News Desertion

 Ever since CNN became the first 24-hour news network, it has been difficult for news to report just the facts. After all, in 24 hours how much news rises to the level of consequential except to those who are involved? Nonetheless, the news is now an endangered species on the local level as newspapers are either gobbled up by conglomerates or shuttering up in less populous areas. On the TV front, it is much the same as local channels are bought up by companies like Gray Television or Sinclair Broadcast Group. With the consolidation of news media on the local level, there are fewer eyeballs on the ways that government officials fail us or how business interests expand their influence, and frankly, even fewer human interest stories that remind us that there is good going on as well.

Democracy thrives by factual information being widely available for all who care to know it. Today's media is more marketing than it is news. Hence to attract a certain demographic, you have right- and left-leaning flamethrowers like Tucker Carlson or Michael Moore and then form stories that conform to a prospective. Other than Reuters or the AP, most news is preferential to the way it treats stories. Of course, there is a long history of this. And somehow democracy has survived the disparity between what is true and what people believe.

However, with the evolution of social media, the blurring of fact and fiction is widening; to the point ere at one time Jon Stewart was the most trusted news anchor in America. I'm not dissing Jon Stewart, as we have seen recently comedians can come across as very credible (see:  Volodymyr Zelenskyy), but clearly, people are struggling with understanding their world and the bipolarity of how news is reported. With the ability to pick and choose your sources on social media, we are rapidly submerging into a gray area where it is not shared or even common knowledge on anything and the barn door is wide open for out-and-out propaganda to pose as news.

So, I am left with this question: Did the news desert us or did we desert the news? A case for both can be made and particularly when people stopped paying for reliable news sources via transitioning away from newspapers and magazines and even network news in favor of web-based sources which have, up to now, been harder to monetize around. At the same time, the consolidation of news media is the egg in the chicken and the egg analogy. 

It may be argued that this is a temporary problem and that the marketplace will eventually solve it as people seek out reliable sources. I don't see that happening. Using a different analogy, people know that there are healthier food choices, but we lean into salty, sugary junk food because it tastes so good. And like junk food, sometimes we feel bad about it, but we go back to it. News as we've known it is dead and its replacement is partisan news--not as healthy for us, but we can't seem to get enough of it.