The mainstream media is in even bigger trouble than it — or America — thinks. Amid the great debate this election season over whether we faced a “Flight 93” moment (wherein we had to storm the halls of power even though it might already be too late), one thing that did become clear is just how weakened our most influential institutions have become. Although an enfeebled media probably strikes most people as less of a problem than a hollowed-out economy or a breakdown of grand strategy, we need to recognize that wrenching change is likely to come to communications as a whole, upending the way we consume information and make sense of reality. There is some good news in the mix, but it is going to come with a lot of pain.
The best way to see what’s happening in media, and what will befall it, is in light of the pattern of influence and weakness replicated across the system of institutions making up “the establishment.” After hurriedly overextending itself for a brief period that seemed like a new normal, the financial industry hit a crisis point, survived by concentrating its power, and continued on as if equilibrium had been restored. The identitarian left has progressed through the same plot points, achieving dramatic, swift gains that could not hold, then collapsing back into an embattled concentration point unable to process that their triumphs lacked the foundation to be sustainable.
Remarkably, the pattern can even be seen in the invasion of Iraq, where overwhelming force achieved internally taken-for-granted successes only to see them implode, and underlying premises remained extraordinarily difficult or impossible to rework while advancing a largely unchanged agenda.
Media’s long travails, now coming to a head, have stuck to the script. Cable news and prestige newspapers had become so dominant that they all but swallowed the online media space, only to discover that the online space was the new center of gravity and no reliable business model existed for monetizing the attention drawn there.
Social media hastened the established media’s awareness that the old ways were changing, but the initial solution — reading tweets from prompter into the camera from a newsdesk — proved wanting. Halting attempts to innovate — by, say, launching online television channels, complete with scheduled programming and big-name sponsors — quickly devolved into little more than click-bait, clip-producing schemes.
And meanwhile, as the communications industry grew more concentrated and circled the wagons, the wilds beyond began to fill up with radical (and reactionary) alternatives. At its crisis point, how did the media “choose” to respond?
On closer inspection, what happened was hardly a choice at all. The only reliable sources of clicks and eyeballs that could be monetized (or assigned market value) were two: pop culture fans and knee-jerk culture warriors. So mainstream media outlets, of whatever size, have turned either toward the model of celebrity aggregation and public relations “journalism” or to the model of so-called “fan service” for ideologues whose political identity has merged almost completely with their cultural identity.
Because the conservative end of the ideological spectrum was largely monopolized and was not perceived to be a growth industry, and because that perception would undermine the strategy of using the ever-growing population of celebrities to leverage valuation and content, mainstream media outlets were compelled to cater baldly to self-identified progressive millennials — when they did not choose outright to make that fateful decision.
The problem here is not itself ideological, but conceptual: dependent on such a narrow audience and business model, the media had raised its risk profile far beyond what was prudent or indeed what was conceivable. It just didn’t seem possible that the ubiquity and influence of the media could suffer systemic failure, especially when it seemed certain that Hillary Clinton would win the White House, likely in a landslide.
And so, just as the financial services industry woke up one morning to discover the severity of its own fragility, or the social justice movement suffered its rude awakening, or the Bush administration abruptly confronted a complete meltdown of its “Mission Accomplished” moment, the media has wound up in a shell-shocked panic over the election of Donald Trump and all that his enmity implies.
The truth is that Trump’s election did not throw the mainstream media into an existential crisis; that was merely the event which made the extent of the crisis visible. Television may be forever, but the model of news today’s dominant cablers still rely on has been disappearing into the rear-view mirror for years on end. On the other hand, online news cannot rely on advertising revenue and labors in vain to make good on subscription models.
Finally, the conquest of political information by the same taste for filtered fantasy that reaches from pornography to sports and well beyond has called into question why viewers should subjugate their attitudes and dispositions to newsmakers’ when they now have the option of confirming their own priors and preferences on a daily basis. The media, like so many of our leading institutions, has followed its overextension by painting itself into a corner.
Of course, some of the biggest players do have the capacity to withstand the change to come — if they themselves change quickly enough. But the vision of change undergirding the media’s sense of itself may not be enough. Growing numbers of Americans have lost respect for the media not because of its arrogance or self-importance but because the content it delivers is just not relevant to their lives. For some, that’s because they’d prefer peace and quiet, consuming only what’s essential. For others, it’s because they’re happier screaming unmediated at their online foes.
If education and socialization — two more crumbling institutional frameworks — fail to produce citizens and consumers who make up a traditional media audience, how long can a traditional media endure?
James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.
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