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Everything Depends on People Watching the News
I still don’t think that it has sunk in how the media environment has changed. Rachel Maddow gets 2.3 million viewers. Twitter is about 2 million people. Washington Post has a million digital subscribers, and less than 400,000 hard copies. CNN 760,000.
These numbers are minuscule. The vast majority of people don’t get their news from these sources. The stories they cover don’t indicate interest or concern of the citizenry.
This has two consequences. One is that a news item that gets wide awareness is likely a headline. A loud and outrageous claim is probably going to be known. The young girl from Scandinavia seemed to get known by many.
But the second is more important. Local and daily experience becomes undeniable. Saving the planet becomes power bills that are unaffordable. Care and diversity end up meaning hopping over human excrement on the sidewalks.
So the theatre of the absurd going on in Washington is designed to create a media buzz but no one is listening. The self-referencing rabbit holes give themselves more import than they have. It is bipartisan; the Trudeau blackface stories do not affect opinions that I hear, except in small circles who are either overjoyed or concerned. It is chaotic; a butterfly flapping its wings creates a hurricane, totally unpredictable and out of control. The impeachment fuss seems to be damaging Biden more than anyone else so far.
Do you know who benefits from this? Politicians who are close to the electorate, whose policies make measurable differences, who exercise the art of listening and connecting, having a very wide and diverse network of people who they connect with. People who have a good ear for nonsense, who by experience or character don’t believe anything until it is confirmed by multiple data points.
People in decision-making positions have lost their feedback mechanisms. We are seeing people freed from any constraints demonstrating fully who they are, which is always a bad idea. The danger is when the information we need is quiet and hidden in the noise; eventually, it makes itself heard in a way that cannot be ignored. Opioids, youth suicide, human excrement on the sidewalks, regular mass shootings. Something is fundamentally wrong.
But in all of this, there is one constant. What we read in the media or watch on TV will have whatever they are talking about fundamentally wrong in some way. Not a bit wrong, but reality is almost the opposite. And some politicians in Washington and other capitals, people in policy positions and business still pay attention and make decisions based on what they read or hear.
We are watching the assumptions and accepted practice of the political economy that have stood for almost a century being dismantled.
Published in Journalism
Donkeys braying at each other in the farmyard mean nothing to me here in the city.
Great post
I like the post, but I think everything depends on people believing the news rather than just watching it.
Last night I watched the movie Absence of Malice, in which a Miami newspaper recklessly prints stories about a local businessman that are not true, resulting in the ruination of the man’s livelihood and the death of an innocent woman. Behind it all was a federal investigator manipulating the newspaper in order to ferret out a murderer.
The movie was made in 1981, and it still rings true. The only difference now is there is no one left in the Justice Department willing to swoop in at the end and set things right, as played so brilliantly by Wilford Brimley in the film.
The sad thing is: Today everybody knows the media is making crap up. And yet we don’t seem to care all that much, so long as they are making up the sort of crap that we want to hear or read.
This sounds encouraging. However, it doesn’t include network news. Here is a chart from Pew Research and a comment from the article on journalism.org: (my emphasis) Network news is skewed to the Dems, but apparently people say that they get their news more often from cable. Hard to know quite what to do with this data.
“Far more people watch the three network evening newscasts than prime time cable news shows— roughly ten times more. But as cable news is always on, polls show more people say they “regularly” get news from cable.”
EDIT: Well, my bad for just looking at the picture. The latest data on this chart is 2006. I do think that there are still more network viewers, but I will have to do a little more looking to see if I am right.
But we cheered when we saw how the businessman lured the establishment guys into his trap. I don’t know how much Bill Barr will look like Brimley at the end, but as always, I’m pulling for the underdog.
Sure, but the frequency of parroting and news stories about other news stories mean that classic media set the focus of discussion for exponentially more consumers. They are not the only ones deciding what gets talked about, but they are still powerful even if the only people reading or listening to them are fellow journalists.
Citizens are not generally better informed or more independent than they were when only three TV networks and a handful of newspapers were running the show. A small portion of voters know how to dig for information and aren’t led by the nose. Most voters ignore those annoying political junkies. Ricochet freaks!
A lot of people get their “news” from social media sites, and much of this consists of memes that make assertions without any supporting evidence or chain of logic.
It’s changed, but it hasn’t changed. Let me explain:
The end distribution point is meaningless. It makes no difference if you’re getting your news online or in print or on television – the content is still being driven by the news judgment of only a handful of organizations, mainly The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Associated Press. They quote each other, they pursue the same stories from the same angles and cultivate the same sources.
The biggest change is economic. A fractured media landscape means that the layers of filters that previously checked their worst impulses has been reduced or, in some cases, completely removed. Stories, thoughts and other half-baked material tumble from brains into some form of media without question.
And maybe the worse development has been the exponential growth of the incestuous relationship between the media and the political class. Particularly on the Democratic side there are more family relationships than adversarial ones.
The only thing I’d add is that some who stay tuned in are too engaged. The loudest voices are the angriest today, which is why so many tune it all out.
If conservatives can stay sharp but cool off a little – not to become “cool,” but warm instead of too hot – then I think we’ll have everything we need to shape things a little more to our liking.
Trump in particular: there are surely a lot of people who are very disturbed by the rapidly-growing insanity of political discourse, and if Trump can adopt a slightly cooler persona, I think it would do his a lot of good.
Famously, Marshall McLuhan asserted that one main reason for Kennedy’s victory over Nixon was that Kennedy’s “cool” style was better adapted for television than was Nixon’s “hot” style, which worked fine with radio.
Agreed! But Trump’s one tough but to crack. But, boy, if he could do, it would be a blessing.
The only thing that’s been saving Trump is his communication style. In-your-face, over-the-top, petty, exaggerated, hyperbolic, petty some more – all that is the only reason he survives and continues to improve things.
Trump didn’t make this media and political environment, he’s just responding in kind and in 1/10th measure to what’s already out there. The volume has to be set at 11 because the left will drown us out if we don’t. The comparison to Kennedy/Nixon doesn’t apply today; try imagining Nixon vs. The Beatles if the Beatles all had Tourettes. Ok, that’s not very apt either. Still. Leprosy maybe.
I get tired of this fatuous “Oh Trump’s great but I hate his tweets.” Those tweets got us a ton of judges and some good regulatory reform, but more to the point they’re keeping the left off balance.
I agree with that, and any credibility they had is being squandered. Not smart for a business whose sole asset is trust.
I think it goes further than that. These organizations can drive the news cycle, but they are also being questioned and challenged every inch of the way, which means they can’t control narratives anymore. And their stories are disseminated along with the challenge to them.
This situation is very challenging. For all their flaws the media has been a counter balance, and had their worst impulses constrained by the exigencies of getting an audience and generating the income to be able to supply. Oddly they were a shortcut to the concerns of the citizenry, or a close approximation. It is interesting to listen to politicians, even bureaucrats and get glimpses how important the media is to what they do. News reports are considered important and valuable, something to reckon with. But that no longer is the case. Case in point, Trump. He has been subjected to multi week long 24 hour media pile ons, and has not suffered lasting harm.
So what remains as a source of information, a feedback mechanism, an indication of what is important in the minds of the citizenry?
I think the political class, with exceptions, are flying blind. People who are making decisions of import based on what they read in the traditional media have already made serious mistakes of judgement, being misled. This could actually turn out to be very dangerous.
I agree with that, and any credibility they had is being squandered. Not smart for a business whose sole asset is trust.
I think it goes further than that. These organisations can drive the news cycle, but they are also being questioned and challenged every inch of the way, which means they can’t control narratives anymore. And their stories are disseminated along with the challenge to them.
This situation is very challenging. For all their flaws the media has been a counter balance, and had their worst impulses constrained by the exigencies of getting an audience and generating the income to be able to supply. Oddly they were a shortcut to the concerns of the citizenry, or a close approximation. It is interesting to listen to politicians, even bureaucrats and get glimpses how important the media is to what they do. News reports are considered important and valuable, something to reckon with. But that no longer is the case. Case in point, Trump. He has been subjected to multi week long 24 hour media pile ons, and has not suffered lasting harm.
So what remains as a source of information, a feedback mechanism, an indication of what is important in the minds of the citizenry?
I think the political class, with exceptions, are flying blind. People who are making decisions of import based on what they read in the traditional media have already made serious mistakes of judgement, being misled. This could actually turn out to be very dangerous.
This echoes the Tip O’Neill maxim that ‘all politics is local’, that people vote on what impacts them directly. So politicians who respond to grassroots needs will be rewarded with voter loyalty. I don’t think that is as true anymore. The weird tribal identity of being secular, woke, urban and white-collar and needing to despise some caricature of other white people so as to feel secure in that identity has changed everything. The despised and caricatured people elected Trump in reaction. Non-white voters are loosening existing political ties because they correctly see our politics (e.g., Trump v. Warren) as an identity fight among white people over issues that have less and less relevance to issues that affect them.
It is very hard for Congressmen to be seen as solvers of relevant problems when Congress doesn’t really address any relevant problems and politics has become so national that even the city council is braying about LGBT or climate change issues rather than trash pickup or drug abuse.
Local news outlets cover national events with exactly the same slant as the MSM because (a) all local news editors and reporters want to go national (b) they largely identify with the urban secular tribe and (c) there are no resources to provide another slant. Fox News provides a more conservative interpretation of issues and content agendas that are still set entirely by the MSM.