WHAT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DIDN'T SAY
The headline reads, “Outlets hurt by dwindling public interest in news in 2021,” but their analysis is woefully inadequate. It’s what they don’t say that’s important.
- The mainstream news is an echo chamber, almost endlessly recycling the same information 24/7 to fill time allotments.
- The mainstream media is biased, with sympathies extending to the progressive communist democrats and leading to shrill and preachy pronouncements.
- Much of the mainstream content is narrative, biased commentary, or outright demonstrable lies like the various Trump hoaxes they have never apologized for.
- Many reporters rely on re-writes of Tweets and other third-party source material.
- It is far easier to read curated news aggregators than the media itself, allowing one to pick and choose stories of interest from multiple sources rather than from a single source outlet.
- The major news outlets refuse to apologize for flawed, erroneous, or downright deceptive reporting for the last six years.
The mainstream media has lost almost all of its journalistic credibility, and the public does not know who to trust.
NEW YORK (AP) — The presidential election, pandemic and racial reckoning were stories that drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020. To a large degree, 2021 represented the inevitable hangover.
[OCS: Most mainstream outlets refused to carry stories of credible threats to election integrity or egregious violations of our election laws by one party, the Democrats. Likewise, the media promoted a narrative regarding the origin and the actual statistics regarding the pandemic, often using the false metric of “cases” to drive the administrations fear campaign or fight against the “Trump Vaccine.” And few reported that the racial reckoning was mostly driven by queer socialists who were promoting racism and violence.]
Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content.
[OCS: Popularity is the wrong metric for news content – it should be the credibility of the media outlet and the accuracy of its reporting. And, with most of the mainstream media, credibility and accuracy were abysmally low and are getting lower each day.]
Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.
[OCS: Notice the author uses the word entertainment, not education nor enlightenment. Most news is not entertaining. Something well understood by the old media moguls who saw their news divisions as cost centers to be paid for by advertising and the revenue from entertaining programming.]
The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12% at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News;” 14% at NBC’s “Nightly News,” Nielsen said.
The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44% in November compared to November 2020, and down 34% at the Times.
For the most part, smart news executives knew the peaks of 2020 were not sustainable.
“It was entirely predictable,” said news media analyst Ken Doctor.
[OCS: Trump warned of the crash in audience when he left office. Even the pathetic attempts of CNN and MSNBC to keep Trump in the news led to declining results.
Perhaps that was most obvious at the cable news networks. They built a prime-time model almost entirely focused on political combat during the Trump years, which made it difficult for them to pivot to something different, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.
“You become, to some extent, a prisoner of the audience you built,” Rosenstiel said.
[OCS: There was plenty of “other” news available – only the media outlets refused to report it or misreported it the news in accordance with the prevailing administration narrative.]
“What we’re seeing this year is kind of a watershed moment in the pivot from a print business model that is diminishing to a digital model that is beginning to take shape,” said Timothy Franklin, Abernathy’s colleague at Northwestern.
[OCS: And we are seeing over-the-air programming give way to streaming services and personality- or subject-driven videocasts or audio podcasts.]
Local news outlets saw a boost in digital subscriptions as people sought information in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. While interest in pandemic news has waned, Abernathy said she believes the outlets have done well in keeping many of those new subscribers. <Source>
Bottom line…
As long as progressive communist democrat narratives influence or drive the news, they are doomed to perpetual audience loss and shifts.
We are so screwed when we can’t believe our elected officials, bureaucratic spokespeople, and news celebrities and commentators.
-- steve
“Nullius in verba”-- take nobody's word for it!
"Acta non verba" -- actions not words
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”-- George Bernard Shaw
“Progressive, liberal, Socialist, Marxist, Democratic Socialist -- they are all COMMUNISTS.”
“The key to fighting the craziness of the progressives is to hold them responsible for their actions, not their intentions.” – OCS "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” -- George Orwell “Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." (The people gladly believe what they wish to.) ~Julius Caesar “Describing the problem is quite different from knowing the solution. Except in politics." ~ OCS