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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.
Like Europe, the media is in a suicidal spiral it cannot disenthrall itself from.
and the Left in general
we see this in academia, entertainment and across the board
that’s what happens with leftist institutions, they become zombies serving leftist ideology, destroying their credibility and original purpose
Why do billionaire owners of media bankroll people that supposedly hate them?
Don’t zombies shamble around after they’re dead? Unless they’re Korean. Those ones are fast.
😂 That’s a truly hilarious observation! Have aa great day!
Excellent metaphor, “zombies serving leftist ideology.”
General Sherman had some good quotes on the newspapers during the Civil War 🙂
“The only two really successful military strokes out here have succeeded because of the absence of newspapers or by throwing them off the trail. Halleck had to make a simulated attack on Columbus to prevent the Press giving notice of his intended move against Forts Henry & Donelson.”
“I hate newspapermen,” he once attested. “They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.”
“The American press is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor and manufactures public opinion.”
“set of dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.”
“the most contemptible race of men that exist.”
Speaking of newspapermen, this from John Swinton (1829-1901) (New York Sun):
“The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
‘Nuthin’ new under the sun…
Good riddance.
I cannot think of a single minute of MSM ‘media’
that was not some form of gaslighting against the good people of America
since JFK was shot by Oswald.
… or not! ;-)) The media rode that lie forever, too … Sorry, it didn’t start with Watergate, folks …
Yes, I still remember Cronkite reporting that “…three shots rang out” in Dallas. OK…
I can still see him weeping. They showed us kids the TV broadcast in the lunchroom that day while we were eating lunch.
The Church commission in the next decade proved the point. Unfortunately, since than MSM gaslighting has gotten worse, much worse.
The media is like the few dinosaurs left after the asteroid hit. They’re lifeless, dazed and confused. Trump is banishing them like fish in a barrel. Viewers can virtually see the strings on the talking heads being pulled by Pharma, Blackrock, DNC, USAID and intel goons like FBI. They banked on the narrative to control the content. The ‘group think’ control has worn thin and people are escaping the ‘Plato’s Cave’ that MSM maliciously created.
Back in the 1930’s the New York Times became just a typical Propaganda Rag for Stalin and later Hitler they also covered up for the Viet Cong Castro and no doupt Mao and now their lying about Guns Our Food and Climate Change then they wonder why the American People no longer trusts them. Were not getting Real News just Leftists Propaganda
The NYTimes still proudly lists The Pulitzer Prize “won” by Walter Duranty.
Duranty never bothered to venture out and meet a single Russian peasant (he didn’t speak Russian).
He spoke to only to his Commisar handlers who told him what he wanted to hear.
His denial of the Ukrainian famine was just as hyperventilating as Joe Scarborough’s denial of Biden’s dementia.
Another colossal disgrace was the DEI hire of the most extraordinarily incompetent reporter in the Times’ history – Jayson Blair.
He copied other people’s work (giving him something in common with Sleepy Joe), pretended to visit places he never did (something in common with Brian Williams), and cited sourses that didn’t exist (something in common with The Atlantic).
He was finally let go in 2003 after a four year run of shame.
Pinch Sulzberger had covered for Jason’s lazy incompetence, because “diversity is our strength!”
Afterwards, ingrate Jayson wrote a book that no one read – “Burning Down my Master’s House”. (An entitlement mindset is a terrible thing to waste.)
American leftists began by denying the atrocities of the French Revolution, then the various leftist uprisings, then the USSR, Communist China, Cambodia and whichever of their ideological allies needed a cover-up next
these days it’s Islam
Greetings from New Zealand, Daniel. I’ve found your analysis of current events to be right on the nail and I have read all of your content here on Front Page Magazine for the last ten years or so. My country is infested with woke lefties and a dud media which is thankfully dying on its feet. We’re beset on all sides by political parties mired in woke, race, gender and climate ideology that are slavishly following all WEF and UN dictates. Many have no political home. Regards.
As a former NZ resident in the 50s and 60s, I remember the cradle to grave socialist state and 95% PAYE on anybody who worked hard and prospered. We still are stuck with our Lefty Socialist idiot savant PM who will just not leave. At least Jacinda took the hint and left just before the broom hit her in the butt!! The liberals here want to replace man-child Justin with a WEF trojan horse who wants to jack the carbon tax to about $170 to start with. Carbon Tax Carney has been Justin’s financial guru thro all this financial suicide. Pray for us.
Excellent points about the atrocities during the French Revolution being covered up. I come across examples of that sometimes when reading history of that period (like, naval struggles in Toulon, where atrocities by the revolution are mentioned incidentally, etc.)
Spot on my friend!
The ‘Old Gray Lady’ is the wall of shame of journalism. Gareth Vaughan Jones was instrumental in exposing the Holodomor. So of course the NY Times was relentless in destroying him. I’ve read the micro filch transcripts of the NY Times in the ’30s and they were praising Hitler. Evil exists in the world as proven by the NY Times existence.
Beautifully thought out. Expertly written (so concise, no wasted words). Thank you Mr. Greenfield.
I agree, nicely done,
Thank you so much. That’s praiseworthy praise.
The lockdown hysteria was a big part of the legacy media failure, they always thought that “if it bleeds it reads (or leads)” but the people had enough propaganda and hysteria because they looked out of their window and saw a very different story. They then started to look elsewhere.
The lockdown hysteria fell apart when the media’s double standard on the danger of leaving the house unless it was to riot in the streets became obvious to even the dimmest Dem.
And when Alzheimer Joe got into office illegally. The D-Bags didn’t want to blame HIM for the Scamdemic the way they had President Trump.
It did piss me off that I couldn’t go to Church but black supremacists and Pajama boy fascists were allowed to riot, and the Alphabet People were able to prance around in mobs at will. Bars were open, too.
“And when Alzheimer Joe got into office illegally.” Nonsense. Trump “blue it” in 2020. He gave Sleepy a Dem-dominated Congress after previously having a GOP-majority in both chambers. Were all those elections changing control of Congress fraudulent as well? Trump got 81 million people to come out and vote against him.
C’mon Jeff, tell us why Fox News settled with Dominion for $787,000, oh sorry, $787,000,000! We’ll wait.
We’ll also wait to hear your explanation about Rudy Giuliani and and the $148,000,0000 verdict in the civil suit. Maybe that lawyer had a bad lawyer, right?
And how do you unionize online “influencers”?
Imagine Mark Levin having to be part of organized labor.
And then there’s AI to throw into the mix.
Influencers require less of the ‘labor’ that the traditional media demands.
Excellent column. Our “news media” are simply awful. One cannot hate them enough.
FWIW:
My hatred for the MSM has long since dissipated. With the advent of the internet, I stopped relying on the MSM as a primary source of news circa 2001.
By relying on the internet and reading news from sources around the world, it soon dawned on me that what passes for news here in the US is actually someone’s opinion of what’s news. I can’t speak for anyone else but I prefer news that is unfiltered, un-biased and not padded with irrelevant info to fill out space on a page or time on a clock.
I’m astute enough to be able to discern the difference between facts and opinions. What passes for news here in America is an insult to intelligent people.
Humans will always hunger for information…even the CroMags needed to know and hunt where the herds were. So they talked and shared intel…which kept them from starving. The death of any information source should be lamented not cheered. What people are slowly realizing is that our modern information sources (The Media) were always leading us to the fields of famine…not fulfillment. But humans are remarkable in that we talk quietly among ourselves and trade truth without the gate keepers. Honest information is traded. We CroMags now use the cursed/sacred internet and, for better or worse, we may be eating lots of crap, but we’re also no longer starving.
Back in the day, most American newspapers were that, information about ships coming in, leaving cargoes, various advertisements.
Once the internet upended advertising, it also upended the media’s business model. Much of the public simply went online to find out ‘where to eat’. Both literally and metaphorically.
And to compete with the internet, the MSM resorted to sensationalism. The problem is that over time, sensationalism becomes a sort of arms race in competition for viewership until the truth gets watered down and distorted until it’s no longer unrecognizable. The truth becomes what ever the media says it is.
One has only to watch CNN or MSNBC to see how that works. Caution: you might want to take something to calm your nerves and stomach before watching those networks. I threw the remote at the TV the last time I tried watching!!
“The media’s coverups for Obama were justified by the historic nature of his candidacy, his charisma, his burden of racial guilt…”
This should have been the deal breaker. Obama simply was not presidential material, and it had nothing to do with his racial makeup.
Incompetence in the highest office of our nation requires cold, hard, unbiased scrutiny.
True which is why the media had to create a cult of personality untethered from reality. Facts and scrutiny went out the window. And so did the media’s credibility.
But Jake Crapper is coming out with a book and Rachel Mancow has a show once a week!
JOURALISM: THE CIRCLE OF COMMUNISM.
A College Journalism Professor gives an assignment to cover a PROTEST. The ones that write that “they are protesting for a Just Cause” gets good grades. The ones that write: “Led by Communist groups that are now supporting Terrorists and the Elimination of Jews!”, GET BAD GRADES and now that professor spreads the word, students spread the word, not that person is in Fear, is intimidated, and retaliated against so they have to hide in Closets like Gays used to do and encouraged to do so by the very people who make others RUN INTO ONE!
The Professor: “Hey… they college newspaper is looking for journalists and you would be perfect. I’ll put in a good recommendation for you. (All far-left in the complete takeover of the Newspaper) The student writes their first article, everyone is proud of them, they frame it, then change their major to Journalism. They become lead Journalist and even the Editor. They then graduate, write for local rags, city newspaper, and then make it to National News. They TIRE of a real job so they apply to become a professor, lots of recommendations, they’re hired as a Journalism professor and give an assignment TO COVER A PROTEST! CIRCLE OF COMMUNISM!
Let’s recall JournOlists. A group of five hundred, probably thousands, who were paid to find dirt on political opponents.
Let’s recall OBAMA invited Far-Left TV hosts and Journalists to the White House to coordinate their Propaganda. Even Juan Williams from Fox, who cried when Obama was elected, was invited.
Let’s recall J6 when all of the TV hosts and their reporters were, within minutes of the breach… “INSURRECTION!” WHO SENDS THEM THOSE TWEET TALKING POINTS?
LET’S RECALL the mass recruitment of Americans into COMMUNIST FRONTS in the ’60s-80s which were directed and funded by THE SOVIET KGB! They were the Masters of Propaganda and Disinformation and taught our Journalism Professors well to where all college newspapers that I’ve ever read or heard about, READ LIKE THE CPUSA’S… PEOPLE’S WORLD! (It’s not printed anymore that I know of.) NOW THE CPUSA TALKING POINTS ARE THE SAME AS THE DEMOCRATS!
For real!!! And… Who does send those talking points? We received them like clockwork when I was a leftie Vietnam War protester’/organizer. I have thought it was Axelrod and that ilk, Ayers and such, but I believe it is higher up and had even once been told it came from the communist party.
The thoroughly liberalized talking heads indoctrinated in schools of socialist thought had a large part in the medias act of suicide.
Like biblical Esau trading his birthright for a bowl of soup, “the press” has exchanged its First Amendment constitutional prerogative for the status of censors in service to Democ-rat politicians. For the proverbial thirty pieces of silver, the watchdogs have become lapdogs. It is a quid pro quo involving the equivalent of Esau’s lunch.
And virtually every institution in American life, e.g. academia, corporations, made the same deal with the Left. Give us more power and we’ll use it to enforce your agenda.
Daniel:
Based on what you say, you would agree (with me) that “un-electing” democrats is only half the solution to what ails America. A more consequential and lasting solution would be a thorough culling of academia of the entrenched communists and neo-Marxists (aka, progressives.)
Failure to do so and colleges and universities will continue to crank out newly indoctrinate leftist radicals year after year with no end in sight. America and the US Constitution will not survive if that is allowed to continue unchecked and unabated.
I say this because in my experience, people rarely ask: where do those leftist radicals come from and who’s teaching them that screed they mindlessly hew to and regurgitate?
“When you understand the nature of a thing, you know what it’s capable of…”
Culling is a dangerous solution. It’s been practiced by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others. A better solution would be to teach our kids to think critically and think for themselves.
After culling. First, there must be consequences. Humans do not change easily and a good culling might be the required, bad-tasting medicine.
Also, thinking critically is difficult. Most people will not do more than is absolutely necessary. We will need to have elites who set the tone so these non-critical thinkers will simply follow their good example.
If honestly believe what you say then you are not serious about dealing with academia. People have been saying what you say for decades and look were it has gotten us?
And don’t tell me that you believe you can vote all the Marxist democrats out of office. That’s naive pollyannaish thinking and it’s never going to happen.
It’s akin to socialism. You can vote your way into it but you’ll have to shoot your way out of it.
Removing Marxists in colleges–and high schools for that matter–should be axiomatic, and something that every institution is asked to do to maintain accreditation and Federal funding. Teaching Marxism is teaching the murder of our Constitution, and the way students should look at the world.
This is beyond free speech, and no more scandalous than throwing out a professor who demands the POTUS be assassinated to “free the people”. Some speech, some ideas should not be tolerated. Otherwise the writings of once socialist-turned-apostate Jean-Francois Revel, in “How Democracies Perish” could come true in the US.. Our Republic should not become a willing victim to Communism.
It’s an imperative. It’s like dealing with an invasive plant species. First you kill the roots so that they don’t grow back.
They have deeply burrowed in.
Who is teaching them, indeed?
Excellent review. And I try to work ‘agitprop’ into conversations
it’s amazing how clarifying words like that are.
When I was a kid the tag line of one newspaper was “all the news fit to print”. We just took it in stride. Then later I discovered that cherished newsman Walter Cronkite decided WHAT he would tell the American people each night and it dawned on me that someone else was deciding what news was “fit” for us. They were no longer REPORTING what happened, but LIMITING what we should know about and always had been. I started questioning any news media source after that. Even now, with all of the competition and varying reports, I try to look for the real story behind the reporting. Every reporter has a spin. We just need to look behind that spin for )hopefully) the truth.
Technology has also played a big role in the decline of the MSM. First, the Internet came along, giving people access to many non-traditional sources of news. Then – and perhaps even more significant – came the smart phone, which is a carry-it-with-you computer in addition to being a communication device. The left claims that we live in a “gun culture,” but in many parts of the country you can go weeks and even months without seeing a gun in public other than a policeman’s sidearm.
What we live in is a smart phone culture, and you see people staring at their phones everywhere. A high percentage of TV ads depict people using their phone apps to buy this or that. Phone apps are multiplying so that in some places you can’t even do some things – see a movie, go to a ballgame, use a parking lot – without using a phone app.
Finally, it is print media that are dying, not the MSM in general, and many traditional news sources will continue to exist only in scaled-down format as on-line services. This process is already well under way.
A good article, yet Greenfield seems to miss the significance of the past year or two on media and leftist influence. The Left’s weapon of influence is guilt, shame, and defamation. That weapon depends on credibility for their social justice issues. Yet the credibility has collapsed over the past couple of years: To whit:
1. Blatant tolerance of criminal behavior;
2. The blatant betrayal of their social justice principles. The prime example here is support for Hamas and its crimes; The feminists and blacks demonstrating for equal rights in the morning were followed by demonstrations for the abuse of women and children and death to the Jews in the afternoon. Kool-Aid Liberals and their House Organ media found that praiseworthy, but most people did not.
3. The intolerance that led to the justification of killing or ruining the lives of those who disagree, culminating in the assassination attempt on Trump, was a bridge too far for most people;
4. The impact of open borders on the daily lives of Americans.
5. The loss of any information content in the media. The number of possible outcomes of a test defines information content. If the media output is predictable, there is no new information in the coverage and no reason to read it.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Bullseye on all 5 accounts!!
In the SF Bay Area, where I sometimes knew the facts of the story, there were often newspaper articles that were completely wrong, the facts wrong, the guilty parties wrong, the objects of the participants wrong, the history wrong, everything.
I got banned for life from the SF Chron for pleasantly and innocuously commenting about navigation of oil tankers near a small island visible from my window, where one nearly ran aground, that I had been watching all my life, not to mention sailing on the bay, etc. Noone else commenting, including the story author, had a clue, so I naively answered a question one of the other commenters had asked. Noone at the Chron would respond to me after that, despite being lifetime subscribers 🙂
It’s simple; all the mainstream media had to do was be honest. I noticed back in 2004 or 2005 that newspapers were biased and I quit buying them. That goes for Newsweek and Time magazine too.; I used to like both of them. T.V. Media is the worst. It’s all attempted indoctrination. The sheeple still follow The Pied Piper, the author of LIES.
I don’t have any pity if the mainstream media kills themselves.