The Death of Media, Again
Dear Wags,
Let’s talk about Ron DeSantis. That’s a sentence unlikely to make the heart flutter. Maybe you caught his campaign announcement. More likely, you did not. According to the impresario who runs Twitter, it was a success, because it grabbed some attention. A legion of critics say it got the wrong kind. Most Americans were oblivious. After server glitches, about 250,000 alleged users took it all in.
That’s not nobody, but consider that DeSantis’s subsequent interview with Fox got around 2 million viewers, about a million less than CNN’s Trump town hall. Cable news still snags far more eyeballs than Twitter, but it is in a gruesome slide. Fox’s overall ratings are down 41 percent. It’s the category leader in a category with a terminal diagnosis. CNN’s ratings plunge is truly mortifying. MSNBC has posted audience gains — but only because it’s gained former CNN viewers after the Trump episode.
The news business is aging in an awful way, and the social-media-as-conversation-driver model is accelerating its woes. Things have short-circuited because polarized constituencies know what they think without the need for further exposition. Flailing to broaden the audience backfires, so why try?
DeSantis chose Twitter for his announcement because he loathes the mainstream media (that’s baked into his positioning). He also used the platform because at one point it was The Future. Despite the acid bath of press he’s getting, he could turn things around; most people don’t care about presidential campaign announcements. Still, the idea of Twitter as the conversational vanguard is quaint.
It’s hard to divine the strategy on Twitter’s part, beyond a thirst for amorphous relevance. Does it want to be a competitor to struggling news outlets? Does it expect ideologues of different perspectives to follow DeSantis and Tucker Carlson onto the platform? Does its leadership believe spooked advertisers want more politics? What good is this cheap brand of attention-getting doing anybody?
An ancient pitch from social media platforms was that they would invigorate democracy by opening discourse to a diversity of voices. Somehow this would be a cash cow, too. Obviously, that’s not what happened. The gap between the chatter Twitter stimulates and monetization is widening.
The business model did flood the zone with content, which diminished its quality and ratcheted up consumer contempt. No matter what lip service social platforms pay to combating tribalism and misinformation, incentives tend to run the other way. For this iteration of media and the cable news networks it captured, it’s likely too late to change.
Politics engages and enrages, but it tends to be bad for business. Unhappily, the current information system is bad for politics, too. Things were lousy on the old hustings, but at least politicians had some flexibility. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton could move to the center, without their craven base-pandering pinging through the metaverse forever. Sen. Tim Scott optimistically wishes to move the GOP into a bigger tent, but the paradigm is solidly against him.
Politicians, celebrities, companies, and journalistic outfits dove into this environment because they equated quick metrics with influence, but the more people mouth off, the less the public trusts what is said. The informational marketplace is flooded with shoddy goods, which furthers civic dysfunction.
DeSantis— a major national figure—has been warped by these incentives as the rest of us. He’s not stupid, but he spends much of his time being a heat-seeking missile aimed at culture war battlefields. It drives attention in base-oriented venues. Unfortunately, the GOP frontrunner is better at these games. It’s not clear that outrage wins elections or drives revenue, but it does erode civic health.
The DeSantis announcement underscores the limitations of our current media infrastructure. It’s somehow both ubiquitous and irrelevant. It has exhausted us, so much so that even important moments, political and otherwise, fail to make much of an impression. It agitates without inspiring much meaningful engagement at all. Ultimately, its outrage tricks play to half-empty halls. The more it histrionically cries out for our attention, the less we care.
Yours Ever,
Howard Beale
