Mainstream Media is in its Death Throes

The so-called mainstream media, once defined as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the three major network TV stations, no longer have a monopoly on the opinion making process in American life.

Why belabor the obvious? We all know why. Eyeballs are migrating to the Internet, that vast endless, timeless cloud of information that assaults us 24/7 from every corner of the globe. When eyeballs migrate, the money as defined by the advertisers migrates with them. The less eyeballs, the less revenue, the less revenue, the less investment by the media.

When the revenue decline reaches the tipping point, money dries up, shrinkage occurs until there is nothing left to shrink and the media entity dies or morphs into something else. That is what is happening now. The old media is dying. The new media is building on the corpse of the old media and it is too early to tell if the business paradigm for the new media will ever prosper. It might even die faster than the old media.

Television and radio has split its audience into tiny pieces. There are now hundreds of television channels and thousands of radio channels, and gazillion channels on the Internet. The Tower of Babel now extends into infinity.

Mainstream journalists, many of them now in save-the-world mode (ever since Watergate made celebrities out of investigative journalists) truly believe that we are losing our ability to prod the government into transparency, to uncover corruption and generally serve the public good. Thus, they contend, that the resources to expose the sins of government are drying up, splintering, becoming less effective. They have a point.

The new media now on the Internet e.g., the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Politico and on and on believe that they will fill the gap and become, if not what was once known as the mainstream media, the go-to media. Maybe. Politico is now morphing back into print with a local angle news sheet. They had better have deep pockets.

Those of us who grew up with the traditional mainstream media have, to say the least, mixed feelings about its demise. With fewer outlets we were more like a family, more connected. We knew what each outlet stood for. The public conversation was limited by comparison with today, but comforting since those of us who cared could embrace the information flow. We thought we were getting all sides of all arguments, that our press and speech freedoms were secure. We probably were. Sooner or later, corrupt politicians were exposed by the press and many removed or incarcerated. It amazes me that one crop of crooks are quickly replaced by another crop.

In New York when I was growing up there were eleven dailies. Now, there are three and who knows how long they will survive?

Were we unduly influenced by those who controlled the media? I’m not sure, since the line between the business side of the press and the news side seemed like a pretty wide chasm. Economic desperation may be diluting that ethic. Ideological lines have blurred and the media appears to manipulate its content and layout to favor the particular bent of its sixties influenced editors and reporters. Their nostalgic output seems a lot less subtle than it used to be.

As an ex-newspaperman, I know that editorial placement, headline writing, and the way stories are constructed by length and detail, can make spin often hard to spot. As a former practitioner both as editor and reporter, I can spot a bent story at a hundred paces. On the Net, the same process holds, but usually we know the ideological zone upfront.

In today’s media environment a few big public companies actually control a vast array of competing media. When one conglomerate owns a big basket of unruly entities, it is difficult to get them all to dance to the same tune. Besides, it doesn’t really matter to the operators. Their principal objective is revenue and profit. By and large, they are not selling ideology. They are selling eyeballs and ears. The more they deliver, the more they can charge advertisers. That’s business, and the business of business is business. If it sounds crass, it is.

So far, the migration of the mainstream traditional media to the Net has been a rocky road. It is also a rocky road for the so-called new media e.g. Politico, Huffington, and many others. I’m sure they’re credible but I’m not certain that they have as much influence as they claim. They, like many of their on-line competitors are still in start-up mode and have not yet reached a sustained profit, without which they will eventually fold or become something else.

An exception is the Wall Street Journal, which has paid subscribers on the Net, a lucky early choice with its mostly upscale target base. But most of the on-line media is free and dependent on advertising. I’m still uncertain, despite the hype, whether the advertising is paying off. In other words, everything on the Net that is defined as media e.g. the news business, and other forms of information peddling is still up for grabs.

Of one thing I am absolutely certain. Everything, not only media, is changing. And I do mean everything; delivery systems, marketing, content, medicine, the whole ball of wax. No sooner than we think we have it in our grasp then it moves somewhere else with the speed of light, perhaps faster. Everything that is, perhaps even what is commonly known as human nature.

The center is not holding because there is no center. Marshall McLuhan was spot on. The media have become the message. Google has proved the point. It and its copiers are swiftly becoming the media.

I suppose the trick will be how to keep up. Even this attempt at analysis will be obsolete the moment it is written. Remember that play: Stop the World- I Want To Get Off.

Forget it. It’s spinning too fast. It’s making me dizzy.

How about you?

Next Blog: The Dying of the Celebrity Culture

We Must Save The Old Bitch

There is nothing sadder than watching something beloved and essential to one’s comfort level and well being decline. No, I’m not talking about the human aging process with its relentless surge of decrepitude and eventual oblivion. I’m talking about something that has always been there in my life for decades, stalwart, steady, exciting, frequently aggravating, but the most enduring stimulant to starting one’s day, more potent than its accompanying coffee eye-opener.

I am talking about The New York Times, once the immortal grey lady, now slowly morphing into a stripped down version of a retrograde teenager showing off in a desperate attempt to be noticed or, in this case, stay noticed.

Nevertheless my love affair with the old grey lady continues since I can still see vestiges of her classic beauty that keeps me interested, perhaps more out of nostalgia and habit than necessity and utility. The fact is that if the New York Times did not arrive at my front door in the morning, I would be bereft. A huge gap would open in my life that could never be filled with whatever the vast cloud of the internet could provide.

Strangely, the Times has morphed into a bizarre version of ideological schizophrenia. It has become the impassioned champion of its non-readers whose eyeballs would hardly matter to those advertisers who seek to sell goods and services to its ever declining readership. On the other hand, it does satisfy the ideological demands of many of its readers, whose “save the world” mentality protects them from the guilt of plenty and extreme comfort that punctuate their lives.

One would think that such breast beating would actually increase the readership of its paper. Then again, perhaps this ideological pose is the least important reason why people read the Times. It has, far and away, the best arts coverage of any mass media paper, probably in the world. Its feature stories, always well written, imaginative and often surprising in content, offer a marvelous potpourri for curiosity hounds like yours truly. I am often astonished by the imagination of its editors in ferreting out wonderful sidebars to international, national and city life that have often been neglected elsewhere. And, their sports coverage is darned good.

There is enough non-ideological material to make up for the obvious bias. Some star op-ed columnists are almost universally nasty. For example, Frank Rich, a pleasant fellow in person, seems to be running a close race with Maureen Dowd as to who will win the nasty prize. Frank, who single-handedly nearly ruined the live theater business when he was the drama critic for the Times, maintains a sniggling self-righteous nose-in- the-air superiority that makes one shudder with inferiority anxiety.

As for Maureen Dowd, her column must attract a large readership of psychiatrists to observe her love hate relationship with her own gender. I read them both avidly, proving the theory that nastiness has great entertainment value for people of my ilk.

Then there are the self-righteous op-ed lecturers on the subject of the way the world should be run, meaning Tom Friedman, Nicholas D. Kristof, David Brooks and Paul Krugman whose economic views offer even more fodder for the Times’ non-readers. Let’s throw in Bob Herbert for racial sensitivity. No racial slight, real or imagined, goes unwritten.

Their “how-to’s” have spawned for these writers an entire ancillary personal profit industry with ever burgeoning contracts for book writing, speaking tours and talking head babbling on the boob tube. More power to them. Talking to non-readers puts them in an income category that makes them wealthy enough to buy the goods advertised in their flagship distributor.

Kristof, who sheds tears for third world atrocities is quite eloquent on the depressing treatment of females in many of these abominable countries. One wonders why his exposes don’t send ardent feminists into violent protest mode along with the rest of us allegedly caring humans. Or does it indicate that Times readers are mostly armchair activists who prefer to bleed privately and leaving the dirty work to its non-readers.

As for the editorial pages, here is classic umbrage taking to satisfy the most hardcore “progressive.” The page screams with “down with the rich” and “republicans are neanderthal” indignation, offering a perfect magic bullet right into the heart of its readership which is mostly “upper middle class and comfortable to very rich” and, without a doubt “democratic or faux independent.” I suspect the target audience is themselves, the privileged guys and gals who run the editorial end of the business.

I keep wondering how many readers of the Times live in subsidized housing or how big a circulation the Times has in the borough of Queens, statistically the most multi-culturally geographical designation in New York City and probably the world. As the Bible for political correctness, the Times has a world-wide franchise on this transforming vocabulary in which evil doings are deliberately scrubbed clean of vituperation. Indeed, it won’t be long before the Times will describe terrorists as “wayward youths.”

I’m sure the right of center crowd, if any remain, are left with heartburn and rising blood pressure if they read the Times editorials, undoubtedly with masochistic fervor.

As for the Jewish readership, which is probably a healthy statistic, the paper’s anti-Israel stance may have little to do with a decline in circulation, since the paper acts as a bellwether of bias and a record of Israel baiting, both obvious and subtle, that offers a proper standard for the many Jewish organizations to attack. How could they keep score if they didn’t read every word of this outrageously anti-Israel biased coverage?

On the other hand, the United Nations personnel must revel in such coverage and surely provide a heavy statistical bump to its circulation figures.

Whoever selects the Letters to the Editor also takes its marching orders from the same folks who put together the editorials and approve the stunningly subliminal and brilliantly biased headlines embedded in the news coverage. And their so-called ombudsman tries desperately to prove that he is not a toady to those who write his paycheck.

I’d give the live theater and movie critics so-so reviews. The theater guys try hard to impress us with their broad range of knowledge and often forget to review what is on the stage, so caught up are they with their own intellectual narcissism. But hey, at least they cover the whole turf. The movie reviewers are less snobby and, in my experience, more on the money. But then, the job has to be very dreary these days with most popular movies mimicking big screen video games.

I hope I’ve left out no area or target of insult. Nasty can be fun. Bottom line is I love the old bitch and despite all my huffing and puffing I could not imagine not having her greet me in the morning. In fact, I find myself rising at least an hour earlier to cadge the paper before my wife gets the front section. Indeed, this is the only serial disagreement in our otherwise tranquil married life.

And I pity poor “Punch” Sulzberger, the heir to the Sulzberger-Adler family alliance that built the Times into what was once the most powerful and influential newspaper in the world. I sincerely hope he doesn’t fall into that shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves cliché that signifies the beginning and end of good fortune. That rumble you hear is those venerable newspaper builders rolling over in their graves as their golden boy heir fights to take the lady off life support.

I, for one, will stand by the paper and defend it to my very last breath.

And no, in the interest of fair revelation, I am not a descendant of those Adlers. I wish I were.