We’ve all experienced the #fakenews scandals that have rocked the American electoral process over the past year. What most people don’t realize, however, is that the spectacle of the traditional United States media imploding in credibility has created a gigantic hole for new media upstarts to fill. In short, there is a LOT of opportunity right now for some savvy entrepreneurs to make some serious money and literally change the country for the better.
Creative destruction has been a hallmark of American economics from the beginning. As new ways of doing things are invented, the old ways are destroyed to make way for progress. When the government tries to stop this inevitable process, the country’s citizens suffer. Economic growth slows and standards of living drop. We’ve seen this phenomenon in action over the last decade under the socialist policies of the Obama administration.
The implosion process has been underway in American media and journalism for some time now. Those of us over 50 grew up with network news. I for one remember the Iranian hostage crisis showing every night on ABC News, and the birth of Ted Koppel and Nightline during that period. The faces of American hostages in Tehran paraded every night on national TV are etched into my mind. The good reporting of Sam Donaldson and the reign of Peter Jennings made an impression upon me and most likely sparked my interest in international affairs and geopolitics.
The political environment was different back then. Most of these personalities were liberals but somehow I don’t remember that coming across in their broadcasts. Perhaps I was just too young but I do remember a sense of patriotism that was still embedded in the nightly news in the 1970s, no matter the anchor you were watching. Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, and others were the ultimate entertainment for me as a teenager. I watched CNN religiously and Headline News was a staple of my daily viewing for years.
Then something drastically changed. It started slow, but it has snowballed during the past two years.
The mainstream media, or MSM, became threatened. And somewhere along the way the MSM made the collective decision to stop reporting the news and began to morph into a propaganda machine. Of course there probably had always been hints of this coming through the TV from the ABC News I remember. However, it wasn’t overt. It wasn’t breathtakingly malicious, and it wasn’t in-your-face.
As I’m writing this, the CNN producer tapes are being released from Project Veritas. These tapes essentially show that the Cable News Network has been pushing a false ‘Russia’ narrative with Trump to goose ratings. This effort seems to have been encouraged from the top. “Stay on Russia!” were the orders given. The Leftist corporate media has had a field day during the first five months of the Trump administration and all through the 2016 election campaign. Now, it seems some conservative activists are fighting back, exposing these biased networks for what they are, no better than Pravda during the Soviet days.
All of this intentional misleading of the public for ratings and to push a political agenda has had serious consequences. The American public is fed up. They are turning away from the fake news outlets and seriously looking for news organizations they can trust for their news consumption. This phenomenon means there is serious opportunity in the media space for those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk and attempt to build a new entity to take real estate in the journalism space.
I myself know of several new networks intending to do this that are in the planning stages.
With the management changes at Fox News, conservative America has lost a stalwart media outlet that for decades gave them an alternative to the Marxist spin of the mainstream media. This is no longer the case. The Murdoch sons have made an obvious attempt to dampen the ability of Fox to cater to its long-term audience by getting rid of personalities such as Roger Ailes (prior to his death) and Bill O’Reilly. So much of the older, cable-oriented audience is looking for another home. One American News network has picked up some of this slack.
However, the younger generations do not have this history of watching cable news and are much more oriented towards the web. They consume much of their news over social media. In response to this, a plethora of conservative news outlets have blossomed on the internet, with many more up and coming.
I believe this is where the low-hanging fruits exists for new conservative entrepreneurs to take real estate away from the mainstream media.
Due to the spectacle of Harvard, or Columbia, trained journalists turning into nothing more than propaganda outlets, citizen journalism has begun to flourish. The ivory towers of the news room have come crashing down to the chagrin of the inflated egos in Washington and elsewhere. All it takes is an iPhone and a laptop to now be a journalist who can make a significant impact on world events.
Just look at entities like Project Veritas, The Drudge Report, and Breitbart for examples of past conservative success on the web.
The truth of the matter is that if a new media organization, with a little hard work and smarts, can break a major story today and get national attention, then they are off to the races. This opportunity exists because the mainstream media is ignoring stories that don’t have anything to do with Trump and Russia. Heck, CNN is just making up stories at this point. They are not worried about reporting the news. Many so-called ‘journalists’ rarely leave their desks. So, by paying attention to what ordinary Americans are really worried about, a small, independent, new startup can be catapulted to stardom (and money). And here lies the opportunity.
One problem that needs to be addressed is that tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter control the distribution for these new media upstarts. Publishers have to follow the new algorithms from these behemoths like a religion in order to get their stories ‘out there’ for the world to see. In my opinion, these giants have too much power. There has been example after example of these monopolists censoring and controlling what people see on their news feeds.
The liberal backlash against the allowance of Hillary’s Clinton’s criminality to be spread all over the web in the 2016 election ensures that in the next cycle, the tech giants will work to prevent bad press for the Left from being widely disseminated. Facebook and others have already developed new ways to censor what they consider ‘fake news’ on their platforms. Of course, what is considered ‘fake news’ is in the eye of the beholder.
Facebook has already been busted for censoring ‘conservative’ stories. I myself have had many weird things happen to me on Twitter and Facebook; they stop certain stories from being published, they block out stories from being seen by followers, they shadow block my posts, and so on and so on. Many followers have come to me asking why they can’t read my posts and why I disappear from their news feeds.
In short, it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of money and time to build an effective social media presence on the web for a new publisher. The problem is that once it is built, the tech giants can turn it off in a split second and it is gone forever. You only have to look at Milo’s 300k followers magically ‘disappearing’ and the phenomenon of his account deleted for an example.
The #fakenews scandal of the mainstream media is real, dangerous, and growing. And yes, this scenario provides conservative media entrepreneurs a wide open field for taking journalism real estate. However, there are pitfalls. Congress and the Department of Justice should take a look at attempting to level the playing field by ensuring these tech monstrosities don’t abuse their power by censoring conservative content. For the Russia scandal is not just a media scandal, it is an American scandal. It threatens our very way of life.
