CHR - How X And Joe Rogan Broke The Back of 60 Minutes

TOP LINE: 

Super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices and embrace transparency.  The post election TV ratings abyss is driven both by technology and by the public’s loss of trust in Mainstream media.

DEEP DIVE:

To buy MSNBC or not to buy?  

This week’s headline that Comcast will spin off its cable channels underscores the tectonic shift in the media marketplace and how technology is providing the exit ramp for competing platforms.

When my job as a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News was terminated in February, I took a few months to educate myself about the marketplace because so much had changed since I left Fox in 2019.   What I found was genuinely surprising, a little frightening and, oddly, re-assuring for the strength of our democracy.  

You can’t argue with the data.  It is compelling. On Election Day, according to @Xdata, the platform boasted record usage of 942 million posts worldwide and  2.2 million hours of watch or listen time over approximately 160k live events. The X data crushed engagement numbers for the mainstream media (MSM.)

By example, a Tucker Carlson interview on X has 35 million engagements. The CBS Evening News has 4.5 million viewers. If I had to choose, I’d take 30 million engagements on X because it represents explosive growth.

The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy.  This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. 

In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, “elite panic.” 

“Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That's a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we're seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.”

If you asked me four years ago, if a presidential candidate could skip a 60 Minutes interview, I would have been skeptical.  Four years later, candidate Trump bypassed the legacy news magazine and instead, sat down with Joe Rogan.  As of this writing, the marathon sit-down viewership reached 51 million views.

There is no doubt Rogan is a skilled interviewer who can draw out his subjects and deliver huge audiences. Compared to heavily edited network TV reports, the raw, unedited format reveals much about the subject.  In politics, the podcast is perfectly suited for the “beer question” which measures a candidate's authenticity and likability.  

The progressive Harris campaign took a more traditional media approach and came up short. Neither celebrity endorsements which feel less relevant nor a 60 Minutes interview seemed to move the needle.  The combined audience of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and its views on YouTube landed at about 10 million, far less than what Rogan and X delivered.

The legacy of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview is not her responses but the lingering controversy over the CBS’ interview edit.   And that is where the public’s loss of trust in the media comes in.  I believe this is another driver of the audience exodus.

CBS aired two different answers from the Vice President to the same question from correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Israeli Prime Minister apparently ignoring the Biden Administration.

Since, a credible complaint has been filed at the FCC alleging “news distortion” at the network with a reasonable demand that the full, unedited Kamala Harris transcript be released. CBS News has said “it fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience and not to mislead it.”

In the October newsletter, I explained that releasing the full, unedited transcript would resolve these questions. There is ample precedent.  

As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News, I interviewed President Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I advocated for and CBS News published the full, unedited transcript.  

The CBS News Trump interview was not a special case.  The full, unedited transcript from Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2019 interview with CBS chief legal affairs correspondent Jan Crawford was also shared by the network.  And more recently, 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript of its interview with Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

If the current trend continues, in the 2028 election cycle, the broadcast networks will firmly take a back seat to podcasts, town halls, and investigative journalism on X.   For independent journalists and small digital newsrooms, the challenge is developing revenue streams that are viable.

In February, I was not comforted by the analogy that losing my corporate reporting job was like getting pushed off the Titanic when there were still seats in the lifeboats. In retrospect, I wonder if it may turn out to be more accurate than I initially thought.   

After turning down job offers for which I remain grateful, I began building the Catherine Herridge Reports brand on X and in the newsletter marketplace.  These platforms are the new media beachheads.  Content is King.

I’ll have more to say about the future of journalism and why journalism is called a profession for a reason. Look for exclusive new content on media accountability in the coming days!

Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting independent investigative journalism! 

Inside the SCIF

This week, I was so grateful for the support from so many of YOU!!

…as our appeal of the February contempt order, for refusing to disclose confidential reporting sources, was heard in the DC Appellate Court.

I was especially heartened by the kind words for our late father, William Herridge, who had hoped to support me in person at the Appellate court for Monday’s arguments. An extraordinary lawyer in his own right, he died in August at the age of 92.

From Anne B. -

“From God bless you, Catherine.  I support you with many prayers.  My deepest sympathy for the loss of you Father.”