Is Mainstream Media News Dying?
Is the mainstream media news dying out? For decades, the nightly news on the big 3 networks dominated the airwaves. Tens of millions of Americans tuned in each night to find out what was happening in the world. But now cable news has cannibalized a huge chunk of that audience, and the Internet is taking massive amounts of eyeballs away from both of them. So are we now at a point when the way that Americans get their news has fundamentally changed forever?
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Internet has surpassed newspapers as one of the primary ways that Americans get their news.
Perhaps that seems only natural to many of us now, but there was a time before the Internet was widely available that a very high percentage of the population would read a newspaper each day.
But now all of that has fundamentally changed.
According to the Pew survey, only 17 percent of Americans say that they read the print version of a national newspaper and only 50 percent say that they read local newspapers.
But that is only part of the story.
According to the survey newspapers were most likely to be read by people who were over the age of 50 or who don't own cell phones.
So as that generation dies out, newspapers will lose even more popularity.
But it isn't just newspapers that are suffering.
It appears that a day of reckoning has arrived for network news as well.
Both ABC News and CBS News have recently made announcements that indicate that they are experiencing deep financial woes. Not that NBC News is doing well either. NBC News has been struggling financially for quite some time.
But it was still a shock when ABC News announced that it was cutting its news correspondent staff by 50 percent and that it will close allof its "brick and mortar" news bureaus except for the one in Washington D.C.
So why are so many diverse mainstream media outlets hurting so much?
There are a lot of reasons, but one of the key factors is that people are tired of not hearing the truth.
More Americans than ever are waking up and are realizing that the mainstream media is very tightly controlled and is not telling them the whole truth. Many are realizing that the "news" is increasingly becoming little more than thinly-disguised propaganda.
The reality is that as the alternative media has grown more prominent in recent years, the corporate-controlled mainstream media has lost tons of credibility.
Once credibility is gone, it is really hard to get it back. In recent years it has become increasingly obvious that outlets such as the New York Times and CNN produce news that has been twisted and spun to fit a particular ideology and to promote a particular agenda.
And the American people are sick and tired of it.
So the mainstream news outlets are going to continue to lose viewers and readers.
But that is a good thing.
Is the mainstream media news dying out? For decades, the nightly news on the big 3 networks dominated the airwaves. Tens of millions of Americans tuned in each night to find out what was happening in the world. But now cable news has cannibalized a huge chunk of that audience, and the Internet is taking massive amounts of eyeballs away from both of them. So are we now at a point when the way that Americans get their news has fundamentally changed forever?According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Internet has surpassed newspapers as one of the primary ways that Americans get their news.
Perhaps that seems only natural to many of us now, but there was a time before the Internet was widely available that a very high percentage of the population would read a newspaper each day.
But now all of that has fundamentally changed.
According to the Pew survey, only 17 percent of Americans say that they read the print version of a national newspaper and only 50 percent say that they read local newspapers.
But that is only part of the story.
According to the survey newspapers were most likely to be read by people who were over the age of 50 or who don't own cell phones.
So as that generation dies out, newspapers will lose even more popularity.
But it isn't just newspapers that are suffering.
It appears that a day of reckoning has arrived for network news as well.
Both ABC News and CBS News have recently made announcements that indicate that they are experiencing deep financial woes. Not that NBC News is doing well either. NBC News has been struggling financially for quite some time.
But it was still a shock when ABC News announced that it was cutting its news correspondent staff by 50 percent and that it will close allof its "brick and mortar" news bureaus except for the one in Washington D.C.
So why are so many diverse mainstream media outlets hurting so much?
There are a lot of reasons, but one of the key factors is that people are tired of not hearing the truth.
More Americans than ever are waking up and are realizing that the mainstream media is very tightly controlled and is not telling them the whole truth. Many are realizing that the "news" is increasingly becoming little more than thinly-disguised propaganda.
The reality is that as the alternative media has grown more prominent in recent years, the corporate-controlled mainstream media has lost tons of credibility.
Once credibility is gone, it is really hard to get it back. In recent years it has become increasingly obvious that outlets such as the New York Times and CNN produce news that has been twisted and spun to fit a particular ideology and to promote a particular agenda.
And the American people are sick and tired of it.
So the mainstream news outlets are going to continue to lose viewers and readers.
But that is a good thing.
