News industry continues to suffer in chaos

The churn in news channels and newspapers continues. In the US the right-wing Fox channel sacked their star anchor Tucker Carlson and left-wing CNN sacked Don Lemon within no time of each other. It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you are on: Things have been rough for the last few decades. Political podcasts continue to gain momentum while traditional news continues to flounder.

From the late 1990s it’s been just one thing after another. The dime a dozen news websites. The millions of blogs. The video revolution unleashed by YouTube. The absolute upheaval that social media unleashed all over the world. The news chaos that started about 25 years ago continues. There is still no sign of things settling down.

It’s not that social media itself is doing great either. Meta shares have crashed. Twitter has been taken over and there’s even more chaos there. TikTok is being attacked by all the governments of the world. The governments are upset with their loss of power and have been running around like headless chickens all over the world. They have been trying one legislation after another.

In India we now have the amendment of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023. It deals with the issue of “fake or false news” and “fact checking”. But that will only increase the chaos.

Never has so much content been created by so many people. Never has it been distributed so easily. Never has so much content been “free”. The people will not pay for content anymore. The genie has escaped the bottle and will not go back in.

But if everyone has lost so much power and money, then who has gained. Well, it’s supposed to be all the citizens of the world. They are flooded with free content 24X7. But are they happy and informed? No, they are misinformed by a factor of 100. They are even more confused and susceptible to brainwash.

Social media is forcing them to keep up with the Joneses (or rather Kardashians) and that’s leading to depression, anxiety and the FOMO state of mind 24X7. I was a journalism student in 1995 when this churn began and it feels like the changes that have taken place since then are far greater than all the changes that took place in the last century before the advent of the Internet.

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in