[Flash Walken]

Americans’ trust in media is at historic lows, yet profits for many cable and network news stations have reached record highs. Is this a market failure or the press we deserve?

Blaming the media has long been a favorite American pastime, but the most recent Gallop national survey — showing trust in the press at an all time low for the second time in three years — at 32% — indicates a problem greater than the tidal regularity of campaign season rhetoric and points to an urgent need to review the state of journalism in America.

Commercial media, operating on a for-profit model, are the dominant force in the American press. Despite the exponential growth of channels and platforms for distributing content, over 90% of all mass media (film, books, music, newspapers, magazines and television) are produced by just six corporate sources, down from fifty in 1980. While much ink has been spilled foretelling the death of television in the internet age, commercial tv broadcasting still accounts for the most common source of news for Americans. Television is very much alive and successfully competing for the attention of a sizable, albeit shrinking audience — and more importantly, still leading the national discussion.

The most viewed event in the 2015 campaign was the first Republican debate, attracting nearly 24 million viewers (about seven percent of the population) — vastly more than comparable primary debate turnout in recent years. The first general election debate broke over 80 million in viewers. Most of the attention has centered around the bombastic campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump: Every program that Trump has appeared on has benefitted financially — the Fox News and CNN debates were the most watched in each of those network’s histories, late-night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel each scored their most watched shows ever with Trump as a guest; Saturday Night Live, despite the controversy and protest, considered the decision to invite Trump as the week’s celebrity guest ratings gold.

A study by Tyndall Report, a media research group, illustrates the preference for spectacle goes beyond cable news and late night entertainment. In 2015, among the big three network stations — ABC, NBC & CBS — Trump’s campaign received 234 minutes of on air reporting compared to ten minutes during the same period for Bernie Sanders, a snub referred to by his supporters as the “Bernie blackout.”

The campaigns themselves are a sort of free market enterprise in the press’ view — a great deal of time and energy focused on who raised the most money, which traditionally has been required to fund staff and outreach, but most importantly to purchase advertising to brand their campaign, repeat their catchphrases, attack opponents and get their message out to as many voters as possible. It is here where the conflicts between commercial tv news and capital intensive campaigns become most vivid.

The comparison between Bernie Sanders and Trump are especially fitting, not with regard to the substance of their messages, but because as each candidate offered a similar narrative to news stations — running “outsider” campaigns while having the most enthusiastic turnout at public events of their opponents. It is hard to deny that Sanders events were the most photogenic — a seeming goldmine for the press to endlessly ride.

As far as ratings and advertising revenue go, Trump was a blessing to the business of news. To its substance, he has been a revealing case study on the contradictions of profit and public interest.

Presently, competition between commercial media outlets has come in the form of news broadcasts increasingly favoring spectacle over substance. Over the last decade, numerous layoffs and closures of foreign bureaus and investigative wings at newspapers, network and cable stations have been replaced by entertainment news, self-help and human interest stories. The Tyndall report shows a precipitous drop in coverage of domestic and foreign issues, nearly half of what it was as recently as the 1980s, while coverage of crime has increased 4-fold, despite a continued and steady decline in crime during the intervening decades.

The media itself, no monolith, has shown signs of discontent and self reflection, with some attempts to reign in the spectacle with fact-checks and assertive journalism.

But the tidal shift in the coverage of Trump from fawning self interested curiosity to righteous condemnation only had the effect of reinforcing the mistrust for media already present — left, center and right.

For politicians in this climate of public mistrust, however, lambasting the press has evolved from a caricatured verbal tick into a winning public relations strategy, and somehow in spite of constant lamenting, the business of news is thriving.

A study by the non-profit, non-partisan group Free Press, conducted by media scholars from NYU, asserts that America journalism is experiencing a “classic case of market failure,” a problem America is uniquely vulnerable to because of its disproportionate reliance on commercial media and chronically underfunded public broadcasting.

https://medium.com/@k.zare/profiting...07d#.3ptpia1nt