Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.
But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.
But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. . . . And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).
You are absolutely correct and this was very well stated. Television networks used to view news programs as a public service. They weren’t intended to generate revenue, but rather as part of the payback to the public in order to use the public airwaves.
Newspapers were always generally profit driven, but you had the distinction between the yellow journalism approach and the Grey Lady approach. There’s less of a distinction today, and you now have a phenomenon where the bad drives out the good via the Darwinian process that essentially boils down to being able to monetize clickbait.