BY PAUL T HORGAN

It is reasonable to suggest that the re-election of Donald Trump to be President, after a four-year hiatus, has sent shock waves throughout Western society.

One aspect that has been covered in detail is how most TV channels in the USA, but also here in the UK, were against him with not just dislike, but open hostility. If the anti-Trump coverage was to be believed, Trump should not only have lost the 2024 Presidential election but should never have been reselected as the Republican nominee as part of a Primary process that his rival ducked. And yet the Republican Party selected Trump, and he went on to win.

Broadcast media in Western societies is heavily regulated. This is a legacy from how radio broadcasts were used by totalitarian states to control populations from the 1930s onwards. Radio and TV were seen as powerful tools in the political process, and thus had to exhibit a degree of impartiality and honesty. However this impartiality seems to have collapsed in the last two decades. There is a blatant left-wing bias in modern TV broadcasting, something which seems considerably more pronounced in the USA. Excepting Fox News, all the major TV news channels were openly anti-Trump. All of the late-night talk show hosts were also. TV news concealed the cognitive decline of Joe Biden in the last four years, if not before he became President in 2020.

And yet Trump still won despite all of this. How?

First, the left-wing bias of TV in the UK and USA is not an overnight phenomenon but has been the outcome of years of creeping radicalisation. One reason for this could be the professionalisation of the TV jobs. When TV started, the people that worked in it may have come from radio broadcasting, but this would not have been a perfect fit as TV is a visual medium and thus requires different skills. So people had to be recruited from other professions, but also people drifted into TV broadcasting by happenstance, even if they did not have the starry-eyed ambition associated with every aspect of showbusiness. 

In the modern age, work in TV has been academicalised. It is possible to get degrees and other qualifications from educational establishments. These qualifications would be related to the liberal arts and the humanities (Gender studies professors were recruited from English Literature faculties), and these subjects have almost from top-to-bottom been ideologically captured by the Left. People with conservative opinions will face a hostile reception and will see their career progression stunted or destroyed. So the professionalisation of TV organisations permitted left-wing infiltration to the point of domination. Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics states that “Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The political shift of TV in the UK and USA bears this out.

But Trump still won. He won because TV is dying. It is being replaced. And Trump made good use of the replacement media, most of which makes use of the Internet. The most prominent use of new media in the campaign was the three-hour sit-down with Joe Rogan for his podcast. But it was conceded by TV commentators that Trump also made use of the fact that people have stopped getting their information from now blatantly biased TV broadcasts, but from media that arrives on their smartphones from various internet content sources.

And this is what is killing TV. Our TV-watching patterns were dictated by the restriction of the technology for several decades. It was not possible for the average household to watch live broadcasts other than at the time of the broadcast. This was moderated by the advent of videotape recorders, but the complication was that the cassette tapes were bulky, damage-prone, and also that it was a non-trivial exercise to access the specific portion of a TV broadcast that a person wanted to watch. Videotape was a form of catch-up TV, but in a primitive incomplete form. This is why millions would tune in at the same time to watch the same programme and did so for decades, even after they obtained a videotape recorder. The shared experience was imposed due to the limitations of technology.

This limitation started to be eroded when new technology started to be affordable. But then the new technology also meant that the barrier to entry into the media marketplace was substantially reduced. For the BBC to be able to broadcast a programme to millions, in the decades prior to near-universal access to the Internet, required a massive amount of infrastructure, from expensive cameras requiring coordination by a production team, to large videotape machines, and huge aerials to carry the signal through the air to household receivers. Now, cameras are part of every smartphone, video data can be stored on small inexpensive microchips, datacentre storage of video data is thousands of times cheaper than the huge reel-to-reel machines of decades ago, and the infrastructure of the Internet makes distribution routine. When a warehouse full of nitrate fertiliser exploded in Beirut with the force of a small nuclear weapon, pictures from numerous angles of the unfolding disaster were on Twitter well before it was reported by news stations.

The advent of the Internet has also allowed any media organisation to produce any kind of media. In the 1980s Joe Rogan’s podcast would be a radio show that could probably only be listened to at the time of broadcast. Now it can be listened to, and repeatedly, as soon as it has been uploaded.  If the Daily Telegraph wanted to, it could start its own 24-hour rolling news channel, even though its expertise lies in print journalism. 

The Internet allows disparate media organisations the opportunity to converge their offers. That they have not been successful is because gaining a mass audience in the Internet age is very difficult, given that people now have a remarkable array of choice. It was only 40 years ago in the UK that there were four broadcast TV channels, three of which were state-owned. Some TV programmes would attract audiences of over twenty million viewers. Commercial radio had only been in existence for slightly over a decade, there were about a dozen national daily newspapers, with some selling millions of copies every day. Those days are long gone. 

Broadcasting has given way to millions of narrowcasters competing with legacy media that has seen an exponential decline in audience and readership. The challenge in this free marketplace of content is viewership, but some individuals have successfully carved out audiences of millions for their output.

I dumped my TV licence back in the summer of 2020, and have not watched any live broadcast television ever since. It should go without saying that I have also refrained from making use of the BBC’s iPlayer catch-up service for video for the simple reason that the BBC no longer produces any programme with which I need to catch up. Instead, I make use of alternative media, plus far too many second-hand DVDs sourced from charity shops at almost giveaway prices.

While the population of the UK has radically increased inorganically (and it should be obvious by now that the official population statistics are completely bogus and are understated, given their political sensitivity), the number of households paying for a TV licence has decreased by hundreds of thousands. They are not all watching broadcasts on the sly. The only real need to watch a programme live is if it is covering a live sporting event. The TV licence is in effect a tax on sports viewership.

TV organisations are trying to fight the decline by moving into narrowcasting. The BBC has clearly taken a policy decision that as it cannot attract a general audience, it will instead pander to the social minorities defined in the Equality Act 2010 and focus on them to build a loyal base, to the exclusion of those outside these groups. One of the reasons I dumped my TV licence, in addition to the biased news reporting of Brexit and other issues (I understand the BBC’s reporting of the Gaza War has been pretty bad), was how debased the TV show Dr Who had become. Where it had previously been all about the science fiction, it was now more concerned with social issues and relationships, a sort of soap opera with time travel included.  While this was obviously designed to attract a female audience, as did The Big Bang Theory when more women were added to the cast, the high production values compared to the 1960s and 1970s did not disguise the reduction in story quality. What next? A gay Dalek? A transgender Cyberman?

Kamala Harris’ minders bet their campaign on wall-to-wall support from a medium that is dying in the USA and elsewhere. She dodged any interview, such as with Joe Rogan, where she would have to go into detail what she would do if elected. With the Trump victory, TV broadcasters have finally seen the writing on the wall, and there are job cuts in Harris-supporting companies.

In the UK the decline of TV is evidenced by the number of TV professionals jumping ship to other media. The BBC’s Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, and Lewis Goodall defected two years ago to present a podcast. Gary Lineker, after his ideological exertions saw his MOTD contract not renewed by the BBC, may follow suit.

The TV industry relied on the absence of alternatives, plus the need to view its content immediately or it would be lost to sight. Both of these conditions no longer apply. By retreating into left-wing politics to secure an audience, TV companies are avoiding the inevitable. Just as video killed the radio star, so the Internet is now killing the video star.

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Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.