Media Flame Out

Had mainstream outlets leaned toward the center in 2020, would they have a better chance of survival today? A somewhat subjective survey

Last Tuesday night in New York City, I attended the first on-stage performance of Mark Halperin's The Morning Meeting, a weekday news show that airs live on YouTube and on Halperin’s new 2Way platform, on which I’ve several times appeared as a talking head. The meetings, which happen most weekdays at 9am and 6pm, are attended via Zoom by hundreds of people, any of whom has the opportunity to question, and at length, the hosts of the day.

Unlike the news climate we’ve been burdened with since at least 2015, the 2Way audience does not slant any particular way. Pre-election, Halperin often asked Zoomers to ID where they were from and how they voted, and the results were usually evenly divided between Rs and Ds, with a smattering of Bernie bros and maybe a Stein fan and more than a few “I’m not voting for either presidential candidate,” including yours truly. With the exception of once seeing cohost Sean Spicer object to Halperin call RFK Jr. “a kook,” participants do not show an appetite to denigrate others; are not, as I wrote in an article that will run tomorrow ran today, “opportunistically looking to chew the other guy's face off.”

The chasm into which cable news immediately fell following the election started forming, I am quite sure, when media decided that the best way to stay successful was to pit citizens against one another. At the outset, this happened at least semi-organically. Trump was a bizarre choice for Republicans, the presidency was thought to be Hillary’s destiny, it didn’t take much to induce partisan agitation, to get people overly receptive to believing the worst and keep them anxious about the state of play, which, coincidentally, was pretty good for the bottom line.

Whereas cable had once covered the news, it now became arbiters of the news, then its curators. Any tidbit that could be shoveled in the overheated furnace and blasted into our faces would do. It did not matter if the stories were strictly true or true at all; it mattered that people became addicts to whatever flavor of news was being fed to them, that they could be made into cable’s very own cash cows, reliably pooping out dollars.

Until they weren’t.

Not to be undone, primetime viewership at CNN fell 43%. Last week, Comcast announced it was spinning off its cable networks, including MSNBC.

For a solid look at how traditional media has hastened its own demise, I recommend the discussion between The Fifth Column and recent guest Ben Smith, cofounder of Semafor and previously the New York Times and Buzzfeed.

#480 - The Media Mess / Gaetz Pulls Out (w/ Ben Smith)

Do I feel badly that places like CNN and MSNBC have lost their hegemony, such as it was? I don’t. While I am not going to celebrate people losing their livelihoods - I’m not that much of a monster - I cannot ethically offer quarter to people who botched one of the biggest stories of the past decade - the violence in the U.S. in 2020 - in order to stoke an “us versus them” narrative that kept ratings high.

I will never understand how the above chyron could be expected to do anything but let viewers’ know their intelligence was not respected. I don’t think this was benightedness on the network’s part so much as entitlement. Why give the cows quality content when they’ll poop into your hands no matter what you feed them?

Until they won’t. Until they tire of overheated rhetoric, or being told to hate half the country, or feel no more than a sort of sad embarrassment watching yesterday’s kingpins pivot in order to try to re-earn viewers’ trust and/or save their own skin.

I find that video painful to watch, while also not having much sympathy. You cannot keep telling viewers partial truths that coincidentally make you rich and famous and expect they will stay with you when those truths fall apart. It was a different MSNBC personality who argued with me on Twitter after I pointed out that the protests I was covering in Portland, including in the video I shot below, were not peaceful. Not only was it wrong, the personality said, for me to characterize the protests as violent, it was, in a climate so politically charged, an irresponsible thing for a journalist to do.

Well, I did my best, to show viewers and readers a middle-class, left-of-center city going completely off the rails, a situation encouraged by much of cable media, which steadfastly refused to show the whole picture; who felt it more in their viewers’ and certainly their own interests to purvey partial truths.

I’m still doing my job. Are they?