Ode To GeezerMedia
RIP 1948-2024
The most-viewed live event of all time was the 2008 Beijing Olymics Opening Ceremony. It pulled roughly 2 billion viewers worldwide, though to be fair, roughly half of that was in China alone. Live Aid in 1985 pulled 1.9 billion, and the FIFA World Cup routinely pulls about 1.5 billion for live telecasts. Note that none of these has any long-term historic value.
By contrast, the most viewed podcast episode of all time was the 2018 Rogan/Musk interview, which pulled in 69 million views over all platforms, including live and recorded streams. The Rogan/Trump interview has already taken second place with 45 million views in five days only on YouBoob. This doesn’t include Spotify or TwiX, for which I don’t yet have numbers.
In comparison, ABC/NBC/CBS nightly news programming pulls 18.9 million combined average views per night. The combined average daily viewership of the top four cable news networks is 2.5 million across all platforms, with FOX getting roughly half of it.
Since broadcast networks and scheduled programming were invented in the US, it makes sense that the US invented scheduled nightly news shows. Granted, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird made the first public broadcast of a television signal for the BBC in 1926, using mechanical-scan receivers; however, it was RCA’s Red and Blue networks, which eventually became NBC and ABC respectively, that pioneered scheduled TeeVee programming.
A little historical side note: I was in the London borough of Haringey, on 10 March 1980, watching the Alexandra Palace (Ally Pally) burn down. This was the birthplace of BBC television and a new mass medium.
The FCC filed an antitrust suit against RCA in the early 1940s, forcing RCA to sell off the Blue network (primarily news and cultural programming), which rebranded as the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The Red network rebranded as the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). At about the same time, Columbia (film, radio, music) launched its television operations as the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).
On 21 September 1948, CBS aired the first Nightly News program, creating the half-hour national news reader format that we still suffer under today. This was quickly followed by Boston’s WBZ-TV The 10 O’Clock News, which was the first local affiliate news show. This created the local format we still suffer under today. On 1 June 1980, Ted Turner launched CNN, the first all-news cablecast, and civilization has been crumbling ever since.
Here’s a look at where it all began:
CBS Evening News - Douglas Edwards was the first anchor of the CBS Television News in 1948, and remained the anchor until 1962, when Walter Cronkite took over. How the mighty have fallen.
ABC Evening News - John Charles Daly was the first anchor of ABC’s News and Views, when it debuted in 1948. Daly was well-known for hosting the game show What's My Line?, which says a lot right there.
NBC Evening News - John Cameron Swayze, best known in later years as the Timex pitch guy, was the original anchor for NBC's Camel News Caravan, which began in 1949. This was the first successful American television news show.
The podcast format is credited to Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Winer developed the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, which allowed audio files to be distributed over the internet. In 2004, Curry created a program called iPodder, enabling users to download podcasts to their iPods. This combination of technologies laid the groundwork for the podcasting phenomenon.
The internet changed everything.
The internet killed daily newspapers, gutted radio audiences, and has been relentlessly leaching television audiences for two decades. It has democratized news gathering and reporting in a way no other technology has ever done. Combined with ubiquitous phone cameras and on-demand live streaming from just about anywhere by anyone, audiences are no longer captive to a handful of networks and “gatekeepers”.
My peers in the GeezerMedia still grouse about “broadcast quality” and “production value,” but clearly the world doesn’t care about those things. Voting with their eyeballs and wallets, folks are obviously more interested in diverse opinions and eyewitness reporting, than anything the networks can offer.
Eighty years is a good run, and the GeezerMedia has produced some iconic moments and personalities, but it’s time to lay that corpse in its eternal rest. The pinnacle of broadcast news occurred on 22 November 1963, when a live audience witnessed the assassination of a US president and the ensuing events. It rose again with Apollo 11, and again with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but the horse-and-hound shows of daily events rarely rise to those levels of global immediacy.
Instead, GeezerMedia has become little more than shrieking puffballs trying to terrorize audiences into fearful lock-step compliance with a predetermined narradigm, and it’s failing miserably. The more they shriek, the more folks wander over to Rogan and others.
In the heyday of GeezerMedia, the personalities had real-life experience. They went to real war zones, stood in the ruins of real disasters, and had real emotional reactions to real events.
Nowadays, they are blow-dried primadonnas with “journalism” degrees in front of green screens and mocked-up crime scenes, whose sole purpose it is to read press releases and shriek. The Editorial boards have taken over the news rooms, and the anchors have been replaced by shock jocks.
It’s time. Let us bow our heads in memory of the pioneers who brought us mass media. It was fun while it lasted. The NewMedia are here to stay, and “broadcast quality” and “production value” are anachronistic terms from a bygone era. May the pancake and puffballs rest eternally if not peacefully.
Slán agus beannacht.
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There is only one movie that perfectly captures the GeezerMedia, and that is Broadcast News (1987). In fact, I see it as more of a documentary than entertainment. Bill Hurt is the quintessential national news anchor, and Albert Brooks embodies the few remaining journalists with integrity. Holly Hunter is every network producer I’ve ever worked with. Scary real while side-splittingly funny at the same time, especially the parts about running to Master Control, grappling with ethical dilemmas, and the eternal cocktail parties.
Hoisting a glass on the Far Side:
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Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:
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A major blow to the media was the loss of what was once called 'investigative journalism'.
Investigative journalism was a niche sector in journalism that only larger media companies could engage in, but it was always the ghost in the machine: the real raison d'être. The reason for this is that it took years to fully and decisively investigate a complex case; sometimes, years would go into an investigation only to discover that it was a dead end.
For that reason, not every media organization could marshall its feeble resources into such a venture.
There were some spectacular successes in the world of investigative journalism, such as Three Mile Island, the McDonald's slavery case, various serial killer cases, etc.
Unfortunately, in our day and age, it seems to have gone the way of the dodo. Organizations simply do not have the discipline, forbearance or financial wherewithal to fund a multi-year investigation that might end up without a sellable story.
It is much easier to simply cherry-pick a few choice phrases and shoot them out like so many memes. By the time they are discredited or nuanced, the media organization will have gone on to another hot button topic.
In the end, readers are not better informed and are simply going for click-bait. With the shift to citizen journalism, thanks to the empowerment of the individual, we may see a return to investigative journalism on a micro scale.
I recall that, after the Trump assassination attempt, various YouTubers conducted forensic examinations using information online to create a timeline and hypothesize on the flow of events. They did this quite successfully.
In contrast, the conventional media was silent and the authorities tight-lipped.
So there is a spark of hope... maybe the ghost in the machine is not a ghost after all:)
"Ode to the Geezer"? I'm not dead yet. Your tip jar still isn't working.
I will not miss the GeezerMedia. The show is over. All of it... media, government, voting...
The audience saw what was behind the Wizard of Oz' curtain during Covid.
We are gone and not coming back to the show.