Looking at the projections, society’s turning away from mainstream news was always inevitable. The creation of the internet and the subsequent reduction of attention spans was a poison to long-form news. Where people used to click on the TV to watch the nightly local news and maybe some CNN, now social media has become the go-to source for news.
Fox News was something of an outlier. It was one of the few places where Americans felt like they could get the story. To the credit of the many great people who still work there, it still is in many ways, but recent events have kicked people’s trust in the channel to the curb, and I don’t just mean Tucker Carlson’s abrupt firing.
As RedState previously reported, Fox News seems to be taking a more sympathetic approach to leftist issues, including the transgender issue. Employees have been directed to treat and discuss transgender people as the sex they claim they are, not the biological one they were born as. It’s a clear indication of where the network is headed and if it can’t be truthful about the most basic realities then one has to ask what else it wouldn’t be truthful about.
Transgenderism is an issue that has proven to be something that can’t be let up on because doing so puts a lot of things in danger from your job to your children. If Fox News won’t be an ally in that fight then tuning out is just something many will be forced to do.
(READ: Okay, Now It’s Time to Go Scorched Earth)
Again, this was inevitable. Even if Fox News always did the right thing to win the trust of Americans, technology would have soon made its television presence wholly irrelevant. Looking at news consumption trends for millennials and Gen Z, platforms like Twitter and TikTok are the place they go for updates on everything from current events to finance.
Gen Z really puts an emphasis on TikTok, which has become their Google. According to Morning Consult, Google is still the king of information delivery systems with TikTok being a distant second, but we can likely expect this gap to shorten over time as more people gravitate toward the platform and as the Alpha Generation (born 2010 to mid-2020s) comes online as well.
Keep in mind, it’s highly likely that TikTok will be forced to share the short-form information space in the coming years as other social media networks work to cut in on the market. For instance, I’m pretty sure Elon isn’t going to take TikTok’s dominance lying down and he may re-release an improved Vine, which Twitter still owns.
Multiple things will cause more of the younger generation to move toward these platforms as they increasingly abandon television.
For one, trusted sources and personalities will arise. Online content creators rise and fall like weeds, but some of them go on to become household names. Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, Phillip DeFranco, and Charlie White are just a few names in a long list of people that the Western world gravitates toward for their news. Joe Rogan, while not necessarily a news personality, attracts so many people that the information put forward in his podcast becomes information and news that people use.
And with the decline of television, the rise of more independent personalities is inevitable. This can be a really, really good thing. While many of these personalities won’t be immune from the same corruption that infected networks, an independent creator will have a lot more resistance to said corruption.
Without a massive corporation with a ton of employees to take care of, the independent creators with their small group of helpers can be a lot more choosy in who they work with. I’ve seen quite a few creators break off relationships with sponsors when they were asked to betray their own principles for money. This altruism is far more likely because the online content creator has a much closer relationship with his or her viewers and that trust means everything. It’s not uncommon for an audience to suddenly abandon a creator after a major controversy or breach of trust, making up-front honesty important to the creator.
Not to say this won’t have its dangers.
People tend to search out information that confirms their biases, and once they settle on a content creator or set of creators that do this for them, they’ll become far more isolated than ever before. Not that confirmation bias wasn’t already a massive problem, but algorithms know how to keep you tuned in and you’ll be fed more content like the kind you enjoy on a loop. As you’re fed more and more of what you agree with, you’ll naturally retreat further and further into your corner. As others retreat into theirs, the flame wars will become more intense and the division far more pronounced in our society.
Moreover, many will focus on a niche area of news and current events. For instance, one person may find fears around North Korea to be the thing that gets their attention and the algorithms on these sites will continue to feed more and more information about that topic to the person, making them narrow their vision in on this and ignorant about all else. If the person is focused on abortion, then the algorithm will feed them abortion news, turning them into a one-issue voter.
These are likely side effects but as the news landscape develops, some creators may find a way to balance themselves, creating a middle ground. Hard positions usually come as a result of organizations offering money for that position to be embraced so it will be interesting to see how more independent creators deal with this. To be sure, hard-leaning content creators will never disappear as they will always have an audience, but with changing times comes changing views.
The current state of the news world is toxic, but it is dying. What rises in its place is already looking better.
