US Corporate Media: Swallowing the Bitter Pill They Helped Create

It was not until the deafening sound of the bursting housing bubble could no longer be hushed that the US corporate media began shyly reporting on the sub-prime mortgage disaster. The MSM’s failure to do its job of informing the public and uncovering some of the riskiest behaviors of reckless lenders and credit peddlers in history was akin to its unashamed complacency in the face of the Bush Administration’s outrageous constitutional contraventions and its violations of international law.

Now that the ad-spend is plummeting and the share prices of the big media corporations are collapsing, the MSM has only itself to blame. The expected windfall from the US presidential elections and the Olympic Games, two big boon events which took place the same year, just did not materialize.

In a November 28, 2008 article published by Globe and Mail, Richard Siklos wrote that some parts of the industry - particularly local U.S. media - have seen their sales fall off a cliff and their long-term viability as business models called into question. He quotes Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the world's largest media conglomerates, as saying that automotive advertising, which has represented as much as 40 per cent of the advertising at his local Fox TV stations, is down by 40 per cent this year, with some big advertisers such as imperiled General Motors cutting their spending by more than half.

The slowdown in ad revenue described by R. Siklos is hitting newspapers as well. Online advertising is also likely to plummet to meager levels in 2009.

All this is due to the housing disaster and the financial collapse that came with it. Although the crisis turned out to be one of epic proportions, none of the MSM saw it coming, and it’s not a far-fetched scenario that some corporate media organizations may have simply turned a blind eye, perhaps in the hope that it would go away on its own if nobody brought it up. With the exception of the blog community, no serious attempt was made before 2008 to warn consumers of the looming cataclysm and the hardships that may ensue.

This was no small blunder. It dwarfs the US intelligence failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union or to prevent the 9/11 attacks and to anticipate the huge domestic and international backlash from the misguided invasion of Iraq. It dwarfs all of those failures because the housing swindle was happening right before everybody’s eyes and the red flags raised by many bloggers have been ignored for too long.

The current crisis may bring about a historic shift in the media industry. The MSM is losing ground very rapidly, they may never fully recover from the current slump, as they are being hit from all sides: plummeting ad revenues, image problems, proliferation of alternative info and entertainment sources, and the negative impact of the economic downturn.

R. Siklos says the bigger question is the degree to which the media wipeout will imperil businesses whose future was already in doubt when the downturn hit. Recent weeks have seen some print publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor, drastically cut back their publishing schedules, and several magazines fold.

It looks like this unprecedented downturn in US history is finally taking with it the arrogant US corporate media, as it has already deleted from our collective memory eight years of our existence, eight years during which a highly incompetent president wiped out the achievements of the entire Western civilization.