Suicide or Murder? Examining the Slow Death of the Mainstream Media

Little by Little They Lose Influence and Die. The Question is Why?

A few days ago, the Harris campaign announced a $370 million media buy. Interestingly, the largest portion of it, about $200 million, is going to be going to digital media, a kind of direct-to-smartphone campaign the scale of which we have never seen before. The smaller portion was going to traditional TV buys.

It signals, I think, a watershed not just in the history of American politics but in the on-going evolution of our society. Not only do political strategists recognize that most Americans get their news (and prefer to get their news) from digital sources, they realize that it is no longer even close. Nearly 9 out of 10 Americans say they often or sometimes get news from a smartphone or computer and, according to a Pew study, 56 percent say they do so often. Slightly under a third say they often get their news from television. Under 10 percent say they regularly get their news from print publications.

What do they prefer? About six in ten say digital devices. Fewer than half that prefer TV. And print? Print is preferred by only 1 in 20 Americans.

How the mighty have fallen. You might lament the downfall of these legacy media. But that would be wrong for several reasons. First, they’re there for you if you want them. You just don’t want them. Second, new media are better in almost every respect. They’re more convenient, more timely, and easier to consume in whatever format you prefer (video, text, long form, short form). Finally, let’s not let the legacy media off the hook for their own disastrous hard landing.

The mainstream media are the ones, after all, who both-sidesed the 2016 election and Trump’s time in public life to such a degree that they normalized a man who was a giant human cancer cell eating away at all that was good in our system of government.

(And that’s to say nothing of boring formats, a relentless focus on politics as sport (Horse race? Cage match? Horse race in a cage mach? Some combo of those things.)

What is more they have not only apparently learned zero lessons from their past mistakes in some cases they are getting worse. “Doug J. Balloon,” the nom de guerre of the math professor from upstate New York known to Twitter fans (that used to be a thing) as the brains behind the New York Times Pitchbot account has in recent months struggled to come up with parody headlines making fun of the Times penchant for normalizing the abnormal and both-sidesing the one-sided. The Times, once the “Grey Lady” of American journalism, still the paper of record (although that’s largely by default because as noted above newspapers are not really a thing anymore either), has become ridiculous. While it is sometimes still the home of good journalism, between the ethically corrupt access journalism of some of its celebrity ink stained wretches and the truly brain-dead headline choices of its editors, the paper’s reputation has been deservedly battered and fried like a Popeye’s chicken breast.