Every year or so, some struggling news media organisation takes a look at the way the News/Fox model has come to dominate right-wing resentment media across much of the Anglophone world and thinks: we sure could have us some of that.
For a broadcaster, what’s not to like? An ageing stay-at-home demographic that embraces the call and response of populist right-wing media and the big personalities who shape it. It’s the last audience segment that can be relied upon to watch lots and lots of linear television, hour after hour, day after day.
The most recent to have a go? The old guard of US cable news networks: CNN. Looking across at its cable competitor, CNN saw an audience falling out of love with Fox, yet not that keen on the (usually streamed) Newsmax or the pool of podcasts from talking heads such as Steve Bannon.
Before last year’s takeover to form Warner Bros Discovery, the incoming owners were already talking up a Fox-lite model. Major shareholders and (long-time Murdoch frenemy) John Malone said he thought CNN could learn from Fox’s reporters. Once the merger was done, new management canned its media program Reliable Sources, sacking reporter and Fox critic Brian Stelter.
New network head Chris Licht promised a reset with Republicans. According to June’s dissection in The Atlantic of how that reset failed to gel, Licht told insiders the right had been alienated by CNN’s hostile approach to Donald Trump and “craved sober, fact-driven coverage”.
As the Dominion Voting Systems case revealed, this got Fox back-to-front. Its cable audiences weren’t looking for facts. They were looking for confirmation bias. More importantly, in the US at least, right-wing media don’t get to own the audience. They just get to borrow them — from Trump.
As CNN went on to find out, the borrowing costs can end up bankrupting you — first morally, and then in the ratings. Hosting a Trump town hall packed with MAGA enthusiasts in March ended up trading a one-night hit of Trumpists passing through for the once-reliable audience of regular news watchers.
As a result, by the end of the most recent quarter, CNN found itself slumped in a distant third place in the cable news race, far behind Fox (still down with its post-Tucker Carlson blues) and a surprisingly resurgent, more liberal MSNBC.
That angry, ageing demographic is not as attractive as it once looked. It is small, declining, with plenty of alternatives, including now in social media: a major study of Facebook users last month found that conservative news sources dominate the platform. Moreover (as we’re discovering with the Voice) those conservative networks are also where 97% of fake news is read, liked and shared.
The decline — near collapse — of CNN marks a big turn in mass media. It launched in 1980 as the first of what would become now ubiquitous 24/7 news at the moment when 1970s technological change and US deregulation turbocharged cable to the dominant means of delivery in the US. (The power of Australia’s free-to-air oligarchy meant it would be another 15 years before pay TV and 24/7 news came here.)
The modern format remains shaped by the early CNN experiment. For instance, turning a story into a media event by the sheer power of repetition (which perhaps dates from the Challenger disaster) or the combative two sides talk show (started with Crossfire in 1982) which, in the continuing bane of panel shows such as the ABC’s Q+A, prioritises the heat of the political clash over the light of, you know, news. Not to mention news creation through longform political town halls and debates, which in turn created the modern telegenic political controversialist starting with independent Ross Perot in 1992.
In a medium-is-the-message way, these innovations flowed through (and continue to shape) both broadcast news and democratic politics. (The recent ABC drama The Newsreader is a fictionalised telling of how these changes rolled over 1980s Australia.)
Despite its significance to global news, the decline of CNN would be a weird “only in America” type of story, but there are lessons for Australia. The ABC seems set on making the same mistakes in facing the News Corp challenge as CNN has with Fox. Just this past week, we saw the dangers when the public broadcaster let The Australian’s front page set the news agenda, with the masthead’s nonsense panic about treaty running through the ABC’s programming, all the way to Sunday’s Insiders.
It’s no secret that the ABC is already struggling to gain younger audiences. The more it leans into News, the harder it will find ever winning over that post-Mabo audience that will, soon, be a majority of Australians.
Should the ABC just stick to its own agenda and stop trying to draw in a younger crowd? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
I think you are being too kind to the ABC hierarchy in saying they are letting the Australian headlines shape programming. Repeating a right wing media version of events when you are the only remaining independent large news source is tantamount to deliberately misleading the audience in terms of a balance of relevance.
It is our lot that the strongest critic of propaganda and manipulation is Shaun Micallef. Only satire is allowed to consistently state the bleeding obvious.
Conservatives/ neoliberals know full well that control of information outlets shapes the hearts and minds of audiences, the voting public, nothing can change for the better until this stranglehold is broken up. Deliberately manipulating people for profit has been refined shaped to meet modern communication formats, decency is at a clear disadvantage.
It is well past time to emulate the USA (in one aspect only)………………..
………mandate that Media proprietors must be Sole Australian Citizens.
No Yankee dual-citizen blow-ins allowed.
Problem solved at no cost.
Plus roll out some anti-monopoly legislation? We had some but guess where it went.
It went when the media diversity rules were abolished on the spurious basis that the abolition would save small regional papers which it didn’t. Keating’s restrictions on media ownership were seen as a reform then later the abolition was similarly characterised as a reform.
We threw out the baby with the bathwater – but kept the bathwater. We must be the dumbest nation on earth. If threats don’t work, money will. But maybe that’s our guarantee of survival: nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Absolutely with you, on all you’ve said, Stuart.
Perhaps media should come under more editorial control and regulation, rather than a play thing of billionaires.
I don’t have a problem if a media is Left Wing or Right Wing, I then know what I am buying/subscribing too. There has to be a balance of factual reporting rather than relying on columnists, who appear to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
Media was not designed to be profit center such as retail or mining, it should have integrity it is a community news service. From which it has morphed into a huge profit center, in which a few selected few greedy opportunists have fine tuned it into a follow the money operation, ” Rivers of gold” filled with gaslighting which pays the extraordinary return that billionaires need to earn.
I know our Saturday Tabloid has virtually become a catalogue distributor for national retailer brands, and the cost has gone up 50 cents a week, with no extra new coverage. I wont be buying it for much longer. .
Working in the media and briefing section of a large Commonwealth Department 20 years ago, it was my lot to get to work by 6am, cull the stack of Media Monitors newspaper cuttings to identify the 20-25 most relevant items of interest to the department and Minister’s office, photocopy them, and send the courier up to Parliament House to deliver them.
Regularly, I would get a call from the MInister’s office directing me to make sure an item by Bolt was included, even if I thought it was of little interest to the Department’s work. I would then spend the morning consulting with the Ministerial Advisers and coordinating the Department’s Question Time Brief for the Minister, then record Question Time for the interest of any branches within the Department whose work had been the subject of a Question Without Notice.
It was an education in seeing up close and first hand how the Murdoch papers, The Australian in particular, set the agenda / narrative for the day, as I watched so many Questions Without Notice based on articles that had been in the Media Monitors stack, and how many of them came from Murdoch papers.
Interestingly, at one stage the Minister’s office asked if the Department could fact-check any of his statements and send corrections so he could correct the record. However, after a few weeks, we were told to discontinue the practice, as he did not want to be embarrassed making so many corrections. After that, he just misled the Parliament. I used to wonder what would happen if any of the Labor Opposition asked us to verify the accuracy of the statistics the Minister regularly fabricated.
Thank you DF, that was the sort of writing I’m not capable of, I can only suspect what’s happening, a clear explanation of one small but critical part, where the switch , the chosen reality for the rest of us kicks in. regards
So, why is the ABC joining in this race to the bottom? With a Labor government in power, an increased budget, why are they so… lame? Gutless? Unimaginative?
Run by LNP appointees.
We are so far down the wrong path it’s impossible to have a balanced discussion about the ABC.
Wind back the clock to when SBS had no ads and start the conversation employing the norms and standards which existed then, before they were trashed.
SBS was, and remains, badly degraded by the imposition of ads within programmes, as introduced by Howard-appointed Carla Zampatti when she was the SBS chair for 10 years. Her teal daughter might like to use her influence to try and restore some of the integrity of this public service. Like others, the Zampatti immigrant pioneers were generously supported by Australian taxpayers until they got themselves established. The “I’m right Jack, now up with the ladder” attitude which now prevails widely, has also served to degrade the reputation of the Abetz family.
the ABC board needs moving on as dies the Netflix head and Morrisons pick Ita
sic ; as does
America is a giant bubble of folksy naïveté; a cross fertilisation of ideas is a non-starter.
Rupert has done his best, but we don’t have the freedom to not vote – so he has to play in just the U.K. and U.S. sandpits. However that doesn’t stop him from trying…….he is VERY trying.
Add in the fact that almost every US state still has lead in their water pipes which I think explains most of their delusional and idiotic mindset.