Why Are Television News Anchors So Irrelevant?

Most people by this point know either subconsciously or consciously the main reasons for why CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News regulars act like a group of preppy high school girls. Let's briefly list 4 common reasons before moving on to the underlying explanation.

5) The nature of their work as charismatic and believable presenters of information rather than experts. It is key to mention that the separation between 24 hour cable networks and brief "serious" 6 PM broadcasts on basic cable is disappearing. It used to be that the evening news audience demographic was numerically dominated by the group of elderly depression era females. This explained the need for senior citizens like Dan Rather who was ideal marriage material for the widowed viewers and delivered the authority of a small town doctor. To this day a doctor is shown by polls as the most respected wage laborer whose opinion is considered the most truthful (it makes doctors natural lead characters in TV drama series and movies). However this demographic is dying off and being replaced by baby boomer women (greater female life expectancy always tilts corporate marginal profit seeking) who respect Katie Couric's professional achievement and ability to look good at her age.

4) Support by biggest media corporations of Reagan's efforts to reduce funding for department of education (either through cheerleading it or tacit support from silence). 40 year olds watching the news on TV today were directly affected by the across the board reduction in quality of schooling. Television and newspapers thus have to use less big words and their writers are increasingly relying on baby speak, puns, and outright prepackaged talking points (Gretchen Carlson playing dumb to keep her job is one extreme example of this). Shorter attention span is not the cause but the social symptom. This directly feeds into 3)

3) MSM responding to an Australian tabloid oligarch's invasion of United States with headlong rush towards turning news into entertainment. Of course this would have happened even without the accelerating influence of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation conglomerate. The aging of current TV demographic is permanent since mostly those remain who are unable to master the use of internet two way transmission medium. Since the audience is increasingly represented by rural senior citizens who were failed by the education drives in the 50s and 60s, the intensification of circus style hysterical entertainment as seen on the radio is inevitable in the short term. Murdoch's influence must again be mentioned however. Newstartainment ( trademarked =] ) saw a publicly visible deepening split between internationalist media oligarchs (who encourage globalization since USA is not essential to their base of operations) and nationalist media oligarchs who use their media asset influence to help out USA based heavy industry. NBC Universal can be said to be an example of a nationalist oligarch mouthpiece since it is owned by General Electric (which is reliant on selling real tangible items like engine parts to US military and government organs). News Corporation of course is not as reliant on the well being of United States military-industrial complex so its assets like Fox News can be extra irresponsible with their newstartainment. From the financial perspective it is better strategy for GE's bottom line to support nationalist Democratic party wing of the oligarchy (since better educated/healthier peasants allow US based corps to better compete abroad). That is why MSNBC leans towards democratic millionaires and their businesses. The fact that Fox News was emulated points less to its success than to a transition of formerly US tied corporations towards a more global status. For more information on who the top 10 owners of media clusters are, here is a handy chart (warning : This is from 2002 and the industry got more consolidated  and monolithic since then. Use it to get the thrust of the idea).

2) Losing ad revenue to the internet since television news (and TV programming in general) did not live up to its promise of raising human consciousness as envisioned by the first head of the FCC. The internet serves as a type of American glasnost while television serves as a way to sell state propaganda and mass produced TV drama garbage at home and abroad. That is easily recognizable. Getting young people's trust back (to keep going long term as old people die) is now almost impossible and the road of least resistance is to intensify the circus. Some young people watch the news and MTV just to laugh at how terrible it is (that still is a mild boost to ad revenue). News "anchors" themselves do not come into contact with relevant information much since their networks have actively cut recruitment of journalistic investigative talent. Since it is cheaper to analyze second hand information with talking heads than hire sufficient numbers of understimulated human explorers (and pay for their plane tickets, hotel accommodation, security, etc), news anchors come less and less into real contact with knowledgeable experts. Ridiculous cowards like Wolf Blitzer for example, do not get hits to their self esteem as much from interaction with resident stay at home talking heads than with old school journalist data fiends like Michael Ware. To be fair, as Fox News anchors show, there is a lot of self censorship and dumbing down to remain on the job.

***drum roll***

And the underlining explanation is....

1) National news anchors and pundits are members of the wealthiest 1% of the population. Even if they started out poor (which is increasingly becoming unlikely as key people in the conglomerate hierarchy flood these simple job openings with their children) the long cut throat climb to the top irreparably changed them. The laughing playboys on TV are completely insulated from vast majority of the problems that Americans are facing (except of course problems of taxes on income and capital gains and regulations on financial gambling). Whether they work for Fox, CNN, MSNBC, many of them are good friends and are always on the look out to jump ship to another network to bump up their salary. People like Anderson Cooper, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity would never be caught dead riding a piece of third world joyride called the NYC subway. To them life in America is great and getting better all the time. Every day is just an ego bolstering practice of either driving from luxurious suburbs or being driven to a place where people put make up on them, where they see their friends, and where they talk to some senior citizen politicians/celebrities (who are naturally as insulated). They sit down and chit chat about the problems of places like Detroit ( which for all intensive purposes is as foreign and distant as cities in Africa are). They are goofy and full of giggles not just because they are professional entertainers but because the anchors that elderly people get their "news" from are but middle aged preppy high school girls on the equivalent of a fashion show.

Such dramatic disconnect having continued for as long as it has could only have created neurotic social perceptions the ripple effects of which we'll be feeling for years to come.

Television Will Get A Lot Nastier and Stupid like Radio Did

Elderly audiences will not switch from passive media of TV to active media of Internet as easily as they did from radio to TV. 


Result will be intensification of profit driven circus into RushLimbaugh territory





If you think that current television programming is only good for poking fun at it, you've seen nothing yet. It was relatively easy for the elderly to switch from radio to the new medium of television in the 1950s. After all, it was roughly the same in terms of operational procedure. You turn on the new bigger box, turn the knob to switch the channels, and sit down to enjoy the passive entertainment.

At around the time of Sputnik, the radio companies began various flashy gimmicks that seemed ridiculous to those who remembered the seriousness that was radio broadcasting in the 30s and 40s. The fall of radio industry was much more spectacular than the current fall of television due to mass migration of virtually every demographic group away from it. Sure, there remained the very elderly who couldn't afford TV or clung to radio out of nostalgia. Unlike the aging demographics of today's television audiences however, it wasn't the technological inability to operate the two way entertainment that kept them from switching.

The cold logic of profit driven media wiped out audio programming that needed serious financial expenditure such as salaries for voice actors. Many cultural critics derided television for elevating the visual presentation over the actual spoken content. The percentage of cognitive energies an individual spent on focus and absorption for things like a news story declined because of TV presentation. When one listens to a radio news story, one's attention is just on the information presented (and perhaps the overly exaggerated and dramatic voice to a degree). When one sees the news story spoken by an actor pretending to be a kindly wise old man, a bit of the cognitive energies are spent noticing the objects in the studio such as the clothing of the speakers and the increasingly neat looking pictures and camera recordings.

Radio news networks could only compete with each other by getting actors to change their tone of voice or to use more humor. Television competition kicked things up a notch since the corporation with the most money to spend on paying people to get film footage won in the ratings wars. For a time, such competition was even beneficial for society. The audience's drop in attention to spoken content was more than made up for by sober footage from Vietnam and other parts of the world.

That was not to last since TV news was a lot more boring to look at than visually outrageous shows. News became a massive inconvenience for the bottom line of corporate shareholders. Thus, since the 1970s, we've seen a slow and steady descent towards the current attention deficit circus for the elderly that are MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. Although key 6 a clock news on ABC, NBC, and CBS are not as burdened by the need to be a 24 hour entertainment tabloids, they have nevertheless become such tabloids.

The Oscar winning 1976 movie Network explores the madness of profit driven news. What was a dark humor prediction in 1970s became surpassed by 21st century reality. Ratings forced television to swing from extremes of outrageous drivel such as Jim Cramer's Mad Money to Wolf Blitzer's cowardly paralysis and inability to touch on anything of value.

Radio gives a taste of what's awaiting television in the near future. As mentioned above, the elderly audiences will not be able to migrate easily from passive to interactive media. A larger % will stick with television type content compared to % of those who made the jump from passivity of radio to passivity of TV. That will hold true even when TVs and internet fully merge and offer some easy to use ability for senior citizens to choose their mainstream propaganda (for those who make the effort to find what they think is "news" rather than look at attractive young actors investigating homicides on other channels).

What came to the rescue of the dying radio was the explosion in car ownership and the mass construction of inefficient sprawling settlements that came to be known as suburbia. This stopped and stabilized the free fall in radio audiences and allowed the medium to survive to the present day. The current talk radio popularity of demagogues like Rush Limbaugh who make a living catering to morons is the direct result of cars allowing audio entertainment to survive.

The car culture in United States is the most advanced of any large Western society due to the country's size, lack of political will to build public transit, and the above mentioned rapid construction of suburban sprawl. The millions of Americans (who wanted to emulate the rich by living on city outskirts and to escape living with racial minorities in urban centers) patiently waited years of their lives in traffic jams with the radio playing.

When the national pendulum began to slowly swing towards urban living, the radio demographic increasingly became older, more rural, and correspondingly more religious and nationalistic due to poorer educational infrastructure in the non-suburban countryside. The educated youthful Americans are slowly trickling to the cities to find their urban dream and no longer have as much exposure to cars (and radio content playing inside of them).

The result is the predictable geographic character that radio has undertaken in recent years. In the 1998-2003 period, religious babble, country music, oldies, and talk radio amounted to 41% of radio content. Over 40% of talk radio listeners in 2003 were over the age of 55. Granted, public radio like NPR has grown in recent years but considering that the listeners of public radio tend to be younger and/or more affluent/educated than those who listen to talk radio, the rural, religious, and nationalist character of radio will continue. There are a lot more elderly and poor listeners waiting in traffic in the countryside than affluent young.

What does this mean? It means that television programming will become a lot more petty, circus-like, and well, retarded in the near future. The CNN programing of today and tomorrow will seem like Rush Limbaugh type insanity to 30 year olds in 2020. We can imagine how CNN subscribers in 1980s would view today's CNN. That is not mentioning the fact that television can now be cheaply watched in traffic jams. All new cars will have access to Rush Limbaugh type characters pulling their hair out and passionately ranting about anything that makes ad revenue from old people's attention. Glen Beck is but a beginning. As the white population of United States slides under 50% and economic depression continues, television in the near future will become a colorful graphic circus of moralistic hatred, screaming, shocking tabloid stories, and thus absolute irrelevancy.