I’m pretty useless in a lot of different ways:
First, nobody even reads me anymore. I have been quickly replaced by the online version of myself. My online counterparts think they’re better than I am sadly.
Is my death here? The same newspapers that guided our Founding Fathers to politicize and disseminate among the general public the freedoms they were fighting for in the American Revolution are now on the brink of self-destruction. Woe is me. I’ve always had general respect and revere in the public spectrum – a reliable source of information, until sensationalism became a primary focus. The birth of Yellow Journalism, the era in which Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1895 competed for sales, where news increasingly became focused around scandal-mongering, sensationalism, jingoism, or some otherwise unprofessional standardized media practices, brought to the nation a mistrust in my reliability. Fortunately for me, this faith would be restored with the investigative coverage that would review to the public lies propagandized by the Johnson administration about the Vietnam War, through the my brother (the New York Time’s) historic publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, as well as investigate coverage by Time, The New York Times, and the Washington Post that would bring down the Nixon administration by exposing Watergate. As the public’s distrust of the government went down, their faith in me and investigative journalism went up. Unfortunately, this would not be enough to save them.
According to The Future Exploration Network’s media research, I was set to be extinct in 2017, but here I still am. Several factors underlying this extinction include technology uptake (those using newer forms of technology to access news, such as the Internet, or mobile phones), economic development, the structure of the newspaper industry (which is too in the past and not up to date), demographics (newspaper reading is more of an activity of the older generation), and consumer patterns in their preferences and behaviors. It is indeed a fact that as the usage of me and readership goes down (whereas weekday sales of newspapers are down 9% from last year), the usage of the Internet for news purposes is indeed going up. Though some would cite the recession and Internet usage for the decline in my purchases, one particular reason could also be the conscious decision by my publishers to focus on more loyal and profitable readers, raising their prices and catering to those readers, while at the same time, alienating potential new readers.
As the increase in various online media sites increase, due to the conglomeration of news sites by such aggregates as Google News, the potential for somebody to pay for online news usages is potentially very low. Furthermore, the same increase in online news is paralleled by an increase in the amount of information disseminating from the online blogosphere, increasing to political polarization as blogs are becoming more and more liberal or conservative in opinion.
What does the drop in viewership of me mean for the potential of politics in the United States? The answer: polarization. As my viewership drops, so do the traditional ABC-CBS-NBC network evening news broadcasts. CNN, one of the first ever cable news networks is unable to prevent its ratings from consistently dropping, reaching a new low in 2010. CNN, which is supposed to be the most moderate of the three major cable news networks, is now behind the conservative-leaning Fox News and the liberal-leaning MSNBC. If viewers are not flocking to their TV sets, they are primarily flocking to the Internet for news. Because of this conscious decision to go online for political news, users are more likely to garner information from sources they trust – or sources rather than they agree with. Subsequently more conservative-thinking individuals and more liberal-leaning individuals are more likely to go to online blogs or news sites that parallel, and often channel their position on the political spectrum. This breeds deeper polarization in the political arena – leading to the birth of the Tea Party, as well as left-wing sites like Moveon.Org. This isn’t all bad though, for it could provide a potential for third parties such as the Green Party or the Libertarian Party to rise in popularity, as more people become open to the idea of political change, in opposition to the standard two-party system that has dominated politics over the last century and a half..
Though I have a long been part of the history of America, the likelihood of my extinction in a future date is very high. Though this could potentially lead to polarization as users flock to their news of choice online, the future is not necessarily a dark one. With the Internet comes new ideas and new sources of information – as opposed to the various forces in the United States that have dominated news ever since its independence. As long as the freedom our Founding Fathers gave to us is alive in the coming future, the Internet will be the new avenue in mass media by which news will be disseminated to the general public, revolutionizing American thinking for the better for this generation and all future generations to come.
That being said, sorry for the long tangent, but I was simply used for one purpose and one purpose alone today: to mummify certain students at Rise Kohyang Middle School.
After they were mummified, they raced to see who was the fastest. The winner was a dark Filipino little boy. And then I go tossed in the trash, left alone to wither and die as I usually do. Someday there will no longer be copies of me for the world to embrace, till that day I will cherish each and every second of life.
