Wednesday the 20th of January 2021, is the inauguration day of President Joe Biden. My suspicion is that the Biden Presidency will turn out to be a boring one; in a way that we haven't seen in more than 80 years. He inherits a similar set of circumstances to the second presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who was president during the Influenza pandemic of 1918-20. I think that progressives and statists will be deeply disappointed by Biden, that the establishment right of the Democratic Party will welcome a return to boring governance, and that the 'conservative' right will declare him to be either incompetent or the devil incarnate despite his presidency actually doing the job of boring governance.
That last point poses a problem not just for the authoritarian/rightist media in America such as Fox News, NewsMax, One America Network, and other assorted nuts, but also for the banana-choc and choc-banana media outlets like CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, as well as the other assorted fruit media.
Trump has been at the centre of the news cycle for 5½ years and all of the news media, now has the very real problem that the Biden Presidency will be so boring that it will be difficult to even manufacture outrage.
News media has done exceptionally well over the past few years because the old adage that 'if it bleeds, it leads' is incredibly useful in selling advertising space. Audiences are almost always blissfully ignorant of the fact that their eyeballs and attention is actually the product for sale and that as far as profitable media is concerned, the spectator is the spectacle. That product (people's eyeballs and attention) is very much driven, moulded, and shaped, more by whether something is emotive rather than if it is true. Media outlets like One America Network learned from the experience of Fox News that the truthiness of the news barely has to exist and after watching small amounts of the One America Network so that I could underground what it is, I came to the conclusion that it is no different to the Sydney based newspaper "The Truth" from a century ago.
What we have seen in the last few weeks especially is a kind of reset where Mr Trump having lost the election, had now turned on his former friends at Fox and has kind of migrated a small portion of the audience elsewhere. Fox News appears to be sort of rudderless. The rest of the news media kind of gave up on trying to report anything coming out of the White House as it became more insensible. It is a bit like watching the analysis of a football match after the game happened, except that football pundits know that that window lasts exactly 20 minutes before the sports news cycle moves on. In relation to a Presidential Election Campaign which lasts a year, the normal news cycle should last about a month, except this time around the match was disputed by the loser.
What I suspect will happen in future is that Fox News will revert to playing the role of being an opposition party to a Democrat in the same way that it did for Obama. What I also suspect will happen is that the other media outlets will have to contend with the fact that Donald Trump is no longer the de facto editor-in-chief and that they won't get a stream of tweets and outrage from Joe Biden in the same way.
I also suspect that the racist elements of Fox News which went after Obama and actually allowed Trump to get his first foothold in the political cycle (remember that he came to political prominence on the subject of birtherism and then directly went after Mexicans, Arabic people, and people of colour), will turn their attention to Kamala Harris for exactly the same reason.
As I live on the other side of the world in Australia, it would be remiss of me to ignore the implications for the Australian media landscape of how the Biden Presidency will affect things here. Sky News Australia has already decided that it wants to be more like One America Network than Fox News in America and so its concession to genuine news is far less. Sky News Australia rotates columnists from its stable of newspapers (The Advertiser, The Herald-Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, and The Australian) through the Sky News desk; reporting opinion as news and untruth as opinion. As Seven, Nine, and Ten revert to their usual staples of reporting on robberies, stabbings, and washing powder, that leaves only SBS as the reporter of real news from overseas and the ABC as the last genuine news outlet of record; with AM and PM on Radio National as their flagship bulletins. We have enough of our own news and enmeshed politics with media looking the other way, that the fading of Trump won't really affect the news media landscape that much here.
Without the constant drip-feed of outrage acting as dopamine coursing through the veins of the various news media outlets, there is always one thing that they could revert to doing; the collection and reportage of news. What a novel concept that would be!
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