The formerly unprofitable media was briefly boosted by Trumpmania. The Washington Post, the New York Times and a few national outlets and digital hangers on boosted subscription numbers and minted money.
Post-Trump there was a major falloff but now even with the media able to promise a Trump comeback, indictments and trials, its flocks of sheep don’t seem to want to come back.
The troublesome trend is spelled out in research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. For years, the Oxford-based think tank has been asking people around the world about their news-consumption habits. In its latest survey, 38 percent of U.S. respondents say they sometimes or often avoid news, including 41 percent of women and 34 percent of men.
At the same time, the proportion of people who are “extremely” or “very interested” in the news continued to sink. In the United States, this group was in the minority (49 percent) for the first time in the survey’s short history, down from 67 percent in 2015. The institute’s data also suggest a sharper percentage-point drop abroad (including 27 points in the United Kingdom).
The media (like most fanatics) forgot Alinsky’s Rule 7, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
People are becoming burned out and they’re in the key media demo, wealthy, female and liberal.
Carolyn Cohen, a retired teacher in the Washington area, was a committed MSNBC viewer and used to read The Washington Post cover to cover. Lately, she has backed off, out of a sense of self-preservation.
“I may glance at the headlines, but I can’t handle the stress put on me when I go to the front page,” she says. “What I find is, the news is depressing. It feels like it affects me directly. I don’t know if the world is worse now than it was before. But it never used to feel like a personal threat. Maybe I just feel it more.”
Cohen cites a number of topics that provoke feelings of helplessness: gun violence, climate change and climate-change denial, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election results.
“What can I do about it?” she says. “Nothing you do gives any control,” other than laying the newspaper aside, turning off the TV and going for a walk.
People feel stressed out. The panic button has been pushed too many times and too many fundraising texts have been swapped across too many resold lists. A lot of the usual stuff just isn’t working anymore. Keeping millions of people in permanent fight-or-flight mode was never an option for anyone except the sociopaths who thought the ride could go on forever. Instead like all those “This one weird trick” headlines from the last decade, the power of the media over a key demo that it kept enthralled with fear and the promise of Muellerian salvation is fading away as those people have been worn out and want out of the craziness.
News avoidance may be a factor in the ominous declines that are pummeling media organizations of all kinds. The major cable-news networks — Fox, MSNBC and CNN — saw a combined viewership drop of 8.4 percent in June compared with the same month a year earlier. And although ratings typically rise as the presidential election cycle picks up, they instead dropped 7 percent from the first quarter of this year to the second.
Web traffic to a variety of news websites has been trending down since peaking around the 2020 election and the Capitol insurrection in January 2021. The New York Times was down 20 percent last month compared with a year earlier, while The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal saw drops of 15 and 14 percent, respectively, according to the digital tracking firm ComScore.
The Reuters Institute’s research found that 32 percent of U.S. news avoiders steer clear of stories about the war in Ukraine, while 43 percent avoid news about national politics; 41 percent pass up stories on social justice; and 40 percent ignore celebrity or entertainment news.
That’s gonna be a problem because without Ukraine, national politics, social justice and celebs, what is the media going to talk about?