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The very fact that your eyes rolled (just a little bit) at the title tells you that it is absolutely true. So true its obnoxious to proclaim it. Perhaps cable news died when CNN made a hologram of\u00a0 Jessica Yeller <\/a>\u00a0and beamed her into the “Situation Room” just to talk horse race bullshit during the 2008 election. Or maybe it was as far back as 2004 when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire<\/a> and shattered the fourth wall by excoriating the dual hosts for destroying public discourse. The beginning of the end might be hard to pinpoint, but the end is certainly coming. Fox News had its lowest ratings since 2001<\/a> this year, but still has more viewers than CNN & MSNBCNEWSWHATEVERITSCALLEDNOW combined. Even if ratings weren\u2019t a problem, credibility certainly is. Imagine if CNN stopped calling themselves the \u201cMost Trusted Name In News<\/i>\u201d and used the more accurate, \u201cA Little Over Half of Our Viewers Think We\u2019re Believable.<\/a><\/i>\u201d By now it is clear that the zombified talking heads of cable news are either bought and sold, or just irrelevant. Cable news channels\u2019 hulking, telepresent bodies have been run through and left to rot on the cynical barbs of political bloggers and just about anyone at a comedy shop\u2019s open-mic night. This last series of screw-ups in Boston (here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and unless it was avant-garde electronic literature, here<\/a>) begs the question if cable news channels can even tell us what\u2019s going on anymore. Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse.<\/p>\n Perhaps its more accurate to say that cable news has a terminal illness. The state of cable news is still pretty good, but there are few signs of stability or long-term health. Below are a few pertinent figures presented by Lee Rainie (@Lrainie<\/a>), the Director of Pew Research Center\u2019s Internet & American Life Project, at the International Journalism Festival last year:<\/a><\/p>\n CNN might not be shuttering its touchscreens anytime soon but the trend is clear: television news is still dominant but not for long. The demand for cable news (or any news for that matter) is shrinking, and yet the supply seems to grow. Al-Jazeera<\/a> is coming to the United States, and there are dozens of online news outfits that offer hours of original reporting distributed as audio and video content. Some are great; others make you question the wisdom of the first amendment. All are looking to specialize, carve out niche viewer markets, and remain solvent in an industry that is constantly being disrupted by new technologies and socio-political trends. One could argue, like Globalvision Inc\u2019s Rory O\u2019Conner does<\/a>, that new players signal a lack of quality product, not a lack of demand:<\/p>\n \u2026this is an excellent time for any entity interested in making an impact in the increasingly dismal US cable news environment. Fox News, which has long been the industry leader in ratings, has lost huge audience share since the re-election of its\u00a0bete noir<\/i>\u00a0Barack Obama. Fox stars like Sean Hannity are reportedly “haemorrhaging viewers” – Hannity has lost nearly half of his audience since the election, with the\u00a0biggest drop in ratings<\/a>\u00a0coming in the coveted 24 to 54-year-old demographic, which had been one of his strongest groups of viewers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We won\u2019t know until Al-Jazeera America is up and running, if O\u2019Conner is right and declining viewership has more to do with terrible reporting and producing, than an overall declining interest in this thing invented in the 80s called cable news. This seems unlikely, given Rainie\u2019s presentation data that suggests the changing technology has changed how we consume and think about news. News isn\u2019t something we passively receive; it is part of a conversation. Even if I see a story on television I might want to express my feelings about it on Facebook<\/a>. I might also want to sign a petition<\/a>, change my profile picture in solidarity<\/a>, and engage in vigilante justice<\/a>. The news segments and interviews are cannon fodder for political arguments with my cousin and talking points for when I\u2019m feeling preachy. The digital artifacts that contain Breaking News\u2122 are rallying points for debate and action.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/irevolt\/status\/325936703950974977<\/p>\n Spivak once observed that theory is like the currency of ideas. Just as Dollars and Yen make goods easily comparable and exchangeable, theory makes it easier to circulate ideas. News stories work in a very similar way. Monologues and dialogues are edited down to provide a single, highly refined narrative. It does not matter whether that narrative strives to invoke partisanship, entertain, distract, or appear as objective fact<\/a>, <\/i>they are all compressed into the two socio-technical codes that permit the widest consumption: General American English<\/a> and H.264<\/a>.<\/i> News propagates faster and wider if it is easily compatible with the places we meet and talk with one-another. TVs are still in family homes, bars, and offices, but they\u2019re competing with the smartphone in your pocket and the computer that you\u2019re supposed to be working on. That news segment will only go so far on television. But dice up that Maddow interview into 8-minute segments; slap a share this<\/i> plugin on it and it\u2019ll be the new reason why I won\u2019t speak to my friends from high school.<\/p>\n These are very dangerous waters. Spivak\u2019s currency metaphor lets us commit an egregious amount of moral relativism. Agnostic to content, we can treat all stories told in the news genre as the same kind of artifact. Glenn Beck and Democracy Now! are about as different as Fruit Loops and Kashi cereal. There might be some nutritional differences, but they\u2019re both highly processed, pre-packaged goods meant for mass consumption. If news is only as good as its ability to traverse our augmented society, then a story about a water-skiing squirrel<\/a> bests an expos\u00e9 on Chinese factories so long as the former is on Youtube and the latter remains on paper. This doesn\u2019t seem totally right. The death of newspapers and the terminal illness contracted by cable news is not a case of technological disruption: it\u2019s a crisis of legitimacy.<\/b><\/p>\n Remember, we\u2019re not talking about news here. Not journalism. The news contains journalism but it also has corporate press releases, weather forecasts, recipes from Emeril Lagasse, and Amanda Bynes\u2019 latest tweets. Journalism is a profession. News is a sociotechnical phenomenon. There is some excellent journalism being done around the world, but very little of it has anything to do with cable news. O\u2019Conner might be right, and Al Jazeera can succeed based on quality content, but I remain unconvinced that critical thought can be conveyed through the current sociotechnical apparatus.<\/p>\n\n
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