Posted by Ken Waldron on December 5, 2023, 3:23 am
Wall Street Silver @WallStreetSilv Dec 2
The "mainstream media" is rapidly collapsing. Since 2020 their average unique monthly visitors to the top 50 newspapers websites has declined from 14 million to 8 million.
They have lost almost 40% of their online audience in just 3 years. That probably explains a lot of the attacks on X and Elon. The legacy media is dying and this is an existential fight that they are losing badly.
There's nothing to be too pleased about this, though the MSM by hitching itself to the main stream economics and politics, both driving and following our collapsing societies and planet, this media could well deserve its fate. But the absence of a single neutral outlet for the citizenry is a huge threat to democracy. Yes we can get information from other places, but it's often very slanted in one way or another, siloed would be the word, and that is being reflected in the siloed thinking of our populace, our unwillingness to listen to the others' arguments, and re-inforce our own in the echo chamber of our chosen platforms and outlets.
But do I know the answer? The BBC should for instance be the vehicle in which earnest and truthful discourse takes place. But I was in the UK as you know recently, I'm back in NZ now, and the bias in the news and current affairs programmes, the carefully curated language that cannot explore too far the bounds of reality, all examination through an acceptable lens or within the confines of a pair of well fitting blinker, The failure to examine context, the shallowness of enquiry, the perpetual failure to ask the obvious uncomfortable questions, the unchallenging of obvious fallacious reasoning or rhetorical flourish, it was just so depressing.
The legacy media is dying, whitering, as people focus on what they want to see and read. Expecting people to take an interest in issues they have close to no actual influence over, is fruitless.
Imagine, not a single western leader has come out and unequivocally condemned Israel's campaign of deliberate ethnic cleansing and genocide aimed at destroying the Palestinian people. Not one voice of opposition. And our media, as usual, reflects the views of the powerful, not the people.
Our democracy, such as it is, is dying. How can one argue that one lives in a democracy, when the democracy supports what's happening in Gaza? Democracies aren't supposed to facilitate and be complicit in genocide and the mass killing of civilians, mostly women and children.
On the graph, it simply rose actually then returned to where it was in 2014.
Two data points (covering just the past year or so) doth not a collapse make. No trendline (or trend curve) is fittable to that graph, there are just too few data points and the linear regression would be horizontal.
I was careful to include the graph. As you say it's a return to 2014 levels, so more of a "bleed" than a collapse. this one is similar if more explicable being print... but it's to 1940s levels. In short there's a lot of corporate headline reading not happening anymore.
My anecdotal 'evidence' from talking to teachers at virtuall all levels, is that hardly any of their students read newspapers, or watch the knews anymore. They have other things to do with their precious time. Like chatting on their phones!
The so-called decline in US newspapers, according to the graph, is a meaningless statistic in that it's self evident -- as we all know the majority of the population has moved from print to online news via phone or computer. Does the graph include online usage (I couldn't be arsed to wade through the fine print).
Just walking past the newsstand in my local store tells me the sale of newspapers has fallen off a cliff because once it was stacked high and now it never is. My grandchildren (in their 20s) have never in their lives bought a newspaper, and anecdotally they don't keep up with the news online very much (as DTJ confirms) because they simply aren't interested. I wonder if they only glimpse the corporate news now and then when they might catch the BBC or ITV bulletins. I shall have to grill them over the hols to see what they know of the genocide in Gaza.
- If it's a "self evident" decline its obviously not a "so-called decline"...
"Does the graph include online usage "
U'm no...which is why I added it to compliment the last eight years " online usage" graph above... Which for demographic reasons: your "...majority of the population has moved from print to online news via phone or computer " ...should have seen an increase.