How the Media Killed Itself

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

Over the last twenty years, the media, an institution that had defined American politics in the twentieth century, began a decline that has wiped out its influence, its finances and its future.

Ask anyone in the media what happened and they will blame the internet, social media, disinformation, echo chambers and other tired buzzwords directing the fault elsewhere.

The reality is that the media killed itself.

The media lost its influence because it believed so much in that influence that it became convinced that it was no longer subject to the gravity of public opinion, but defined public opinion, at exactly the time when its future was most at risk and its influence was most in doubt.

It wasn’t the internet, but the media’s reaction to it that put it on its current pathway to oblivion. Rather than responding to the increasing competition resulting from a low barrier to entry by maximizing its appeal, the media radicalized until it could only appeal to niche audiences.

The media complains about echo chambers and disinformation, but it chose to become a very expensive echo chamber filled with disinformation appealing to a shrinking audience. Now it’s struggling to compete with much cheaper echo chambers filled with disinformation.

When faced with this reality, the media insisted that it had an entitlement to monopolize the market and demanded that Google, Facebook and other major monopolies subsidize its content and suppress the content of its competitors because it was in the ‘public interest’. The media’s rent seeking did not save it, it only slowed the rate of decline until it became irreversible.

The media traded its old product, news coverage, for political advocacy, a product that most people don’t want and refuse to pay for, and it is running out of ways to make money from it.

The Obama campaign marked a decisive turning point in the media’s shift from a bias to a narrative. The editorial and reporting of most media outlets became indistinguishable. The objective voice fractured into agitprop. Internal fact checking was dismantled. What had once been a distinctive, albeit flawed, institution became a shareholder and taxpayer-funded component of the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and the larger leftist movement.

Not only conservatives, but independents and old school liberals dropped their subscriptions. The media went on blaming the internet, but its content had become interchangeable with what the Obama campaign was already putting out on the internet. Following a party line made the media boring. Its take on any subject was predictable. The only people listening already agreed.

Without critical commentary of the Obama administration, the value proposition of the New York Times or the Washington Post had become negligible to any intelligent reader. Even liberals grew tired of reporters finding new ways to gush about Obama. Unable to criticize its own side, the media’s only ‘vibrant’ content came from its politically motivated attacks on Republicans.

The Trump era revived the media’s business model by allowing it to focus almost entirely on those attacks. While viewership and readership continued to drop over the long run, national media outlets found a revenue stream from a wealthy niche of leftists who believed that they could pull off a new Watergate and take down Trump. Local newspapers rotted on the vine, but the Washington Post and the New York Times began making money from digital subscribers.

But once Trump was gone, the subscriptions and the money also began to trickle away.

Hillary’s claim that the election had been rigged by Russian ‘fake news’ gave the media a casus belli for what they had wanted all along: a social media marketplace rigged to favor them. Congressional Democrats pressured Facebook into favoring media content and creating a ‘fact checking’ sinecure that paid the media to suppress the content of its political opponents.

But once the pressure faded, Facebook lost interest in subsidizing the media. Worse still, Zuckerberg cut the ‘gordian knot’ by rigging the algorithm to deprioritize all political content. This was a catastrophic blow for conservative digital media, the intended target, but it also helped kill Buzzfeed and other leftist digital media, and also slashed news consumption on social media.

Online news consumption should have risen since 2017, instead it dropped off by 10 to 5 percent in different age groups by 2024. The media had set out to throttle conservatives, but it also throttled its own growth as the largest social media entity ceased to be a news platform.

The media’s central role in the Trump wars left it with no plan for what to do after him.

Despite obvious misconduct by Biden, the media remained unable to report on its own side, burying the largest story of the decade, the president’s senility, preceded by burying the story of his son’s crimes, because it was in the messaging business, not the journalism business.

Readers and viewers turning to the media for meaningful coverage of the Biden administration got White House press releases thinly disguised as news stories. By the end of his term in office, the media was spinning the ‘unspinnable’, denying that the economy was a disaster, that inflation was devastating American families and that the man at the top was completely out of it.

The media took to urging Americans to get over it and accept high prices for a ‘good’ economy, ridiculing them as malcontents who were unable to appreciate how much better off they were.

This was not a winning strategy either politically or for retaining the trust of the audience.

The media’s coverups for Obama were justified by the historic nature of his candidacy, his charisma, his burden of racial guilt, and his transformative politics, but Biden had none of these. When the media covered up for a confused old white man in the White House because he happened to be a member of its party, it destroyed the last shreds of its credibility.

When the media lied about Biden’s fitness, it wasn’t lying to the rest of the country who did not believe it anyway, but to Democrats and liberals who blame it for their 2024 election defeat.

Now Trump is back, but the media isn’t profiting from it anymore. The readers who once poured money into the Post and the Times, who tuned into MSNBC, are continuing to stay away. The media had spent too many years promising what it could not deliver: a Trump takedown. And just like donors are reluctant to donate to the Democrats, they’re reluctant to fund the media.

The media’s audience shrank from a nation to a party and then to a fringe of the party: the one that believed men should be able to use the ladies room and that there was no such thing as objectivity, and then that fringe tuned out and unsubscribed leaving the media with nothing.

A Pew survey reported that less than half of working age adults said that they followed the news all or most of the time in 2016. By 2022, it was a little over a quarter. The trust ratings for the media are about as low as they could possibly get. Leading media figures are leaving newspapers and cable networks to start up their own Substacks and vanity projects.

The coming collapse of network television and cable is likely to finish off traditional network news and cable news media institutions, and the newspaper collapse has long since happened. Traditional media properties are being spun off into channel packages that have no future or publications reliant on backing from billionaires who will tire of subsidizing dying enterprises.

The media is panicking, but it isn’t learning. Efforts to recenter CNN and the Washington Post led to uprisings that ousted the new bosses. Unions have formed not to advocate for staffers, but to police their politics. These political networks are trying to run the media the way they did a decade ago, but without any ownership or plan for its future beyond more leftist agitprop.

Talking to increasingly smaller audiences is fine for podcasts, but not for the media. Without institutional authority, the media is little more than podcasts and blogs with million dollar brands that are no longer making money anymore. And then why should companies bother with them?

The media’s talent exodus is a warning of things to come. Major names are leaving newspapers and cable networks because they see which way the wind is blowing. And they’re getting out.

The news business no longer makes financial sense and it’s not a prestige product anymore. Media companies ‘bundled’ news coverage as part of networks or channel packages, but in a streaming environment, there’s no longer any public demand for adding on news coverage.

The entire infrastructure of channels, newspapers, journalism schools and brands that we call the media is teetering on the edge of a cliff. By the end of the decade, it will be over it.

And the media is to blame.

The internet did not have to kill the media. The media chose to kill itself.

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.