Journalist and author Matt Taibbi on Friday said the diminished trust in traditional news media across the country can be attributed to a change among companies to cater to targeted audiences that consume news as “entertainment,” rather than information.
An analysis published by Axios this week that found trust in traditional media has reached an all-time low.
Taibbi explained on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” that this ties back to the pattern of news organizations in recent decades no longer seeking to reach a broader audience.
“We had a radical change in the commercial formula of media that really started in the 80s and 90s with Fox News, where the old idea was you would try to get the entire audience, that’s what ABC, CBS and NBC were doing,” Taibbi explained. “And then with the advent of cable and the internet and the atomization of the media landscape, we developed new strategies that were based on picking a demographic and trying to keep it and dominate it.”
He then added that while, “people are actually consuming media more than ever,” audiences now “consume it more as entertainment than as news.”
“The numbers are very striking, they watch a lot of it, they scroll it constantly on their telephones, but their trust in the information they’re getting has gone down, and that is I think largely a function of this changed formula which really changes the mission of what the news is,” the journalist said.
Watch part of Taibbi’s interview above.
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