I read an article this week that got me thinking. It was about the gathering revolution—because that’s what’s coming—in how we get our “news”: the local, national and international updates on what’s going on around us and in our world. The article in Politico is called “The Biggest Change in Media is Happening Right Now: Streaming News is Going to Change the Way That Everything—Including Politics—Gets Covered. Why Aren’t People More Excited?”
I think the imminence of this sea change is worth your consideration, and arguably, your concern.
First off, why aren’t we more excited about getting our "news" quicker and easier and all-of-the-time? Perhaps it's because far too many of us are alreadly overwhelmed by reality as we’re living it. The gas for my car is too expensive. Where do I get baby formula (last month) or tampons (this month)—The Onion calling this latest consumer crisis “a period drama.” If living today is supposedly getting easier, why does it always feel so hard?
For example, people don’t seem excited or even very curious about next, big things like The Metaverse, a rising development that caused Zuckerberg to re-brand Facebook and got other tech companies scrambling for even better diversions and profit centers. It’s difficult, I think, to get excited about spending more time finding escape in our screens when we haven’t had a proper vacation in years.
At least from where I sit, people don’t even seem that excited about streaming itself, let alone its next frontier which is news delivery. On our streaming channels (think Netflix, HBO or Disney+), we either have to know exactly what we want to watch when we want to watch it, or to turn ourselves over to the streamer’s algorithm to show us programming that’s similar to what we’ve watched already. Oftentimes, you either feel trapped in your feedback loop or daunted by the number of possibilities that you’re facing. Whatever that feeling is is not exactly excitement about having even more of it.
Maybe that's why I sometimes pine for the predictable network line-ups of yesteryear: nightly news, a local highlight at 7 or 7:30 p.m., a situation comedy or serious drama before bed. I looked forward to Thursday night because it had CSI Albuquerque, or whatever. Now Thursday night needs a search party through a smorgasbord of potentials which I (at least) often abandon before I've really begun. (In this regard, research involving consumer choice has long concluded that there is “a sweet spot” in the number of choices we face when we shopping for, say, jam or ice cream, and it’s closer to 6 possibilities than to unlimited ones—something many of our grocery aisles seem to have learned but a lesson that’s apparently escaped the attention of those who are helming our streaming services.)
At the end of the day, many of our streaming choices have arguably been benign until now because they’ve been gateways to distraction (escaping reality) or amusement (over-riding the daily grind with a squirt or two of pleasure). While “the news” is not immune to the entertaining storyline—often by way of an aside or a happy story after the daily countdown to catastrophe—it’s fundamental purpose is different than entertainment's. It’s supposed to be a reality check, a view of what’s really going on and not merely another variation on boobtube. In democracies in particular, citizens need to understand what’s really happening in society, politics, epidemiology and the environment so they’ll stay calm and informed, productive and involved.
Sometimes our lives and our children’s lives also depend on it, and the quality of our civic discourse about matters of collective importance certainly does. We’ve already experienced the first waves of charges about “fake news” and whether what’s being presented on our screens is “true” as opposed to manipulated by somebody’s bias or bad intent. So how will the revolution that will soon be bringing us “streaming news” impact democracy, reality and truth going forward?
It’s too hot and humid in Philadelphia today to provide anything like an answer to such a meaty question, but the Politico article gives us an appetizer that we can at least start to chew on.
So how is streaming news different from what’s out there already? Even more specifically, how will it be different from Fox News or CNN or MSNBC on cable? And why is getting our news from sources like these today crying out for some better way? Well, the writers at Politico are eager to tell us.
They begin with Bharat Anand, who observed that products of low quality and high expense, which are also difficult to use and otherwise frustrate those who consume them: those kinds of products build a pile of kindling that innovators can't wait to ignite so that something new and hopefully better will arise from the ashes.
"The original news source was the town crier, who bellowed the news as he walked the village, but he was only limited by how far he could walk and what his news sources had told him. The town crier was [mostly] replaced by the newssheet [or newspaper], which was superior because it could be consumed at leisure, it was portable, it was sharable, and it could be preserved for future reference. But print’s great liability was being stuck in time — it could report only yesterday’s news. Radio and television’s capacity to report what happened today helped it transcend print. Cable TV news one-upped broadcast by reporting events around the world as they unfolded, like live sporting events. Plus, cable could go all day and night. But being linear, cable TV was a prison of its schedule. Viewers had to set their watches to match the programmers’ clocks and watch until the news wheel turned and returned to the coverage they were keen to see. DVRs cracked that constraint somewhat by allowing time-shifting. But the kindling of dissatisfaction continued to grow, especially after the web allowed consumers to access content whenever they wanted it.
"Streaming news sets alight decades of kindling that has piled up around linear TV. Streaming news arrives on a viewer’s demand. It travels wherever the viewer goes — on a smartphone during a commute, at work on a laptop, or sitting in front of the big set at home. It allows the viewer to customize his experience the same way he can browse a newspaper or a website. Its greatest breakthrough, however, comes in the way it reduces scarcity in the media equation. Previously, government regulation and cable oligopolies limited the television medium to a relatively low number of players. Streaming makes possible a channel for every predilection, opening the way for new entrants and new approaches to coverage from the city council to Congress to the battlefield." (emphasis added, link omitted)
In sum, streaming news’ instant access, availability on every device, how viewers can customize what they see and don’t see, and how it opens the floodgates to new outlets that want to give you their version of the news: all of these features make everything that’s gone before seem obsolete.
The Politico reporters tackled this story in the first place because the recent demise of streaming news service CNN+ let some in the industry to start writing the streaming news obituary, something that seemed to them almost entirely misguided. And I agree. Some of the death knell was because streaming news via CNN+ and the other principle streaming outlet, Fox Nation, still look and feel a lot like their cable antecedents. But streaming’s many advantages over the $5.7 billion cable news business will almost certainly keep it coming while changing forever the ways that we stay informed.
Streaming, like the current Netflix model, also changes cable’s economic paradigm. As long as subscribers keep paying for their subscriptions, the streaming provider doesn’t need to be pulling viewer’s eyeballs towards the advertisers that were paying the cable providers. For me anyway, this innovation highlights a two steps forward (but maybe three steps back) difference between cable and streaming news.
“Subscription fees liberate Fox Nation from having to deliver advertisers, but also immunize it from boycotters. In recent years, activist organizations like Media Matters for America have protested Fox News’ more outré shows, staging advertiser boycotts and calling on Disney and T-Mobile and other blue-chip companies to pull their ads. But because viewers pay full freight at Fox Nation and it runs no ads, the channel can ignore the boycotters. The upside of a no-ads platform is that it gives an outlet wider latitude to address controversial and taboo news topics. The downside, as we’ve seen with Tucker Carlson’s three-part Fox Nation Patriot Purge documentary, is the safe harbor it creates for demagogic fare.” (links omitted)
On the one hand, streaming news gains a measure of journalistic independence that it never had on cable because it’s no longer beholden to those who make the ad-buys or authorize them in a corporate office someplace. But there is another way to look at it. Corporate America has traditionally exerted a mainstream (if you will) and stabilizing influence on news programming via its ad-dollar support. What happens when the only external restraint on streaming news programming is a true-believing tribe of paid subscribers?
There are extremes at every point of the political spectrum (and not just Tucker Carlson’s). Every extreme form of news reporting could have its own mob behind it before too long.
Each streaming news channel could be its own interest-group rabbit hole.
This is my teasing concern about streaming news. It could deliver all of the advantages described above while at the same time also unleashing a spectrum of extreme convictions with shock troops behind them wherever that troop’s particular moral standards are being challenged.
This would be far more than a general anti-fascist (or antifa) movement and its Red State antogonists stirred into action by 24/7 streaming news coverage in every battlefront state and municipality. It would likely be splinter groups conjoined with splinter streaming news sources devoted almost entirely to abortion or trans-issues, environmental destruction or justice, voting rights or gerrymandering, gun control or regulation, what’s taught or avoided in public schools, all of the issues around immigration. Pick your poison or your cure.
I’ve poked this issue from a couple of directions before. Late last year, it was about the mobs that can be unleashed by ideological calls to arms in turbulent times (Mobs Are Like Weapons Pointed at All of Us) and a few weeks ago it was highlighting how a very small percentage of self-serving influencers on social media seem to be driving most of our politically divisive debates today (Divided We Fall). It takes only a small leap of the imagination to see how streaming news could be the vector that will soon be providing the grist for even more of these toxic mills.
The Politico article never once allows these concerns to diminish its excitement about the advantages that streaming news will provide. It never signals that the streaming news channels of the near future will further amplify our divisions or feed even more instances of political conflict and violence than we have already. But it does make two key observations that can easily be redirected towards what concerns me most.
The first is about how poorly, in mass media’s recent past, we’ve correctly foreseen what “this next big thing” will deliver to our doorsteps.
“When cable news debuted, who anticipated that its most popular programming would be blocks of opinion and commentary served every weeknight? That cable news would help elect a demagogue like former President Donald Trump by lending saturation coverage to his campaign rallies? That the nightly news broadcasts by ABC, CBS and NBC would lose their sway to the cable upstarts? The meat of American politics has always been marbled with entertainment, but not until cable news arrived did political entertainment establish itself as a thriving genre. Who expected that?”
You don’t have to credit their characterization of Trump to agree that our crystal balls have been pretty foggy when it comes to forecasting the impacts--both negative and positive--from new experiments in mass media.
But this second observation of theirs is even more thought-provoking, and hearkens back to “the moderating influence” that corporate support likely had on news reporting via the advertisements that punctuated network TV news coverage once upon a time. In the course of their narrative, the Politico reporters recall how, in a kind of virtuous circle between those who delivered the news and those who consumed it:
“the low-polarization of the pre-cable era had artificially boosted the ‘oneness’ of the network era. [Back then] if broadcasters aired something controversial… the Fairness Doctrine… required [them] to give the other side equal airing. Instead, the broadcasters basically suppressed controversial topics, smoothing over whatever divisions the county might have had. Until the Fox News Channel showed up, TV politics generally hugged the center, and the right (and then later the demagogic views of the Trump variety) could be found only in small magazines and a scattering of newspapers.”
Among other things, this is why so many Americans still recall CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite as a kind of national father figure. During the politically charged Sixties and Seventies, he and the other network news readers spent most nights smoothing out our differences. And while many recall Cronkite’s “turning against” the wisdom of the Vietnam War, it’s too easy (as well as foolhardy) to overlook how much the network news back then was a kind of electronic hearth that America gathered around every night at 6 p.m. to moderate their concerns about the country’s direction, and even celebrate America from time to time, only twenty-odd years ago.
Plainly this is a bygone era in sharing and understanding the news as we quickly turn to an increasingly fragmented and volatile alternative.
It reminds us about the pivotal role that sharing and understanding the news plays in contextualizing our political and social lives.
And with the cohesiveness of our democracy at play, it might make us wonder whether “the news” and the role that it’s played from town crier to streaming news services is simply too important to our well-being as citizens and communities to be left to folks whose sole preoccupation is how to increase their companies’ pay-outs from a 5.7 billion dollar business.
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Thanks for reading and for getting back to me with your comments. They're most appreciated. Stay cool, have a good week, and I’ll see you next Sunday.
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