Good morning. Check CNN.com for the very latest on the Israel-Iran conflict. President Trump told reporters on Air Force One this morning that the next 48 hours will be revealing. Now for our whip around the media world... |
Nielsen says streaming has "reached a historic milestone." According to the company's monthly report about different TV viewing modes, called The Gauge, streaming's share of all TV usage outpaced the combined share of broadcast and cable "for the first time ever" during the month of May.
We all feel it happening, of course, and the data backs up the vibes. But The Gauge report also reflects how different viewing modes are blurring. If I watch a brand new episode of Fox's "Family Guy" via the YouTube TV app, Nielsen counts that as broadcast viewing. If I watch a rerun of the same show on TBS via Hulu Live, it counts as cable viewing. If I watch an on-demand episode via Hulu, it counts as streaming. But each instance feels like streaming, and my relationship is with the show, not the platform.
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Social media overtakes TV |
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's 2025 Digital News Report is full of valuable info about news consumption around the world.
The big, bleak picture: At a time of economic uncertainty, tech disruptions and shifting geo-political alliances, "evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving," but instead traditional media is "struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions."
Read Nic Newman's exec summary here. He says the data supports "a sense that traditional journalism media in the US are being eclipsed by a shift towards online personalities and creators."
One of the survey questions is about which types of news sources people have accessed in the last week. "The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the US (54%) is sharply up — overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time," Newman writes. But, of course, much of what people consume on social media originates from legacy media.
Angela Fu digested the data for Poynter here, and NiemanLab's team sorted through the findings here.
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It's all about the relationships |
Whether we're talking about streaming entertainment platforms or social media news sources, the dynamics are really all about relationships.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher hit the nail on the head in a recent sit-down with CNN's Max Foster. "We're seeing a real rise in people's trust in media influencers, news influencers," Maher said. While those influencers are often relying on reporting from established media outlets, "I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think
what it teaches us is that people want a relationship, not with an institution, but with an individual."
"We have a historic belief in media that the brand name of our organization is enough to convey trust, confidence, integrity, but people right now are really looking for relationships with the reporter," she added. "They want to understand why someone is saying what they're saying. That is as meaningful now as the brand of the organization itself." The news outlets that enable and empower those individual relationships will win.
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Trump hits 'kooky' Tucker Carlson |
MAGA media commentators Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson have been at each other's throats for weeks. While the name-calling is petty, the back-and-forth has serious foreign policy stakes. Levin wants regime change in Iran; Carlson wants the US to stay out of it. The clash is exposing a "deep foreign policy divide within Trump's MAGA circle."
There are some signs that, rhetorically, Trump is siding with Levin. Two weeks ago, Trump and Levin dined at the White House. Yesterday, when a reporter asked Trump about Carlson's comment that the president was "complicit" in Israel’s strikes on Iran, Trump said "let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen." (This was both a reflection of Trump's old-school TV habits and Carlson's post-cable habitat.) Trump followed up on Truth Social and said "somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that 'IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!'"
Levin is back at it this morning, accusing Carlson of being "far worse than a NeverTrumper." But some MAGA A-listers are siding with Carlson: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tore into Fox News and the New York Post for allegedly pushing pro-war "propaganda." Carlson made a similarly brash accusation against his former employer, telling Steve Bannon that Fox is "doing what they always do — turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and trying to knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit to a new war."
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