They aren't the news now…
Lesley Stahl Can’t Figure Out the Decline of Legacy Media
Newscaster Lesley Stahl claims she “doesn’t know what to do” about the embarrassing demise of the legacy media.
She was lamenting to her colleague, Peggy Noonan, that “we are at the point where even the president,” then corrected herself saying, “Elon Musk,” asserted that legacy media is dead. She appeared extremely worried, spilling her deepest concerns, in front of an empathetic audience gathered at the 92nd St. YMCA studio in New York.
It was as if Stahl was having an out-of-body experience, where she failed to factor in herself, in accounting for the reason why audiences were abandoning network news in droves. You know you’re in trouble as an award-winning reporter when the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” on the Food Network manages to pull in higher ratings than the 24-hour news coverage, CNN.
“I don’t know how it (media) recovers,” Stahl confessed: “It is sort of… kind of hobbling along.”
There was some editing in her statement: She didn’t require the qualifier of “sort of,” “kind (of)” hobbling along. Sounding like sorority sisters, Stahl then confessed to Noonan, “I’m in a very dark place about it.” The gal-pal team then proceeded to engage in a hug-fest to lift up each other spirits, never hinting at they might be part of the problem.
“We’re talking about something so essential,” Noonan offered in her media overview. “You don’t want to say we’ll see. Or, maybe the world will end. We’ll see.” Wow! Noonan, in a moment of candid reflection, had actually compared something “so essential” as corporate media, and it being thrown on the trash heap of cancelled programing, with the world ending.
Such serious contemplation negates the wider view of just how they got into such a “dark place.” Still, they went along their merry way, as two titans in the media, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their smugness and Trump-bashing served as an integral part of the toxic behavior that fueled the rot in the “legacy media.”
Noonan proved it didn’t matter how nonsensical a joke or outright lie at Trump’s expense was – it was still worth working into the conversation. She made an off-the-cuff quip, shortly after the November election, when President-elect Trump was at the top of news reports in more than 100 countries, saying: “We haven’t been seeing much of Mr. Trump,” and “I’m enjoying that.”
The audience laughed appreciatively. So what if the joke indicated the speaker appeared clueless about an avalanche of news overtaking every newsroom in the nation? You must say this – Stahl and Noonan know their audience, no matter how much it may be shrinking.
Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
It wouldn’t take much digging for Stahl to find out what’s going on in audienceville. She, like her colleagues, would have to get up out of their chairs, leave their network buildings and stop relying on corrupted news sources. (That would include themselves.)
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/lesley_stahl_can_t_figure_out_decline_of_legacy_media.html