a predictable decline

In 1993, the novelist Michael Crichton predicted that the news biz would implode within a decade. He was off on the timeline, but otherwise, he was right on the money.

Jack Shafer reports:

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

In an interview with Shafer, Crichton observes the single biggest change in the “news”—namely, there isn’t any. It’s all “views” [e.a.]: 

“The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, ‘How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama’s chances?’ ‘Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?’ ‘How will McCain overcome the age argument?’ These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling,” he says.

Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public’s interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.

This gets close to my own thesis but is slightly different. I think the public is interested not so much in new viewpoints but rather in new stories, and in new heroes and villains.