Has the proliferation of alternate media and conspiracy theories so eroded the public’s trust in the media that the tipping point has been reached?
That’s an interesting question – and, oddly enough, it is someone from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page that is asking this question. Maybe being bought out by Murdoch was a bucket of ice water to the collective faces over there, and they’ve suddenly discovered that predatory capitalism has consequences…
Anyway, the writer blathers on with a rather thin recounting of various media canaries going toes-up, and then gets to this:
But for the media ponderers
there’s a more troubling issue than the restoration of trust. It’s the
possibility that too many people now simply don’t much care about the
major media anymore. Normally the great media combines would overcome
periods of lassitude by forming up focus groups to tell them what to do
next. Hah! They want “Survivor”! Alas, living as we do now in a world
of seemingly infinite choice, it is possible not to care for a seeming
infinity of reasons, which is why the established media are having such
a hard time knowing what to do.Mr. Paxman identified one reason
not to care: “In the last quarter century we’ve gone from three
channels to hundreds. . . . The truth is this: the more television
there is, the less any of it matters.” Once there was a time when TV
announcers used to say, “Stay with us.” Now no one stays. They go
surfing, endlessly seeking a five-minute wave of TV that will take them
just a little higher than the five minutes they just watched.More difficult are the
I-don’t-care revolutionaries, who argue that digitization has reversed
the media world’s authority and power. The old aristocracy of
programmers and editors has been overthrown by average people who now
blog new political priorities, download media and form themselves into
clickable communities. The Snowman wins. Get over it.
You can almost here the writer’s buttocks shifting uncomfortably in his Aeron chair as he ponders a future where his lofty perch is suddenly not quite so lofty anymore.
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