Society evolves and one of the big pushers of evolution is technology.
The moment Americans began hearing the dulcet tones of the old dial-up modem and hearing “You’ve Got Mail,” the mainstream media’s days were numbered. They would try to roll with the punches, and perhaps in a more honorable and truthful world, they would have made it, but the media isn’t honorable and they sure as hell aren’t truthful.
The rise of the internet would inevitably mean the rise of the citizen journalist. With so many people easily communicating words, pictures, audio, and video to one another, news and opinion were no longer something that the mainstream media had a monopoly on. Then, the perfect storm of iPhones and social media sent this into overdrive.
Various attempts would be made to discredit the rise of the citizen journalist, but the media kept shooting its own foot. Media malfeasance, biased reporting, and a penchant for lying in the light of day made more and more people shrug off the mainstream media in favor of smaller organizations and internet personalities.
A number of events really sent people to the conclusion that it was time to abandon the media. CNN stood in front of a burning town and declared that the Black Lives Matter riots that had set that town ablaze were “fiery but mostly peaceful.” One of the key features of Donald Trump’s time in the White House was incessant attempts at making him seem like an incompetent, yet simultaneously genius villain that was going to kill us all and bring us into a global war that would end civilization as we knew it. Despite repeatedly being proven wrong, they’re still trying to do it to this day.
And then there was the pandemic. The media’s addiction to horror porn was insatiable. Every other story was fear, death, and “Republicans bad.”
Every single one of these stories and more proved to be false, over-dramatic, and egregiously biased. As it become more and more obvious, the media figures still tried to maintain a mask of objectivity like a woman denying she’s cheating on her husband when he walks in on her laying naked next to an equally naked man.
So people are leaving. Trust in the media is incredibly low and viewership for news organizations is down and falling all the time. As my colleague Joe Cunningham reported earlier, three-quarters of the population finds the media guilty of political polarization.
As Cunningham points out, even as this information was released, the media pointed the finger at everyone but themselves for this national attitude. The thing is, they have only themselves to blame and they know they do. It’s not like the research that the mainstream media in its current form wasn’t there.
For instance, earlier in 2020, a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer (the youngest black man to ever receive tenure at Harvard) wanted to see if the Black Lives Matter claim that police made neighborhoods worse with their presence was actually true. His research bore the opposite result and showed that active policing actually played a huge part in keeping communities stable. Fryer set about finding what actually did cause communities to devolve further into crime, and he came out with the answer.
Fryer found that whenever there were massive spikes in crime, the constant factor was the media. With strong evidence to back his findings, he actually took his findings to these organizations. Their response was to tell Fryer to keep that to himself:
Certain shootings that did not result in national media attention did not cause fatality or felony rates to increase. While additional research is still needed to find the direct cause of the increase in homicides, the real culprit seems to be the media.
And the media, according to Fryer, isn’t wanting to give him the time of day about it. Fryer attempted to show his information to the media but was dismissed out of hand. According to the Harvard professor, the media has an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data,” and what’s more, there was an “insistence” that he shouldn’t publicize the data at all.
At some point, people have to ask what the mainstream media is even for. The answer must be “nothing” because with so many people tuning out of major news organizations and tuning into individuals and smaller organizations, it’s increasingly clear that people aren’t buying whatever they’re selling.
The mainstream media is far from dead and won’t disappear tomorrow. In fact, I’m sure that these corporations will find new and inventive ways of trying to stay relevant. The thing is, as technology develops, these slow-moving corporations will have nothing on the agility and fast pace of the oncoming generations who will be far more creative than they ever will.
The media, as it is, will eventually die…and good riddance to bad rubbish.