The media landscape is so much different because of a rise in social media. Now, social media breaks news, while the purpose of mainstream media is to confirm the news. The founder of CNN Ted Turner said that CNN would be around to cover the end of the world, pointing just how much he thinks CNN will be around, even as it tanks in ratings to its competitors, NBC news and Fox News. CNN was founded in 1980 by Ted Turner whose father ran a billboards business that was very profitable although his father would commit suicide. Experts predicted that the 24 hour news TV station would fail as people were used to having news only during prime time at 9PM. The network built quite a following during the first Iraq war of 1990, and that’s how it became mainstream by giving a minute by minute account of the Iraq war.
But then came Fox News that displaced the CNN model of on the one hand you have this, on the other hand you have this, and then attempt and reach some sort of neutral position. Fox News went for opinion programming from day one, and the beauty about opinion is you can slant opinion in as many different directions as you want, you could have hosts that have so many different slants on the same news item that it will never become boring. And this really feeds onto some conspiracy theorists such as Pastor T Mwangi who says the purpose of media is not profits but agenda setting. When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there was agreement that unless Fox news did something magical, they would lose that audience, and so Fox News saw its competition such as Newsmax went with the election denial claims, and just like that, Fox News also pushed the election denial claims.
But that went too far, as the Dominion voting machines company alleged defamation, and the matter was settled out of court for $700 million dollars, being payment that Fox News made to Dominion Voting machines. But how do you cover news endlessly throughout the day and not bore your audience? CNN just has four or five news items that it repeats throughout the day and unless some terrorist snatches a moisturizer into a plane, the news items will be the same. So, probably, CNN should infuse some of its news with opinion commentators and help set the agenda and give news a different slant. The future of media is thus a combination of local news, opinion programming and breaking news that the traditional media does best, all the while infusing social media content creation into the mix.
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