Richard Nixon lambasted the media half a century ago as if they were a single entity, and as they were then dominated by a few big national TV networks, magazines and newspapers, he might have had a point.
This century, though, US journalism has dramatically diversified, subdividing into segments that mix genres as well as media: mass infotainment with well established websites such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost, and national TV networks (CBS, ABC, NBC) with their local affiliates, and news channel CNN; a partisan segment with (conservative) Fox and (progressive) MSNBC, conservative-dominated talk radio, the political blogosphere, and political TV satire like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight; and a quality segment led by national papers and websites such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Politico, magazines like Time and The Atlantic, and leading regional papers. Small but dynamic public and nonprofit sectors offer an occasional counterbalance to this market-based system.
The boundaries between these segments are fluid and porous. Network news and digital outlets such as HuffPost and Vox try to straddle the infotainment/quality divide. Conservative critics dispute the claims of the New York Times and other mainstream media to be nonpartisan. Sinclair, the largest local TV news chain, which reaches 70% of American households, recently hired a former Trump spokesperson as its chief political analyst and has been accused of using its 173 channels to ‘advance a mostly right-leaning agenda’.
To fully understand this new ecosystem, we need to go back to the period after Watergate and the ‘golden age’ of the 1970s — the 1980s and 1990s, when profit became the news companies’ first priority.
Market failure, policy impasse
In France many newspapers struggle to earn more than they spend and would not survive without government subsidies, but news has long been a profitable (...)
