The Future is in small independent news sites
The talk of the town is the split between Fox News and their most-watched news talent, Tucker Carlson. Although there has been much conjecture by pundits about the reasons for the break, what is known is very little. On Monday, Fox News put out a vague statement saying, “FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways.” When the news was made public, CBS reported that Fox News lost $800 million in stock market value. Along with market value loss, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems a whopping $787.5 million to settle the defamation case brought by Dominion. A little bit of math and the total cash outlay is over 1 billion dollars.
Notwithstanding the money paid out by Fox, followers of Tucker Carlson are also up in arms about his departure from the network and have decided to cancel their Fox Nation subscriptions and vowed to stop tuning into the cable network. Fox had previously enjoyed the patronage of many right-wing and centrist viewers. If the boycott of Fox’s streaming service and its cable prominence continues to decrease, Fox News will begin to feel the pain the other big cable news outlets are now feeling.
CNN has also had its share of the significant exodus. Neilson Media Research reported that CNN had lost 36% of its primetime viewers after the inauguration of Biden in January 2021. As of March 2023, CNN has less than half a million viewers in their primetime lineup. MSNBC drew more primetime viewers than CNN but trailed Fox News by over 1 million viewers. With Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News, these statistics may change dramatically, but not for reasons you may think.
The steady decline in cable news can be partly attributed to biased reporting and the general distrust of journalists in many mainstream media outlets. Newspapers are struggling to keep relevant and will also see a decline in years to come. People still need and want to be abreast of the news, but how it is acquired will be different.
In the wireless and internet age, the juggernaut of technology is proving to be a formidable competitor to cable news. Only a short time ago, the only way to get shows you would want to see was to sign up for a cable service that included many channels no one ever wanted to watch. The distaste for the offering led forward-thinking companies to exploit and solve the problem with streaming services like Philo, Hulu, Roku, Sling, and YouTube. The monthly fee is far cheaper than cable, but to get the cable news outlet you want, you will have to pay for it. Most people are now rethinking whether they need to pay premium prices for information they can get elsewhere.
Along with streaming devices, the media landscape has alternative publishing opportunities. It is estimated that as many as 3 million podcasts are produced annually, with a whopping 7.5 million blog posts uploaded daily. Add to the mix, Social media and the personal publishing site called Substack; information is being disseminated through many more outlets than traditional network news organizations.
Good Moral Compasses believes the future of information is heading toward internet sites like ours. Most are free, where different voices are heard, and true diversity of thought reigns. The end seems to be a good trend because independent and small producers of ideas and purveyors of news are not beholding to government propaganda or the blackmailing by giant corporations withholding advertising dollars.
The individual and mostly independent sites are willing to give opinions and news, keeping a check on governmental propaganda. Plenty of small independent sites questioned the government’s COVID policies as questionable, while mainstream media continued to broadcast their lies to the public.
Ironically, today’s bloggers seem to have gone full circle by becoming the present-age pamphleteers in America. Early on in our history, pamphlets written by well-known historical figures were one of the ways the revolutionary thinkers expressed ideas about democracy which, in turn, helped birth a new free nation. Maybe the collapse of the overgrown news outlets replaced by grassroots freedom-loving apologists might be the catalyst for the rebirth of our country in freedom today.