A little unfocused but quite worthy piece framing today’s unloved news media environment as pretty much the product of internalizing and operationalizing every idea and critique the Adbusters-ass 90s had.
It’s frustratingly hard to pin down a throughline, but there are interesting themes: 1999 as the peak of an old media order marked by fantasies of replacing it all with something authentic; particularly Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as a forerunner to the contemporary Fox News work of Tucker Carlson \u2013 the piece reminds that Carlson had actually been the “conservative” host when Stewart famously went on and denounced CNN’s Crossfire in 2005.
Like I say it’s a little under-edited though; it mixes lineages of innovation \u2013 Carlson, like Stewart’s TDS, is carried on cable and relies on a comedy-style writing room addressing subjects raised in detail elsewhere rather than a stable of journalists breaking stories; broader shifts in the economic context and how that played with things \u2013 increasing media options saw producers and advertisers going for particular niches, while Stewart’s idea of news for sensible, decent people envisioned an old-style mass audience, filtered on decency, which corresponds to no demographic useful to advertisers; and just general ways it ain’t like it used to be \u2013 internet search-targeted advertising is even more appealing to advertisers than broadcast, the ability to find and present archival footage was clutch for TDS \u2013 not actually bearing any weight in terms of accounting for how it affects anything else.
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