Steve Krusier notes in his column this morning:
The media landscape has changed so much in just the last few years that Carslon will be writing his own ticket rather easily. People are used to paying for content à la carte now. That wasn’t the case even five years ago.
And that’s true enough.
The fact is that the changes in the electronic news business are being driven by technology as well as content. In fact, I will suggest to you that because of the way streaming technology works, people are making their own choices what programming to watch in a way that wasn’t possible just a few short years ago. Thus, the programming that survives is by far more in tune with the viewers then it was back in the days when there was only a few channels and you either took that or you turned the set off.
Back in the old days, when only The Big Three …CBS ABC NBC and with them to a lesser degree PBS, had a monopoly on what people saw and when they saw it. Thing is, even back then the news organizations existed solely on what I’ve seen euphemistically called life support from those networks entertainment divisions.
The interesting part about that is that Fox alone made enough money to survive.
With more people turning to on- demand programming these days that Monopoly cannot possibly exist. The finances as problematic as supporting a news division was back in those days, these days it’s impossible.
Increasingly, there’s simply not enough viewers left, even if we assume that these major news outlets were programming things that people actually wanted to see.
And that, too, is problematic at least from the perspective of the people responsible for programming over the air and cable channels, particularly where news programs are concerned. Witness the horrendously poor ratings for bottom feeders like CNN, MSNBC etc.
Don’t look for the rise of leftist talk shows or news programs on streaming services, because of fox being stupid about Tucker Carlson. Oh, they’ll continue stumbling along but they will never draw the kind of numbers needed to support such a venture.
Remember that viewer or listener choice rules most of this.
Most of you probably won’t remember this but some genius came up with the idea of putting former governor Mario Cuomo on the radio, supposedly as a counter to Rush Limbaugh. It lasted for about a month and a half, mostly because nobody was buying what he was selling. That’s a lesson that has yet to be learned by some quarters.
Call it as you will, the very reason that Sean Hannity Tucker Carlson and before that Bill O’Reilly managed to get the viewership numbers they did was because people actually wanted to watch them, whereas people are somewhat less willing to sacrifice a particular time slot in their day to listen to the ramblings of Rachel Maddow, Don Lemmon, etc.
The more popular programs that we have spoken of here moving to the streaming world, will undoubtedly cause the delta in those popularity numbers to grow, not shrink.
Carlson, Hannity, etc, are most likely going to be the last gasp of network based shows of their kind. But let’s not shed any tears. The Monopoly of the channelized programmers has been broken and people will actually get programming they want.
That smile you saw on Tucker Carlson’s face yesterday? He knows it. No matter what happens at this point he will be doing well, because simply put, the restraints are gone, both in terms of what they put into their programming… A point which has been a problem with Fox for some time now… and when viewers and listeners can take part in those shows.
It comes down to the idea that Carlson and the other programming that people actually want to watch will only get larger as a result of this, not smaller.
And that’s a good thing.
