The American Media Self-Deconstructs

We Americans pride ourselves on our free press. And yet, our press increasingly seems to be the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. It seems to believe that it is not doing its job if it is not harassing and bullying Donald Trump. It makes up stories, compliments itself for making up stories, wins awards for making up stories and, when it is caught in the lies, declares that it is purveying a higher truth.

With a couple of conspicuous exceptions the press has long long since discarded with the requirement to present facts objectively. Anything that does not fit its ideological framework is denounced as hate speech and is condemned. After the mob at the New York Times chased Bari Weiss from the paper, for being Jewish, 280 staffers from the news division at the Wall Street Journal wrote a letter complaining that the editorial side of the paper was publishing information they found offensive. One is confident that the Journal will not take the bait, but, as a symptom of what the millennial woke generation, a generation that has suffered nonstop indoctrination in its school years, will be bringing to the table-- I defy you to feel optimistic. People who do not know enough to debate issues will do their best to make sure that only one point of view is presented.

As for the profitability of newspapers, it has long since vanished. Daniel Greenfield analyzes the situation (via Maggie’s Farm):

McClatchy had bought Knight Ridder for $4.4 billion to create the second largest news company. After going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, McClatchy was won in an auction by a hedge fund, which also owns the National Enquirer, in a secret bidding which started with $30 million cash and $270 million in debt.

None of this says anything good about the future of its D.C. bureau, or the Miami Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star, and other hollowed out husks of major urban papers carrying huge loads of pension debt and even bigger loads of radical left-wing politics.

Earlier this year, Warren Buffett had dumped 30 newspapers that he had bought for $344 million for $140 million. The Newseum, a $450 million media museum, backed by Gannett, was sold off last year.

Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain in the country, lost $80 million in the first quarter of the year even after a merger in which it slashed jobs at some of the hundreds of newspapers which it controls.

The bottom line is not looking very good.

The jobs situation is no better:

Over 20,000 media jobs have been wiped out in the previous two years and it’s just getting started.

Advertisers are fleeing, as are subscribers:

There’s too much content chasing too few advertisers and subscribers. The internet took away the death grip that local papers had on certain kinds of advertising and made other kinds irrelevant. And people have a lot more options for breakfast reading material than just subscribing to the local rag.

As though the economics were not bad enough, the media has been radicalized:

The media radicalized even as it became more economically vulnerable, alienating print subscribers who tend to be older and more conservative. Papers have been chasing digital subscribers, who are more likely to be younger and leftist, but that’s only a viable strategy for a handful of national papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, which embraced a radical agenda and a vow to bring down Trump.

You have to wonder how these papers will maintain their subscription bases after Trump. Of course the Post is a pet project of the world’s richest man, so it will not soon be going out of business. As for more local papers, the story is different.

The Times and the Post can drive conversation, dominate the news cycle with an anti-Trump conspiracy theory, or turn historical revisionism like the 1619 Project into a curriculum, a TV show, and a movie. But that’s not a realistic option for the Sacramento Bee or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Advertisers will flock to the Times and the Post because they have affluent readers and drive the conversation. But local papers will go on bleeding older and more conservative readers while the hedge funds that own them slash jobs, eliminate entire papers, and eventually give up on the whole media venture as a bad idea.

Online media sources are not doing much better:

And it’s not just the dead tree media that’s in trouble. Digital darlings like the Huffington Post, Vice and Vox have been cutting jobs because clickbait doesn’t win over subscribers who will pay for content. Network television and cable news are on their last legs as cable subscribers cut the cord and content providers set up their own Netflix rivals. What happens to NBC News or CNN in a marketplace defined by Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, CBS All Access, and whatever other platforms will pop up?

So, the media is being transformed into a socialist enterprise, a political action movement that is pushing an agenda.

What we think of as the media, a series of private companies reporting the news to customers willing to pay for their services, is evolving into a political movement that views its platforms as a public service.

Surely, the new agenda rejects free markets. Despairing of competing in the marketplace it aspires to become either a government function or the property of tech tycoons. These latter, as I have often noted, are buying protection. They will let their media do whatever it pleases as long as it leaves them alone:

The transformation of the media from for-profits to non-profits sheds any commitment to the marketplace, to a community of readers who pay for its services, and instead puts it at the service of dot com tycoons who want to invest in left-wing causes. The experience of reading or watching the media’s content also changes from information to indoctrination. As is the case with so many of the dot com giants which finance the media and on whose platforms the media depends, the reader and the viewer are no longer consumers, they are the product that is being sold to the media’s political backers.

From information to indoctrination-- it is impossible to dispute the point. The alternative is a government owned and government run media. This will appeal especially to those who are allergic to the free market.

The end result is State News, a product that closely resembles the government news networks in China or Russia, but which is still distributed across a variety of organizations and which is controlled by social media narratives coordinated across social networks rather than by a central government agency.

And you were worrying about Communist Party control of the Chinese media.