The Death Of The Teleprompter: Why Mainstream News Is Dying, While Online Media Is Thriving
A few weeks ago I got into a Twitter spat with April Ryan (White House Correspondent and Washington Bureau Chief for American Urban Radio Networks) a.k.a. a member of the Washington media. She did not take kindly to me informing her that she had misrepresented a series the facts in her appearance on MSNBC. My subsequent Twitter back-and-forth with Ms. Ryan was a revealing look into a world of great disconnect - mainstream media.
I’ve worked in mainstream media, in network news as a video editor; and during my time there I could feel the disconnect growing within myself. Shift after shift I was editing everything from shootings and terrorist attacks, to weather and sports; matching images with scripts. As if created in a lab to generate the highest possible number of eyeballs, broadcast news is a formula. It’s not there to give you valuable information, it’s there to keep you watching through commercial breaks.
The crux of what network news should be; informing the public, opening minds, challenging the status quo; is all but dead. From regurgitating political talking points to accepting incorrect cultural stigmas (like those around current drug policy); network news is the status quo. It doesn’t challenge your thinking, it gives into your fears and ignites your pleasure centres.
“Woah, someone I don’t know fell off a bridge, scary.” / “People want marijuana being sold stores? Hell no!” / “So much terrorism, I’m staying inside.“
No context, no investigation, no challenging your thinking, no value. If anything, it works against your best interests; making you afraid of statistical improbabilities like dying in a plane crash or contracting a rare disease, thus keeping you from comfortably living your life.
But you, reader of the internet, you already know all of this. What you might not understand though is just how unaware the news is of itself. People in news don’t aim to misinform you, their intentions are pure. They think they know what they’re talking about, but rarely do the work to actually look at the facts and report in context. The result being journalists like April Ryan, who didn’t actually look at the numbers she was reporting, but instead worked off the conventional wisdom that ‘Hillary Clinton is a stronger general election candidate than Bernie Sanders’ - a claim that has been disproven in every imaginable way to the extent that Ms. Ryan had to fabricate poll results to make her point.
Those who work in broadcast think that network news is the epitome of good journalism. In some ways they have to, if you’ve spent your life dedicated to a profession then you’d like to think it’s not wasted. Having worked at a station that broadcast both local and national newscasts, there is a clear hierarchy among the two. National news has an air of superiority to it. You will never see a local newscaster present the national news, even though they are the exact same job - reading words off a teleprompter. The same goes for video editing; as if the footage is wrapped in gold, only the most trained editors are bestowed the honour of editing footage for national newscasts - despite the fact that their job is literally no different than anyone editing footage for the local cast. I didn’t stop to think about how ridiculous it all was until I had left, which goes to the notion that you can live inside a bubble without realizing it.
One fact that network news can’t ignore though, is its inevitable death. Since 1980, network evening news has been on a steady decline in ratings. This death is now being accelerated by the growing popularity of online news networks like The Young Turks - which has surpassed 2.5 billion views and is nearing 3 million subscribers. Ask the 20-year-olds in your life where they get their news from? It’s the internet.
The immediate difference you’ll notice when comparing The Young Turks to say, CBS Evening News, is that in The Young Turks universe there is no teleprompter. Instead of reading a prepared script that someone else wrote; like some sort of Shakespearean actor without enough rehearsal time; hosts on The Young Turks are forced to actually understand the story, and discuss it conversationally with real emotion.
Still considered to be a niche market by the many insiders in broadcast and Washington circles, online media’s impact now has another measurable statistic - the rise of Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. A man relatively unknown until he started his Presidential campaign a year ago, Sanders’ popularity skyrocketed on the backs of online media, who quickly picked up on his remarkable consistency of fighting for the poor and middle-class. Myself and others have documented the mainstream media’s mistreatment of the facts when reporting Bernie Sanders’ policies, a topic wonderfully summed up in this clip from an interview with Bernie Sanders on The Young Turks:
Despite this mistreatment of the facts, Bernie Sanders is as popular as ever; it’s a symptom of the dying corporate media. The legitimacy of one candidate over another is no longer in the hands of corporate media’s network coverage, it’s in the hands of voters. While America’s trust in media is at historic lows, people research these candidates online, particularly young people, where Bernie Sanders has a commanding grasp on 71% of voters under 30.
From this, we can extrapolate that traditional news media is losing a silent war. Network news, like music, film, and television before it, is in the midst of a massive transition. One that is going from our cable boxes and into our phones. The music industry was flipped on its head, seemingly overnight, but that was a different kind of battle. The reason it’s taken the news so long to make this shift is because this is not just a format war - this is not simply a CD turning into a series of MP3s files, the transition of news media is greater than that. This is a fundamental shift in how the news is told; presenting context, arming the viewer with the facts, including them in the conversation; and all without a teleprompter.
- David Doel, Creator and Host of The Rational National.
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