Friday, June 27, 2008

The end of old media

I turned on CNN for a few minutes last night and again I heard Barak Obama mentioned along with Jeremiah Wright. I turned it off.

I saw a blonde woman on the cover of Newsweek. I had an inkling of who she was, but I had to squint to see that it was John McCain's wife.

I'm over forty years old, but does that mean I should care about what's on television or featured in magazines like Newsweek or Time? No. I was around when the Internet first started, and there are people who can't even envision the world without it.

Yesterday I saw Jack Cafferty on CNN talk about how Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign was ruined because he rode around in a tank. What he failed to mention was that George Bush rode in a tank too, but the news media failed to cover that as much as Dukakis. It was the news media that ruined the Dukakis campaign.

They are trying the same strategy with Barak Obama, and they are failing. Why?

Because since the birth of the Internet, each wave of young people leaving their parents homes and striking out on their own are not subscribing to newspapers, magazines, or surprisingly, even cable television.

The new trend is to subscribe only to Cable Internet Service and nothing more. And coming soon, rumor has it, AT&T will up the anty by providing Internet access at speeds faster than cable television.

The next generation will not be watching television based news and the networks know it. You can see and hear the desperate attempts to create ever increasing situations of conflict where none should exist. They claw and scrape to create enemies and fools of public officials and foreign governments, and it will make no difference because everyone now has access to multiple sources of information and opinions that balance the emotional with the factual, exposing the old media's adoption of the Swift Boat Strategy from the 2000 presidential campaign.

So, it looks like I already waved goodbye to television news. It's been almost a week since I sat through a whole evening news show, and I don't miss it.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:15 PM

    Wolf Blitzer had a stupid bias when he hosted the Democratic debates. He dumbed everything down, even the more intelligent questions asked by audience members. Cable news is nothing but a wasteland of trivial idiocy.
    The lead up to the Iraq War proved that the internet is the only reliable way to stay informed.

    ReplyDelete

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