Conrad Black has a column in Canada’s National Post in which he is critical of the U.S. (and Canadian) legacy media’s leftwing bias. Here’s my reaction to the situation he describes.
Newspapers are laying off reporters and editors, others are shrinking in size, page length, some are closing. News magazines are on the wane too, Newsweek has almost disappeared entirely. Decline in circulation, ad revenues, and column inch footprints are all well-documented and widely reported (or bewailed).
At the same time, the pervasive leftward bias of most of the legacy media is well-documented and unrebutted. It is real. Are these two things related? In fact we have cause and effect.
The nation is politically divided, as the results of the last presidential election amply demonstrate. The U.S. is close to being a fifty-fifty nation, politically. Yet the overwhelming bulk of the mainstream or legacy media overtly cheers for one side and, by so doing, has lost the readership and viewership of half the country.
The main beneficiaries of ceding of half the nation’s eyeballs have been various outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch: Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Fox News, all of which cater to the underserved half of our polity. There are also independents like the Orange County Register and the Investor’s Business Daily.
With little competition for conservative viewers and readers, these are doing very well. New media sites online have likewise blossomed in this underserved marketplace.
Later ... large blocs of the left's electorate are non-consumers of print media. Many are also less-than-comfortable with the spoken English of broadcast media or too busy to watch.
Marketing their product to a subset of a subset of the populace is what the legacy media perforce have chosen to do. It isn't working.
