The Good Media

The Influence and Power of the Modern Media.

- Jeromy Kusch

Many people remember the days when their mornings would begin with a cup of coffee and the inky smell of newsprint; it was intoxicating. The quick snap, pop, and rustle to get just the right posture in the paper, the bold headlines and engaging prose made one feel they were a part of making history just by reading it. The power players of that day were the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Frank Ernest Gannet.

The “good ol’ days” of news are long gone, but the influence and power still remain. However, news programming is no longer dominated by gritty truth hunting reporters. Instead, the boisterous commentators and new social media elites like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter dominate readers. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center study (in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation), 62 percent of people get their news directly from social media. These bastions of enlightened journalism that bestow celebrity status to cute cats, crotch shots, and half-baked memes are now the news source for more than half of Americans.

Recently the scary clown craze captured headlines around the country from social media, to local news, to the national spotlight. It is hard to imagine a story like this making national news, but the influence of social media is hard to ignore. Anything that is trending in the Twitter-sphere is fair game as “news” organizations chase the ever-coveted rating. What began as a weird social media “thing” morphed into a national freak-out as major media outlets piled on the trending story, further perpetuating the strange phenomenon into the national spotlight.