Disgraced MSM Hit with Massive Layoffs in 2018

Full story:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/03/16/nolte-disgraced-mainstream-media-swamped-massive-layoffs/

 

Everyone competing to please half the public, while ignoring, insulting and alienating the other half, isn't really a viable road to success either.

 

This is a two-year old article, but it is still relevant for today:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160815/09353135247/lots-newspapers-discovering-that-paywalls-dont-work.shtml

 

The op uses a reference from Breitbart to make some sort of point. It's ironic then that Breitbart is falling off a cliff as well.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/breitbart.com

 

Here a good link that amalgamates and coordinates daily and weekly news from all across the United States:

http://drudgereport.com/

 

I recently had a friend suggest that I look at a new site called Smart News. It is a mobile app that I have not downloaded yet - don't know anything about it. I'd be interested to hear a review from people if you're familiar with it.

https://www.smartnews.com/en/

 

more news from the media

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/business/media/fox-news-analyst-ralph-peters.html

 

Ralph Peters: I Have to Vote for ‘Despicable,’ ‘Corrupt’ Clinton Over Putin-Loving Trump: http://freebeacon.com/politics/ralph-peters-vote-despicable-corrupt-clinton-trump/

 

Here’s another layoff from the disgraced MSM

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/11/conservative-sinclair-tv-pundi.html

 

Returning this thread back towards the subject of the OP, there are several issues raised by the words above. A couple of them:

1. What is the distinction between "fake news" (a recent buzz-word) and opinion?

I'd say that speculations before the fact about what the impact of Trump's election might be on the media were never news and could only have been opinion. (Nobody can perceive the future and then report back on what they see there. They can just express speculative opinions on how things might unfold.)

Some of the news media's current difficulties are attributable to the confusion between and collapsing together of objective photographic-style reporting of events on one hand, and pulpit-style moral exhortation about what any morally righteous person should conclude about them on the other.

It's the old objective/subjective distinction once again in another guise. Describing events strives to be a function of the events themselves: ('Three people were injured' is true iff three people were indeed injured.) But conclusions about the meaning of events or who is right and who is wrong are functions of the reporters' own beliefs, commitments and agendas. That's a far more subjective matter and these latter sort of judgements seem less obviously true or false than descriptions of the events themselves would be.

So, is attempted opinion-leading (seemingly journalism's new purpose in life) 'fake news'? It's certainly something purporting to be news that isn't. So I'd say that most of what the cable news networks fill their hours with between breaking news events is indeed 'fake news'. Pretty much anything on a newspaper's editorial page is 'fake news'. And many of the decisions about what to place above the fold on page one is fake news too, whenever those headlines aren't being driven by events.

2. What is the effect of Trump's election victory on the media?

Obviously Trump's victory came as a total shock to Democrats who simply assumed that Hillary's victory was a sure thing. Many of them do seem to have suffered psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety and feelings of being scared and lost. So many of them sought kindred souls, congenial opinion and emotional validation. There probably was increase in the number of people tuned into outlets like MSNBC. Many people who had been watching CNN probably switched over to MSNBC because they didn't feel in the mood for any ambiguity. That's probably why CNN has moved towards the "resistance" so decisively, they are following their viewers as well as expressing their own subjective feelings.

On the right, the other half of the country remained loyal to Fox largely because it was all there was. Fox News was pretty good about giving Trump's populism more coverage (at the expense of the Republican establishment figures who had previously received most of the network's time).

So, while Trump's victory pretty clearly did create a lot of new interest in the left-leaning media, the fact remains that the great majority of the media is left-leaning. 50 different networks, national newspapers, magazines, websites and "blogs", along with most social media, all battling each other for Democrats' eyes doesn't make a whole lot of business sense to me. So on the left side, it does appear to be something of a zero-sum game. Outlet A picking up viewers probably means fewer viewers at outlet B. They are all battling for just half the population. (And right now, pure anti-Trump hatred is what sells best.)

Steve F. doesn't like me saying it for some reason, but I still think that there's a huge business opportunity for a media outlet on the right to competes with Fox. That's basically virgin untrodden media territory, except for Breitbart and a few smaller things like that. (There's obviously the august Wall Street Journal, but as its name suggests, it's positioned itself as the voice of establishment big-business Republicanism and it's profoundly out of touch with Middle America and Trumpism.) Other than that, it's thin pickings for conservatives, which suggests abundant business opportunities.