The Audience Gets a Vote
A media strategy is just that: a strategy, with both strengths and limits.
In 2004, sitting in the only journalism class I would take, we watched some industry commentary on the coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and what it implied about the state of the media. One media executive—I cannot recall which network he worked for—acknowledged the valid criticism they had received for their excessive focus on the case at the expense of more important stories. But the time they spent on it drew orders of magnitude more attention than those neglected stories. …
“As soon as news of the raid broke, news channels abandoned their schedules and switched to 24 hour coverage. … CBS dedicated an episode of 48 Hours Investigates to the arrest, while NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s 20/20 also rushed out Jackson specials. …”
This was not the behavior of masters of the information system, secure in their positions. This reeks of a desperation for survival at best, simple greed at worst. During the trial, in which cameras were not allowed in the court, CNN broadcast a video of the closed door for absurd lengths of time.
To me, this is a level of the audience exercising its agency over the media system that borders on coercion, with many organizations abandoning any sort of professional pride or sense of distinction between themselves and tabloids to…engage in tabloid reporting, plain and simple. In that moment, the media was not driving the news. The news was driving them. …
Continue reading this article by Adam Gurri, “The Audience Gets a Vote,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-audience-gets-a-vote/