The ‘News’ Media as We Knew It Is Finished

Sunday, January 15, 2017
By Paul Martin

By Barry Casselman
AmericanThinker.com
January 15, 2017

I don’t want to shock anyone, even those who already know there is something quite awry in the contemporary news media, but I have come to realize that it is not merely a temporary condition that will soon pass away, and that the problem cannot be simply repaired.

The news media, as we have known it in the three quarters of a century since World War II, is disappearing much faster than we realize. It might soon be extinct.

I am being very specific in speaking about the “news” media. Communications, in some older and innovative forms, will continue, but what we have understood to be “the news” will come to us in other ways, perhaps primarily as data and notifications. Advertising, promotions, storytelling,editorial writing, gossip, etc., will still find their way to the citizenry in a variety of formats, many of which we know today and some of which are being now invented.

I am talking only about “hard” news – that is, the communication of events, facts and other relatively objectifiable information.

The U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 was not a sudden news reporting phenomenon of excessive bias, but it was the apotheosis of the breakdown of journalistic fairness and credibility that had been gaining acceleration in recent years. It was inevitable that the ideological polarity so evident today was a long time coming – not only in journalism, but in virtually every aspect of U.S. political life.

During the late campaign, in order to explain the specific reasons for the voter response to the confrontation between the two major political parties and their nominees, I put forward a number of concepts, including one that set out the existence of two American English languages that employed identical vocabularies but produced different meanings for two large groups. Candidate Donald Trump, in spite of his background, did not publicly speak the establishment (and elite) version of American English, the one spoken by most educated and professionals. He spoke directly to less urban, working-class voters with fewer educational experiences. The establishment print and broadcast media spoke and understood only the former and, being provoked by Trump’s speaking the latter, launched a pre-emptive media coup d’état in order to sabotage his campaign against Hillary Clinton. Ironically, in the run-up to Trump securing the nomination, the same establishment media actually helped enable Trump to win – not because they knew what he was doing (and how he was adroitly using them), but because they knew he was a box office attraction and boosted ratings.

The Rest…HERE

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