Old new media and new new media have made off with the audience.
The “thirty years war” of “new media” versus legacy media began almost 40 years ago when the Federal Communications Commission ended the absurdist “fairness doctrine” and Rush Limbaugh built the talk radio mall which I’ve been happy to have a prime location in since. The FCC ended the rule in 1987 and Rush launched his nationally syndicated program in 1988, and thus began the Long March of the new media against legacy media.
Before Rush, there was William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine and “Firing Line” television show and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. R. Emmett Tyrell launched The American Spectator. Regnery Publishing helped launch a thousand ships, but the legacy broadcast networks and big papers were all at first liberal and then left-wing, and the government subsidized media of NPR and PBS were overwhelmingly the same way. (If the budget/reconciliation package fails to completely defund both, it is a failure out of the gate. Whatever was the original argument for both and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it is no longer persuasive and money to all three is money in support of the American left.)
There are two kinds of “new media”: old and new. Old new media includes talk radio, and the first generation of bloggers which appeared more than two decades ago, e.g. Instapundit and Powerline. The disintermediation of legacy media from their reading and watching audiences thus began before 2005 and has only accelerated since.
Now the variety and depth of “new” new media astonishes. There is actually no reason to watch a legacy network that is biased. If you want the pure left wing point-of-view, flip over to MSNBC. Everything else among the old brands is just watered down MSNBC, but run by folks who believe in the MSNBC world view.
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No matter your tastes or age, there is a cornucopia of new media choices available to you. Fox News, both broadcast and online, is the backbone of the new media ecosystem and talk radio remains a force of considerable and expanding reach.
New broadcast networks like the Salem News Channel exist to provide choice on the center-right to right, and the new force majeure on the media landscape is podcasting. My own diet of pods runs from the PG—National Review’s “The Editors” and “The McCarthy Report”—to the PG-13—”Getting Hammered” with Mary Katharine Ham and Vic Matus to the “Commentary” podcast and “Call Me Back” with Dan Senor—and the R-rated—”Ruthless” and “The Megyn Kelly Show”—and that’s just the pods aimed at least in part at the 40+ demo.
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Barron Trump and Alex Bruesewitz both famously helped guide President Trump to the enormous online audiences under 35 that devote hardly a second to legacy media but which consume pods by the scores of hours.
Now legacy media is crumbling, simply fading away, with audiences declining and subscriptions plummeting and advertising revenue shaky. The folks who buy advertising long ago realized their budgets go much further with both old new media and new new media. Because the universe of potential audience has sought out those new platforms. They are not operating out of habit. They are cutting cords.
Repurposing predictable, biased content into different types of displays, churning out newsletters with last generation columnists, reconfiguring deck chairs on sinking chairs—all of it doomed. Puzzles and recipes have saved the New York Times but how long until advertising wants only the puzzles and recipes and subscribers figure out there are a lot of free puzzles and recipes to be had.
It’s a death spiral. Rush launched it. It has slowly accelerated and now the speed has reached new levels—and will continue to accelerate.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
