What Happened to the Media?

Friends —

I spent almost two decades at Fox News, running the West Coast bureau and eventually FoxNews.com. I’ve sat in editorial meetings, watched the ratings come in, and been in the room deciding how to cover some of the biggest news events of the time. I’ve seen this industry from the inside.

So when people ask me why the media is so broken, I usually have a pretty quick response. But when I actually sat down to make a video about it — to trace how we went from the founding era to today — I realized my standard answer was incomplete.

What I found was that almost nothing about how the press evolved was driven by ideology or ethics. It was driven by economics. The penny press, the wire services, the rise of cable news, the internet collapse of local papers — all of it was driven by economics.

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I’ll be upfront about something: This one’s personal. The Fox News years, the cable wars, the shift from news to opinion programming — I watched it happen from the inside, and in some cases I was part of it. I’ve tried to be fair about all of that, and you can decide whether I pulled it off.

And this goes really far back. The founders — Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison — weren’t victims of a partisan press. They built it.

We’re not living through something unprecedented. But we are living through something genuinely new in terms of speed and scale. I find that either reassuring or terrifying, depending on the day.

I just posted the full video. I’d love to know what you think.

– Ken

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