The old mainstream media is dying, and has been for years.
This has only become more apparent in the weeks since Donald Trump was re-(s)elected. News that CNN is firing half their workforce, that MSNBC’s ratings continue to slump and is probably being sold, or that The Guardian is leaving X and in financial trouble are greeted with celebratory memes.
Newspaper readership has been dropping for decades, and television news channels struggle to drum up the audience of a moderately popular YouTube channel featuring cute cat videos set to quirky music.
And you know what? Great. That’s all good stuff.
CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian – all of them – they deserve to go under. Digital communication has allowed people to undermine and overthrow decades-old propaganda outlets.
But does that mean it’s over? Is Elon Musk actually correct when he reassuringly declares on X that “YOU are the media now”.
Well the answer to that depends on whether or not you think the same forces that spent untold resources constructing this system of information control are just going to give up and go home when it starts to fail.
I mean – does anyone seriously think they would?
You don’t think it ‘s rather more likely they’ll just regroup, re-calculate, and go again?
Remember – newspapers and TV channels are functionaries of the establishment, not the establishment itself.
For several centuries they have been crucial to the selling of ideas and agendas, but they are a voice not a brain. They’re just a tool of control. And tools can easily be swapped out.
One way or another, the internet has replaced television as the media now, just as television replaced radio and radio replaced print.
This is the Darwinian selection process that flows with the development of technology. And while each step of that path has in some ways led to the democratization of the media landscape, each step also saw those in power adjust their methods to the freer flow of information.
The “free internet” is just as vulnerable to money and influence of the “elite” as the “free press” was before it, only the tactics change.
In short, the mainstream media isn’t so much dying as evolving.
Today, if you want to a sell a story to the whole world you don’t need blaring red “Breaking News” banners on the ten o-clock news – you can fund an “independent podcaster” to interview a “whistleblower” on a set decorated to look impromptu and stripped down.
You pay YouTube to boost the video, or make a few short clips go viral.
When it’s popular enough, other youtubers and podcasters will start repeating it or posting “reaction videos”. It doesn’t even matter if they agree or disagree, either way you’ve set the parameters of the discussion.
Instead of full pages ads in the New York Times, NGOs, think-tanks and corporations can spend the same amount of money on a few thousand social media influencers.
Hellbound and Down 