Time for some wacky media theory talk. 25 years ago Fox kicked off a news network that broke the mold of the news media business model. Against all the odds it worked.
Okay, it was an achievement and people liked it. The popularity even caused a hate from the left, which was weird because you would think liberals would like more news instead of less. It seemed to fire up their hate machine on all cylinders. Leftists couldn’t really hate on legacy media because they shared the same political views.
Now hate for Fox is standard fair.
But whenever you get something new, even if it is an offshoot of something else, sooner or later it too gets dated.
Then, after Fox News proved there could be viable alternatives, it led to others like OAN and Newsmax. Now there are a bunch of them. Oh, you could say they aren’t really mainstream yet. But Fox is because it now leads in ratings. Fox proved you could also succeed in being an alternative network – or beat them at their own game.
Now that that is done, what is new on the horizon? I already mentioned the other alternate news networks. They are gaining fast. And meanwhile less and less people really believe what mainstream legacy media is telling us. It’s a caricature.
What is the future? Well we have to look at what happened and say that eventually someone will come along to replace and further what Fox has done, it’s only natural. What would it be is yet unknown. But we do know people tire of things. After 25 years, they aren’t new anymore. But people will flock to try something new if given the chance.
We’ve seen this pattern in social media, too. Who remembers MySpace? It was all the rage when Obama first ran. Young people probably don’t even know about it, but it was young people then who drove the platform. They know Facebook though. Interesting how the negativity for Facebook has turned into a hatefest. Do you think they survive it?
Mark Zuckerberg has now given us the answer. Change the name. But the fascinating thing under the hood of public opinion is that the Facebook hate is across the spectrum now. It doesn’t matter if they are on the far left or right, or in the middle, everyone agrees on a disdain for Facebook. They certainly don’t trust it either.
So Zuckerberg seems to have a challenge, especially after trying to monopolize so many other social media platforms. His own mother ship brand is in the toilet. No one is more responsible for it than Mark Zuckerberg. Out with the old, in with the new. That time always comes, eventually. At some point, interest fades and/or something else replaces it. Facebook now just wants to remain relevant.
This presents sort of a pattern for the rest of media.
Legacy media is dug in though. There was a time when CNN was the new thing in the 90’s. It rode a popular wave for a while but the wheels came off and it crashed as a leading source. It is no more than an organ for the Democrat machine, credibility is shot. It had its time in the day though. They haven’t decided on changes there yet. But it cannot stand, as people don’t trust them.
No one trusts Facebook either but they didn’t have to. It was only a platform for people to use. Their paradigm has issues now and people refuse to participate in it. They aren’t spending time on it.
I’m saying the same thing will probably, inevitably, happen in the news business too. But it will have to be a different model than we see to be well received. We’re all jaded now; we’ve seen how it works, the good and the bad. We’ve seen where it leads. So it also becomes harder to build a new model with any integrity while there is so much venomous dislike for the old model.
One natural resource we still have in America is creativity. When you have something that people don’t like, there is a hunger for something different. Someone somewhere will find out what that is. It might take several attempts but something comes in the end.
Mark Zuckerberg had to know that day would come when it would be irrelevant, didn’t he? He should have. And he should have planned accordingly. All he managed to do is gobble up anything out there which might be a threat to his monopolistic existence. But Facebook was the business model for all else he hoarded.
That business model now has serious issues. It’s been undermined by people’s lack of trust in it. You can’t keep feeding people poison after they discovered it is poison. That demands deception. Heaping on more new poison is not the answer.
Next up, the jury is still deliberating on Twitter. Jack Dorsey may be despised, for a lot of reasons, but the hate has not spread to both ends of the spectrum yet. So far it is mostly from the right. The left still sees it as politically useful – and they let you know it. In fact, they swarm it like killer bees. It’s a vehicle for cancel culture. It’s useful to attack their political opponents. It’s a preferred platform for leftist hatred.
But that too has its shelf life. Whatever the next thing is, liberals will flock to it like wild boars, they always do. That also makes it harder to start up anything new when the liberals come in scorched earth to destroy anything in their way. That is another pattern we’ve seen over and over again over years. They also don’t develop new; they just want to destroy the old. They wait for others to start it and pounce.
Who knows what the next thing will be or what the future will be? But we do know the sequence of events. The left wants to control it, whatever it is. They want to control us as well as our ability to organize or participate. We can count on those factors.
Meanwhile, Trump announced a collaborative media project to create a new platform. Will it succeed? It will have the name brand and recognition to kick it off – something others only dream of. The left has helped by banning Trump on other media platforms. It created a need for them to go elsewhere. The left never realized it was us who created the attraction for social media platforms. Without that it was only homogenized liberal waste water – an elitist echo chamber, another organ of the Democrat machine.
Whatever is new lies ahead, But what is old will not be forgotten, nor are the lessons learned.
Zuckerberg is already gleaning for what is new that he can use to rehabilitate “Facebook”. He blew it on the new name right out of the gate, Meta. (logo is even worse) No one on the spectrum likes it. Most think it is sounds stupid. He managed to unify hatred of himself, something people would have thought hard to do.
I know, maybe he can use Joey to gain interest in his platform? Maybe he can use has-beens like Obama to help sell his new image? He can say, “hey, we are re-imagining Facebook.” That ought to work. Notice a pattern?
Right Ring | Bullright | © 2021
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