshaling, resulted in nearly a hundred crush deaths and eight hundred injuries. It took years to get to that root cause, but at the time, a working man’s newspaper, called the Sun, gave deep offense to the people of Liverpool with the headlines it ran and the repulsive spin it chose to impart to the story.

To this day, nearly thirty years later, the Sun newspaper just doesn’t sell in the City of Liverpool. The wound had gone way too deep. As I said, an extreme example, but the process and end effect, albeit in a milder form, is exactly the same.

Just as with the Sun newspaper, though not as directly offensive, loyal consumers of hitherto trusted and reliable news sources, found the election coverage an affront to their common sense, never mind their intelligence. To have that sort of patently biased rubbish being rammed down their throats every day for months, and with the very real expectation they’d believe it all, was the final straw. On so many levels, it was an insult they weren’t going to be laughing off any day soon.

It was as if the periodicals they were reading, or the TV stations they were watching, thought they were complete idiots who could be led around by their noses. They simply wouldn’t be coming back to those hitherto trusted news sources, and that’s exactly what happened.

As an example of this brand aversion that’s not going to go away, consider CNN. In the last year, its numbers, like any prognosis of its continued long-term existence, are simply terrible. They’ve done the familar contraction, with the usual waves of massive redundancies, especially after a disastrous attempt to set up a digital platform, but what’s really killing them is that their viewing numbers have dropped by nearly a third and the days of them hitting the magic one million viewers, even in peak hours, are a fading memory.

This catastrophic crash in their ratings is being put down to something called “hate fatigue”, since the station has been running a continuous hate Trump campaign 24/7 for the last year, but that excuse is just a neat way of sidestepping the real problem. It doesn’t take a whole year of getting that sort of fare shoved down your gullet before finally turning it off. The problem is the product – it’s simply not selling.

The third and final reason for the decline, and I believe the mainstream media’s eventual fall, is usually ascribed to a false but widespread idea that the news consumer has now, and for the very first time ever, become hyper-sensitive to being manipulated by the media, not all of them, but a significant and electorally decisive number of them, and therefore momentarily abandoned it. There is more than an element of truth in that tempting notion, but it’s obscuring a bigger truth which the mainstream purveyors of news simply can’t bring themselves to face, but is there for anyone to see once they step outside of their bunker mentality.

A deeper and more tectonic change is at work. The centre of the electorate, and therefore their consumer mass base, is moving rightwards politically. The blue-collar and middle classes, in despair with a mainstream politics that year after year couldn’t deliver anything for them and a mainstream media that year after year couldn’t actually talk about anything that was relevant to them, took a bet on Trump and his supposedly mad ideas, and in less than a year, it’s paying off handsomely for them.

The economy is in a 4% growth upswing, unemployment is way down, they’ve got jobs, more money after a big tax cut in their wage packets and a muscular re-positioning of American foreign policy. Mom, apple pie and the Marine Corps are very definitely back in fashion. The product, in order to be made saleable in any way, has to be drastically reconfigured for the realities of that new world, or it’s going to die. That’s a bullet too many people in the news media simply can’t bring themselves to bite down on.

Oscar Wilde said words to the effect that the only thing worse than being talked about, was not being talked about. Leaving aside his usual epigrammatic wittiness, there’s a large gain of truth in that observation. In a political context, it means that when nobody listens to you, you have no power, and are therefore surplus to requirements. If nobody listens to you, and nobody even cares about your continued existence, your start to slowly fade away into irrelevance. It becomes all too easy to melt into the role of a missing person that nobody notices is actually missing.

As early as May last year, Trump made a quip about cutting the WH house briefings down from two a week to one every fortnight. You could hear the sharp intakes of breath, because by then it’d become obvious he was quite capable of doing that to them, but the real fear was that in their heart of hearts, they’d begun to suspect that nobody would care. There wouldn’t be any 7th cavalry of public outrage charging to their relief and support. There won’t be either when he eventually does it.

The only good news is that Trump still has a definite use for them, so he will not deliver the coup de grâce, which is within his power, until they cease to have any utility for him.

©Pointman

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The spoilt brat complex.

Betrayal by those you once trusted.

On leadership, Brexit, Trump, the New Politics and what dreams may come.

The loss of faith in the political class.

Kobayashi Maru.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with CNN, Fake News, Media, MSM, Politics