In a Substack article titled Suborning Insanity, something Michael Smith wrote caught my eye. He wrote about "a little social experiment" that was something I had once done nearly 50 years ago, actually.
I did a little social experiment of my own last week – I DVR’ed the evening news from NBC, CBS and ABC and watched them end to end. Each one of them followed almost the same script, reporting on the same things, and using the same language and perspectives.
The major networks have been on the same script since at least the late 1970s. But to see it back in those days you had to keep getting up and walking over to the TV to change between the channels. I did that one evening back when the nightly news was still only a half-hour show. At the time, one network newscast was on a half hour earlier than the other two. One evening I happened to watch the news on the early broadcast, then switched over to one of the others. I was watching one of the same stories over again. So I started switching back and forth between the two later newscasts. Yup. All three networks showed the same three major stories, though not in the same order. One of them was about a plane crash. I don't remember the other two, but the networks ran the same three stories and all used the same video footage.
I thought, in a country of nearly 300 million, this is it for important national news stories? Networks and newspapers had the power in those days. They owned the channels of communication. Networks owned the air waves, and newspapers bought ink by the barrel. Typically, the only way the average citizen could be heard was when the local paper would print a letter to the editor.
But newspapers and TV networks aren't the money makers they once were. Wasn't Newsweek magazine, the organization, recently purchased for a dollar? They no longer have exclusive access to channels of mass communication. There are alternatives to broadcast airwaves and high speed printing and distribution. Nowadays the internet provides a low-cost channel for anybody that wants one that can potentially reach the entire world.
Legacy news organizations are losing market share to competition from internet sources of news. They're losing money because they are not really in the news business anymore. They're advocates.
I suppose they always were. We sensed it but didn't know it, at least not such that we could prove it. Along comes the internet, and blogs, and new sets of news sources. Now we do know, and we can prove it, although we thought it was just leftwing bias.
Faced with mounting losses, the news industry did not respond in the way you might expect a normal business to respond. You might think the news industry would turn to providing reliable news, in other words, to reporting the truth. That's what most consumers of news want. Fox News dabbled in it for a while. I think somebody said Fox found a niche market: half of America.
But instead of a renewed loyalty to truth, most of the news industry turned from bias, to advocacy, to propaganda, which a large and growing number of people quickly identify and reject. And rather than try to win back the loyalty of readers and viewers with unwavering dedication to the truth, they've invented the concepts of misinformation and disinformation to persuade people to reject whatever contradicts the approved word. Think of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Fifty-one retired intelligence community professionals signed a letter saying the New York Post's story about it discovery "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." The FBI had known for years that it really was Hunter Biden's computer, but still, the intelligence community prevailed upon Twitter (well before it became X) to limit the reach of the New York Post's story. The legacy media, in almost lockstep, began to cast doubt on the authenticity of the laptop and the accuracy of Post's the story. But then seventeen months later, the New York Times admitted the authenticity of the emails found on the laptop.
The of the news industry has hastened in recent years. Public trust has sunk like a stone. A Poynter article from late last year put it this way:
A Gallup poll released this week found that Americans’ trust in mass media to report “fully, accurately and fairly” is only two points higher than the lowest Gallup has ever recorded.
The results, which are essentially unchanged from last year, show that only 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, while 27% say they have “a fair amount” of trust in mass media.
Twenty-eight percent of U.S. adults surveyed in the poll say they don’t have much confidence in the media, with 38% saying they have none at all. (my emphasis)
Perhaps our legacy media outlets employ more of a B2B business model. Rather than rely on individual news consumers, maybe they are looking to large publicly funded organizations to provide their support. It would seem they tailor their news product accordingly.
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