“You can’t handle the truth.” This notorious line from the movie A Few Good Men might help explain why cable news is still around. Viewership among major news networks is dropping, and with good reason.
Driven by advertising revenue, CNN perpetuates salacious non-news stories, like much of their coverage about the missing Malaysian airplane. During Presidential Elections, MSNBC provides nonstop coverage, while ignoring a large minority who either don’t vote or believe elections don’t matter –seems like there’s a story there. Switch over to rightwing Fox News, the winner of the 2013 ratings war, simultaneously received record lows in credibility. All of this points to a dying medium hanging on to keep us in the dark. Thankfully there is the Internet, without which you never would read this ramble.
The move towards online news and online information is not just a trend–the way we receive information is fundamentally changing. Gone are corporate filters, mandatory commercial breaks, and two-minute segments that barely touch upon complex issues when we go online. Most importantly, gone are the barriers between people and information. The truth resonates, and this explains why online news networks like The Young Turks (TYT) are exploding in popularity and why cable news is dying.
Internet news is just the tip of the iceberg though. Online, we’re not only questioning the messages in mainstream news but we’re questioning our lives, and our trajectory as consumers and worker bees. It’s far from perfect–online there is a lot of room for paranoia and conspiracy theorists .
One of the most popular among them is David Icke, whose message could not be anymore different from the mainstreams, saying: “The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.”
Even if we believe that Icke is correct in his assessment of the human race, we do not really know what to do it about it, or even have the guts to talk about it–maybe we’re not there yet. At the moment, we’re somewhere between cable news and a new era of connectivity that we cannot even begin imagine; we’re somewhere between believing David Icke and Anderson Cooper; we’re somewhere in the middle of terrifying and fascinating times, and all we can do is move towards the truth, as unbelievable as it may be.