Brash millennial upstarts were once the future of news
A decade ago, as a young war reporter for Vice News, I had the nagging feeling that one day I’d find my wizened older self, like an old NME journalist droning on about punk, reminiscing about the time when we brash millennial upstarts had the world of TV newsgathering at our feet. But I never expected it to be so soon.
Vice Media is preparing to file for bankruptcy – after attempts to find a buyer for a company once valued at $5.7 billion appeared to be going nowhere.
More than five companies have expressed interest in acquiring Vice, The New York Times reported on Monday, but the chances of a sale are seen as increasingly remote.
The decline of Vice comes a little over a week after BuzzFeed News announced its closure, and three months after Vox laid off 130 people, representing 7 percent of staff.
Vice, Buzzfeed, Vox. Commonality? All left all the time. The market is saturated.
WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to the news media and the impact it’s having on democracy and political polarization in the United States, Americans are likelier to say it’s doing more harm than good.
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults say the news media is increasing political polarization in this country, and just under half say they have little to no trust in the media’s ability to report the news fairly and accurately, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s sudden departure this week, ratings for Fox News’s new 8 p.m. weekday show appear to be on the decline as viewership again tumbled on Wednesday night.
Data published by ratings service Nielsen show that Fox drew some 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade and “Fox News Tonight” in the timeslot that Carlson once occupied. That places the network at No. 2 behind MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
His show’s cancellation removes from the national debate a fearless voice for a perspective hard to find elsewhere.
On Monday night, Fox News aired a segment about the threats that Matt Taibbi had received from House Democrats, and how journalists like him increasingly must choose to stay silent under pressure or face the consequences. The report was spot on—except, on that day of all days, it felt out of place. What made that day special, of course, was that Fox News itself had just fired Tucker Carlson, its highest-rated single personality.
Since the ouster of Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ ratings have plummeted. The demo ratings (based on viewers aged 25-54) released yesterday from Tuesday night reveal every show on Fox from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. significantly dropped in numbers. “The Five” was down 7 percent, Brett Baier’s “Special Report” was down 23 percent, “Jesse Watters Primetime” was down 35 percent, “Hannity” was down 44 percent, and “The Ingraham Angle” was down 20 percent. Carlson’s old 8 p.m. time slot was hit the hardest — down nearly 70 percent compared to last Tuesday.
Several weeks ago, as Fox News lawyers prepared for a courtroom showdown with Dominion Voting Systems, they presented Tucker Carlson with what they thought was good news: They had persuaded the court to redact from a legal filing the time he called a senior Fox News executive the c-word, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Carlson, Fox News’s most-watched prime-time host, wasn’t impressed. He told his colleagues that he wanted the world to know what he had said about the executive in a private message, the people said. Mr. Carlson said comments he made about former President Donald Trump—“I hate him passionately”—that were in the court documents were said during a momentary spasm of anger, while his dislike of this executive was deep and enduring.
Fox News “is dead,” and Tucker Carlson already has his first job offer. It came within hours of the shocking announcement that he and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation were “parting ways.” Who took the biggest hit? It looks like Fox News has.
Recent highlights of Carlson’s career with Fox News included interviewing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, highlighting the damage done to young people by transgender ideology, and documenting the dangers of plastics.
A week after Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit against it by an electronic voting machine company, the right-wing news outlet and its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson have “agreed to part ways.”
Carlson, who hosted “Tucker Carlson Tonight” at 8 p.m. on weeknights, broadcast his final show on April 21st, Fox News said in a statement, and that “Fox News Tonight” will air live with rotating hosts in its place.
Fox News’ dumping of Tucker Carlson probably ends an era in cable news.
As a business proposition, Monday morning’s earth-shattering announcement that Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News comes off as the dumbest thing since, well…
Maybe tying Bud Light’s brand to a transgender attention grabber? I dunno.
With CNN’s alleged rebranding to be practicioners of “journalism” maybe both they and Fox are signaling they hope to capture the political middle. If that middle even exists any longer.
Everybody is up in arms about Tucker Carlson’s and Fox News’ split.
Lots of rumors regarding why it happened are floating around, and as with all breaking news stories you should wait for a bit before you trust anything anybody says. “Inside sources” or outright speculations are unreliable. Was it Dominion? Was it Tucker wanting to defend himself? Was it something else?
Online media companies got exactly what they said they wanted.
BuzzFeed News is closing up shop. Web visitors can still find all the quizzes and listicles they have come to love—those exist on the nonnews side of BuzzFeed—but the journalism division is shuttering.
The death of BuzzFeed News marks the definitive endpoint of a certain form of social media–driven, millennial-centric journalism; as such, it is being eulogized by many former contributors, including Charlie Warzel, who correctly observes that “The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today.” Ben Smith, the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News who infamously published the Steele dossier—a substantially discredited intelligence document that sought to tie former President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin—and current Semafor editor in chief lays the blame at the feet of social media. BuzzFeed News‘ doom was at hand, he writes, “when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful; when platforms decided news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites.”
On Friday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” journalist Matt Taibbi stated that the lack of mainstream media coverage of the “massive story of national consequence” of former acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s role in the letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian misinformation is an example of how “we’re starting to come to” the “same situation” as in the Soviet Union where “nobody read the newspapers because it was all lies and there was no real news in [them].”
Yesterday morning, BuzzFeed announced that it was shuttering BuzzFeed News, its journalistic arm. Whatever employees of the news division remain after layoffs will be resorbed into the otherwise clickbait-driven site (presumably to be later replaced by an improved ChatGPT algorithm). This was an occasion for wistful reflection on the left and among mainstream-media journalists/academics (but, as the old joke goes, I repeat myself), indifference among the masses (“What, the cat-meme listicle site? They had a news division?”), and grimly smug amusement on the right, whose denizens have long regarded BuzzFeed as the original bad actor in what became “Russiagate.”
BuzzFeed News is has published its last listicle.
The parent company of the site that took the news business by storm in the early 2010s and also published the now-debunked Steele Dossier is being shut down, according to a memo from BuzzFeed Inc. CEO Jonah Peretti on Thursday
