The American News Media Meltdown

Call me a closet curmudgeon. I’m a guy who grew up reading, listening to, and later watching the news religiously. Now I’m the old poop in a recliner cackling like archvillain Snidely Whiplash over our American news media meltdown. It’s been a long time coming but the reality is that our American journalistic institutions are imploding and suffering from a variety of self-inflicted wounds.

Admittedly I’m of two minds regarding this situation. As a guy who writes and speaks often for public consumption, I’m uncomfortable with a single-minded, one-sided—often blatant and obviously biased—presentation of factual events thinly disguised as news. On another hand, I still believe there is a vital and increasing need for an objective press employed as our eyes and ears regarding events we can’t personally observe. I firmly believe citizens of any and all nations should have a free press that serves as our watchdog, reporting and even investigating stories behind the headlines.

For decades past, that’s what we got in our newspapers, radio reportage, and TV coverage of world and domestic affairs. Time, coupled with social media’s barnstorming entry into popularity and availability, changed all that, initially for the better and increasingly for the worse. Our most reliable news media, from local daily newspapers to the big radio and TV networks, formed a circular firing squad and proceeded to blow their credibility full of gaping holes.

What generations of Americans thought of as news became partisan claptrap. We watched our watchdog roll over and morph into a fluffy little lap dog. Presiding over it all is a glitzy parade of slicksters hired for their TV image or mellifluous vocal stylings rather than any journalistic credentials. The Brits have it right in calling their TV news people “presenters” rather than anchormen or women. We need to toss the term anchor overboard as there’s nothing remotely journalistic about some shallow hack in pancake makeup reading from a teleprompter or parroting what’s coming in over an earbud. That’s showbiz, not journalism.

Never mind newspapers. Economics has driven most of them out of business or into abbreviated internet versions. Print journalism, a once reliable and stately flagship of the profession, has been torpedoed by the internet. The staid old Grey Lady NY Times, Washington Post and LA Times have listed so far to port that they are threatening to capsize. And not even a thought for useful stuff like birdcage liners or fish wrappers. That’s gone. What passes for news reporting today is what we hear, see or read on the internet. And much of that is in the form of unsubstantiated reports that are too often simply uninformed opinions. Like it or not, what we most often get in search of facts is beltway blather or resounding echoes from an always chatty blogosphere.

A sad result of all this is that a big chunk of Americans ignores news completely or gets it in sketchy snippets from TikTok, X, or YouTube. There’s an argument to made here that the people have become the media on platforms like X and the credentialed “journalist” filter is both unnecessary and too often untrustworthy. I’ll grudgingly concede. And keep digging through the dreck and dross for factual information.

I’ve got time and inclination to do that. Most people don’t. They shortcut it all and form opinions on important stuff with what they hear in the chamber that most closely echoes their personal or political stance. The lines are so blurred now as to be virtually unrecognizable. It’s a pitiful result of confusing news or vetted, fact-based stuff with commentary which is someone’s personal interpretation of fact-based stuff. It’s not news. It’s opinion. And as everyone should know opinions are like certain orifices at the end of the human alimentary canal. Everybody’s got one.

As usual, we can blame economics for much of this media meltdown. At the end of the government-regulated Fairness Doctrine in 1987 news reporting, objectivity and balanced coverage swirled down the crapper and a raging battle for listeners and viewers ensued. In order to throw more money into the fight, many independent news organizations consolidated with partisan outlets. It was touch and go for a while, until financial backers realized flashy graphics and loud opinion pieces were more profitable. News needed to be exciting and entertaining. That kind of stuff attracted eardrums and eyeballs much more than staid and stodgy straight news reporting. News got confused with entertainment and nothing counted as much as big ratings and steady profit. Exit the journalists, enter the show ponies. Journalist/Commentator: po-ta-toe/po-tah-to. Who cares as long as it pumps up the ratings.

As consumers, we allowed this to happen. We were tickled and titillated by the new way of covering what we thought was news. We weren’t out there demanding a return to objectivity and balanced reporting from all sides of important issues. We were shrugging it all off or searching for alternate media that parroted what we believed in the first place. We just let it build to an implosion point which I believe is where we are today.

As Bob Dylan reminded us in song decades ago during another cultural revolution, “the times they are a-changin’.” And the commercial news media had better start swimming or they’ll sink like a stone. You go ahead and contemplate all this. I’ll be over here chuckling and chortling over the flurry of pink-slips flying around the major news networks.

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