![]() ![]() Fox News has also seen ratings plunge in the past year. NBC’s scrappy cable cousin MSNBC has experienced year-over-year declines in viewership, and it ranks last among its cable-news peers. Meanwhile, the former upstarts of the media world-cable news networks-are also feeling the impact of the seismic shifts wrought by social media. If a Chuck Todd falls in the media forest, does anyone hear him? The legacy broadcast networks-NBC, CBS, ABC-have struggled with these transformations for decades, so much so that when traditional news shows such as Meet the Press perennially switch out their hosts or refresh their formats, it is no longer a major story. It also spelled the end of Rather, who, along with his producer, was fired from CBS News. ![]() Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard, based on falsified documents that Rather had failed to verify, it heralded a new world of citizen-sponsored fact-checking of institutions. When a Power Line commenter successfully exposed the fact that CBS News icon Dan Rather had aired a story on 60 Minutes just before the 2004 election that lied about President George W. ![]() Much of this was a welcome democratization of an industry that had grown insular, sanctimonious, and unaccountable in its behavior. This unsettled media landscape is part of a much larger 40-year story about the collapse of gatekeepers, with new media such as cable news, the Internet, and now social platforms each playing a part in upending both the old order and each iteration of the new order that preceded it. This has resulted in declining audience loyalty to individual news-gathering institutions and greater engagement with the social-media platforms that serve up information like a hyperactive Associated Press-a 21st-century wire service with memes. The overall effect for consumers is that the news is digital and atmospheric rather than coming from a particular voice. This constant stream of information renders one media outlet nearly indistinguishable from another in consumers’ minds except perhaps for the particular media’s partisan or tribal branding. adults, “more than half of those users get news on the site regularly.” Although it is used only by 23 percent of U.S. A smaller percentage gets its information from YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, though Twitter promotes a particularly engaged culture of news consumption. adults report getting their news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” mostly from Facebook. Pew Research Center found that nearly half of U.S. “Smart brevity” is the mantra of the online news site Axios, which issues most of its news in easily digestible bullet points that are perfect for sharing in Tweet form. Instead, people get their news online in microdoses throughout the day, sometimes leavened by a quick visit to a linked story to read the original reporting but more often gleaning as much as they want from a headline or a tweet or a short post. They are no longer willing to participate in the appointment-style television viewing of the old days of nightly news, and those who do often have their flat screen on in the background while they scroll their feeds on their phones or laptop computers. Consumers of news in the 21st century, habituated to a steady stream of constantly updated information on social media, have honed ever-shortening attention spans. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s familiar trope, “the medium is the message,” explains one part of this. When we look back on the media landscape many decades hence, this might serve as the moment when all media became social media. It’s as if Father Coughlin and QAnon had a baby who grew up to be an influencer with a popular YouTube channel. During a 10-minute monologue in which he promised to inform viewers about “what they’re not telling you,” he managed to promote questionable conspiracy theories, invoke hateful anti-Semitic stereotypes about the leader of Ukraine, and serve up homophobic insinuations about elected officials. After praising the fact that there are “no gatekeepers” on the platform, Carlson proceeded to demonstrate precisely why gatekeepers are often needed in broadcast news. In June, former Fox News Channel star Tucker Carlson debuted his new show on Twitter. ![]()
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