Media Studies Part 1: Media Industries and the 24/7 News Cycle

Reflection

This piece was written as a final paper/essay for a class about Media Industries. The focus of the class was to understand how media is produced and why it is produced. In my opinion, which is somewhat reflected in the paper, mass media is a primary tool for control and manipulation of the masses by the powerful elite. Obviously that is just one way to view media and there is much more to media, but I think the critical theorists (Adorno, Marcuse, and many more) of the twentieth century and more recent cultural theorists like Mark Fisher helped describe how culture and media are hard to separate in capitalist societies. There work is often critiqued as not allowing for the agency of the consumers/masses who implicitly receive the information being mediated by the mass producers of media. I do agree that we are all not literally brainwashed, but to a certain degree, I do think we all are because media is one of the primary ways in which our society comes to understand the social reality of being alive. The news is how we come to "stay informed", but the news is and always has been a form of abstracting the realities of the world into written word (newspapers, magazines, etc), spoken word (radio, music), and visual perception (television, movies, social media). This translation from lived experiences into aggregations of mediated technology generates a large portion of the world that we perceive on a daily basis, and while naming these efforts propaganda or brainwashing is maybe a bit extreme, there is a lot to consider when realizing how much of our lives are in fact mediated by technology that is created under capitalist mandates.

When I started this class, I was really interested in writing about how 9/11 changed my worldview. I was in 6th or 7th grade when that event happened, and I still can't get over how bizarre it was to experience the viewing of planes smashing into buildings what felt like thousands of times over the course of the following weeks. There is still so much I don't understand about that event, but I do know that my perception of that event was completely mediated by the news media in that the 24-hour news cycle became a commonality in my life after that point to a degree where it felt like an expectation to consume as much news as possible. I'm therefore quite critical of news media because there is most definitely a limitation to how much one can be informed, and there are much more simple ways to stay informed than being attached to the 24 hour news cycle, but that was the purpose of this paper.

Lastly, while I didn't cover 9/11 as the primary form of this analysis, it is discussed to an extent, but one YouTube creator that I enjoy, GDF, recently made a piece on Hollywood and 9/11 that essentially covers this topic in a way that aligns with how I would have liked to cover 9/11 and film/media, so I will link that here:

Paper

Introduction

The recent events that occurred at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on April 25, 2026 and the subsequent public response point towards several concerning, albeit familiar, phenomenon that demonstrates the ongoing mistrust from the public and their consumption of the media through the 24-hour news cycle. The relationship of the political economy that demands monetary mandates, in which all media industries participate, has simultaneously created a culture of mistrust between news and its consumers resulting from years of habituation (Dan and Brosius), learned helplessness (Nisbet and Kamenchuk), and emotional distress (Thompson et al.). This has resulted in a socio-cultural transformation that leaves consumers constantly overloaded with news, which instead of creating meaningful knowledge, generates an abundant excess of distressing information. The overwhelming apathetic response from the public to the events associated with the White House Correspondent’s dinner, where a man allegedly rushed into the venue with malicious intent (although the details behind this event are not well understood by the public as of this writing), is especially concerning given the dozens, if not hundreds, of media personnel in attendance at the event. This goes to show how the media is an essential part of creating certain narratives that result in a level of mistrust in which one of the primary responses of the public is to essentially dissociate from the news creating a fragmented set of individuals in a fragmented society.

Given the 24-hour news cycle's emergence in 1980(“CNN to Broadcast...”), this report will analyze the relations between the media industries and the inception of the 24-hour news cycle. This relationship will be analyzed through neoliberalism, and the resulting transformation of the news-media landscape trending towards a more chaotic form of production oriented towards the primary goal of profit. This analysis will explore the ways in which the 24-hour news cycle transformed how the public consumes news, and it will look at examples of how this news model transformed itself and media through major historical events such as the events of September 11, 2001. Lastly, this analysis will look to connect these phenomena to a broader socio-cultural and psychological trend of desensitization in the general public when it comes to media consumption.

Methods

As stated above, the tendency for apathetic response to major news events is a phenomenon that is self-reinforcing, in which the media’s coverage of major events is designed to bring attention and convey information in regards to the real world events, but the coverage is intended primarily to grab the viewer’s attention in a superficial manner that does not inherently produce meaningful trust or knowledge in the consumers. Within a neoliberal, capitalist society, media consumers do not have sufficient power to influence the primary means of production that the media uses to cover the news since government policy, and technological advancement within neoliberalism ultimately decide the cultural field of possibilities. While there are still dissenters, and there are still producers of media who try to create insightful media coverage, the majority-mainstream public relies on news coverage from the few media sources that exist within the converging media landscape under the handful of major media conglomerations. This analysis will attempt to scrape at the surface of this iceberg of knowledge by attempting to address the below questions:

1. How did the neoliberal media landscape and convergence culture of the post-9/11 period cement the 24-hour news cycle as the dominant mode of news production, and in what ways did the media’s commercial mandates and practices shape coverage priorities over journalistic depth and contextual analysis?
2. In what ways does the episodic rather than thematic structure of 24-hour news coverage — as solidified through post-9/11 media practices — contribute to cycles of audience distress, normalization of political violence, and the erosion of shared contextual understanding of public events?

In order to address the first question, this analysis will consider a variety of sources from trade publications to peer-reviewed articles to provide an understanding of the political and economic forces that influence the cultural field of possibilities when it comes to media production with a specific focus on analyzing the 24-hour news cycle and its emphasis on repetition of stories, reliance on unscripted commentary, and a preference for live coverage focused on breaking stories (McDonald and Lawrence). The analysis will look at how the quality of this form of news production aligns with the capitalist mandates of the political economy while simultaneously creating the potential for unanticipated side effects in the public who consumes it. Viewing these forces through neoliberalism as the contemporary mode of capitalism, which promotes deregulation and individualism, will demonstrate how the field of possibilities not only become limited to what reinforces neoliberal capitalist mandates, but also creates a sphere of influence in which detrimental public health affects emerge in the general population through reinforcing distressing social phenomenon in news production. This will then allow the analysis to rely more on critical media studies to address the second question since critique of the political economy cannot, by itself, explain how this style of news production, deregulation, and individualism can create shifts in the psychology of the general public.

While the various sources reviewed in this analysis tend to agree that the success of media corporations — responsible for producing the news —benefit from shorter segments that focus and drama or segments that illicit emotional responses, the neoliberal capitalist mandates do not constitute the potential psychological response of the public to this type of news. Since this news coverage style has remained consistent in the 24-hour news format, a critical media studies analysis helps illuminate detail resulting from individuals consuming this form of news production. This portion of the analysis will combine insight from trade publications that demonstrate the economic viability of the 24-hour news format which relies on dramatic information delivery ,and it will focus on how this news production style has psychological implications that emerge from consumers who rely on mainstream media sources for emotional support (McDonald and Lawrence 329) and information-seeking (Dan and Brosius) related to major global events such as 9/11 or the COVID pandemic. Media consumption as a meaning-making process alone is not the sole reason for the potential emergence of negative socio-cultural psychological trends, but it does present an understanding of the media landscape that has remained relatively consistent over the decades since the inception of the 24-hour news platform with its reliance on treating the news as a spectacle rather than treating consumers as individuals who are seeking comfort and understanding of the implications of the major global events. Media’s role here has Public Health implications which effects government policy, and media plays a significant role in shaping the dynamic relationship between the government and the governed public.

Research and Discussion – Question 1

Mark Fisher’s depiction of capitalism in his book Capitalist Realism, in which neoliberalism is the contemporary form of capitalism starting in the late 1970s, provides a succinct overview of the political economy it creates:

Needless to say, what counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. (Fisher 17)

Derek Johnson argues in a 2011 article in Cinema Journal that the media effects must be understood within the political economy in which they operate by discussing the 2000s television show 24, he explains,“Both 24 and the war on terror emerged from a more diffuse reorganization of social life at the turn of the century, driven by a logic of participation shared by the increasingly dominant culture of convergence and the politics of neoliberalism(Johnson 150)." In addition,he defines neoliberalism and its implications for media:

Neoliberalism refers to an ascendant political logic seeking to limit the size and role of government while relying on the free-market private sector to produce self-sufficient and self-governing citizens. As scholars like Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue, media play a key role in a neoliberal regime, as information and communication systems shape citizen, soldier, worker, and consumer subjectivities within it. We might arrive at more nuanced understandings of both post-9/11 television like 24 and the war on terror itself, therefore, by thinking about how the political logic of neoliberalism collided with the cultural logic of convergence to create a wider social matrix of participation. (Johnson 151)

The 24-hour news cycle emerged in conjunction with neoliberal political expansion in the 1980s and the 1990s, with the news’ economic success reinforced through the spectacle of major global events and coverage surrounding celebrity trials and deaths. A separate study, by McDonald and Lawrence, looking at the news coverage the days immediately following 9/11, attempted to analyze the style of news coverage by defining coverage as episodic or thematic where episodic segments depend on the fast-paced, redundant style that the 24-hour news style uses compared to thematic segments, which are more grounded in historical and consequential contexts. The study discussed that major news networks, who typically held daily or nightly 30-minute broadcasts, were granted 24-hour access without commercial interruption during the proceeding days after 9/11. With the additional airtime and limited commercial interruption, they noticed that most of the coverage relied on episodic coverage, which they compare to a more standard crime story coverage, rather than providing more detailed thematic coverage that would provide viewers with political and historical context around the events.

This finding reiterated how broadcast networks, used to producing time constrained segments in their briefer broadcasts, focused on the utilization of the 24-hour style of reporting that is intentionally redundant and prioritizing of dramatic live reactions. This style of reporting, which will be discussed in more detail in the following section, is not without its own psychological implications on consumers, especially when the focus of the coverage remains on significantly violent events. Even though there are potential negative side effects to this style of reporting, made popular by the 24-hour news cycle, the neoliberal political economy is primarily concerned with profit which the media incorporates into its modes of production first and foremost. The convergence of the 24-hour news cycle is an important precursor to contemporary trends in social media, which is a primary source of misinformation and disinformation. Since thematic, contextual reporting has been deemed less financially viable through the prominence of the 24-hour style of news production, the cultural field of possibilities in relation to news production limits its consumers to fast-paced consumption focused on reactions and “being informed” rather than being contextually educated on the broader implications of the events, which then has the potential for reinforcing psychologically distressing content back into the larger sociocultural sphere.

Research and Discussion – Question 2

The psychological context discussed thus far is rarely found in traditional trade publications. Instead, trade publications are often covering the financial success, or lack thereof, of the networks who utilize the 24-hour news style. Trade publications primarily note the patterns of societal spectacle that cause jumps in ratings or financial success such as instances like Princess Diana’s Death (Katz), looming wars in the Middle East (Frank), the Washing DC Sniper (Osnos), Bill Clinton’s affair (Martin), the OJ Simpson trial (Stephen) or the Iraq War (Linnett). Whether the spectacle is of State affairs (war, terrorism, etc.) or of individual prominence (celebrity deaths, trials, etc), the 24-hour news cycle benefits immediately and intensely from these events. The neoliberal political economy is demonstrated clearly again here through the trade publications focusing on monetary mandates rather than the potential concerns and pitfalls of the 24-hour news cycle. As Howard Rosenberg outlines throughout his book, No Time to Think, the speed at which news is created and produced—since the 24-hour news inception—creates a vapid environment of news coverage that focuses on spectacles, immediate reactions without time to reflect, and lifeless commentary. Rosenberg discusses several examples and cites many prominent media figures such as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw who note the drastic change in journalistic integrity resulting from the expectations and production demands of the 24-hour news cycle, resulting in journalism that is essentially guesswork or reactionary at best.

In a more recent study from 2021, researchers define two ways in which consumers cope with anxiety in relation to media consumption; information seeking and information avoidance (Dan and Brosius). The study focused on habituation effects, and these two concepts were used to define the measurable patterns seen in the aggregate viewership of individuals observed in relation to the media viewing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeking involves individuals who search for knowledge to understand the issue, thus reducing anxiety, and avoidance, which is the opposite behavior of avoiding information about the anxiety promoting event, as a means of coping. Findings from the study demonstrated observable patterns where major public broadcasters tended to see increase in viewers with the onset of the pandemic, but they noted correlated patterns of avoidance and habituation over time in the public broadcast viewership that led to a decrease in viewers over time. The noticeable trend of increase in viewership with a spectacle like event in not unlike the examples mentioned previously, but it's also worth noting that the persistent consumption of this type of coverage leads to habituation effects over time, which is associated with avoidant behaviors that tend to be based in psychological patterns of avoidance potentially resulting in isolation and loneliness.

In referring back to McDonald’s and Lawrence’s study about the media’s coverage style immediately following 9/11, it is the public’s immediate response to seek information related to the events and the primary way to find that is through the news coverage which focused on the reactionary aspects of live coverage and repeating visuals depicting the explosions and collapsing of the World Trade Center. This style of news coverage — focusing on spectacles, violence, and reactions — mirrors the 24-hour news cycle style of production. In a study titled Media Exposure to Mass Violence Events Can Fuel a Cycle of Distress, researchers indicate the potential for emotional distress resulting from viewing this form of media:

This strategy of reducing uncertainty by seeking information via the media may backfire when individuals are exposed to graphic trauma-related media content. For example, in the aftermath of the September 11^th (9/11) terrorist attacks, individuals who perceived the media as a provider of useful information were more likely to consume 9/11-related media coverage, but this media use was associated with increased distress over time. (Thompson et al 1)

This study performed a longitudinal analysis over the course of three years, in which during that time, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the mass shooting in 2016 at the Pulse night club in Orlando occurred. In their findings, they state, “exposure to repeated trauma-related media coverage may render some individuals more vulnerable to mental health consequences as collective traumas accumulate over time” (Thompson et al 4). The findings led the researchers to state the potential implications of news media on the public, and that these platforms play a role in understanding current public health trends. The findings from this study show the dynamic relationship between the political economy, and the subjective, psychological meaning-making process that occurs through the masses who are subject to that political economy, neoliberalism in this case. It is worth nothing, as this study does, that this phenomenon is not explicitly causal, but more of an aggregate correlation effect which is too complex to cover in a single study. Everyone's developmental background, sociocultural environment, and biological predisposition will amount to different levels of susceptibility related to the impact's media has on one’s psychological tendencies, but the conclusion is that there is a measurable side effects to repeated consumption of the 24-hour style of news that is redundant, focused on violence, and designed to capture as much viewer attention as possible in pursuit of profit.

Conclusion

As important as media is to this discussion around rapid sociocultural transformation, the technological mediums in which media is produced and consumed should not be ignored. The rapid expansion of these specific news formats would not have the same reach without the advancements of the personal computer, internet, cell phone, and social media, but the interwoven nature of media, technology, and society become blurred in the context of neoliberalism with the primary focus on converting as much wealth to fewer and fewer people at the top of society. The psychological implication of persistent media consumption through these technologies is a function of the apathetic response to major media events such as the recent White House Correspondent’s dinner situation. The point of mentioning technology in this context is to argue that while the political economy does create the cultural field of possibilities that the majority of society participates in, society’s participation is necessary to uphold these structures in a form of symbiotic relationship, and resisting these structures is an inherent struggle given the embedded nature of capitalist mandates in media, technology, and society. In order to find alternatives to the media industries that continue to fail the public by prioritizing profit over the well-being of the consumers, we must be critical of the media and technological structures, but we must also reflect on how we relate to these structures in the first place in order to seek new ways of producing cultural systems of knowledge that benefit the masses. To close this analysis, I’d like to circle back on another quote from Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism:

I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. (Fisher 19)

There is a growing field of study around the implications of technology and social media as it relates to individual psychology, but more specifically towards the developmental impacts on children. Psychologically speaking, there are paradigm shifts that are deviating from the current paradigm of normative mental health issues that instead are now focusing on traumatic experiences, and the primary importance of attuned emotionally regulated development in a given individuals’ first few years on this planet. There is significant benefit in being critical about how society promotes the use of media and technology in children (and adults) since the adoption of technology in areas such as education, and parental care-giving has detrimental psychological effects. Critical studies can shed light on the ways manipulation can sneak into our lives, and can help illuminate potential alternatives creating a new more expansive cultural field of possibilities that is more a kin to human nature and our relationship with nature as a whole.

Works Cited

"CNN to Broadcast Live, 24-Hour News on U.S. Cable TV."The Hollywood Reporter (Archive: 1930-2015), vol. 261, no. 41, 1980, pp. 2. ProQuest,https://login.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/cnn-broadcast-live-24-hour-news-on-u-s-cable-tv/docview/2598202417/se-2.

Dan, Viorela, and Hans-Bernd Brosius. “The Onset of Habituation Effects: Predicting Fluctuations in News Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic by Disease Occurrence.”European Journal of Health Communication, vol. 2, no. 3, October 2021, pp. 44–61,https://doi.org/10.47368/ejhc.2021.303.

Osnos, Evan. “24-Hour News Stokes Nation’s Fear Factor; Fixation on Terror Merges Information and Entertainment.”Chicago Tribune, 11 Nov. 2002.

Fisher, Mark.Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Second Edition. Zer0 Books, 2022.

Frank, Robert. “Media Giants Gear Up for New Gulf War.”Wall Street Journal. Europe[Brussels], Europe, February 19, 1998.

Johnson, Derek. “Neoliberal Politics, Convergence, and the Do-It-Yourself Security of 24.”Cinema Journal[AUSTIN], vol. 51, no. 1, September 2011, pp. 149–54,https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2011.0071.

Katz, Richard. “Diana’s Death: Ratings up on 24-Hour News Channels.”Mediaweek (New York, N.Y.), vol. 7, no. 33, September 8, 1997, p. 4.

Linnett, Richard. “CNN, Fox, MSNBC Vie to Stand out in Upfront.”Advertising Age[Chicago], vol. 74, no. 18, May 2003, p. 34.

Martin, Ed. “RATINGS BUMPS HAVE CNN, FOX, MSNBC CLAIMING VICTORY: ALL-MONICA/ALL- THE-TIME FEEDS AMERICANS’ FASCINATION WITH CLINTON AFFAIR.”Advertising Age, April 1999, p. S18.

McDonald, Ian R, and Regina G Lawrence. “Filling the 24 × 7 News Hole: Television News Coverage Following September 11.” The American Behavioral Scientist (Beverly Hills) [Thousand Oaks, CA], vol. 48, no. 3, November 2004, pp. 327–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764204268989.

Nisbet, Erik C, and Olga Kamenchuk. “Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in COVID-19 Misinformation.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research [OXFORD], vol. 33, no. 3, October 2021, pp. 571–90,https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edab011.

Rosenberg, Howard, and Charles S Feldman.No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle. 1st ed., Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2009.

Stephen, Andrew. “It All Started with O J Simpson. Now, the 24-Hour News Channels Find That Accusations of Celebrity Crime Boost the Ratings like Nothing Else, Even War.”New Statesman (1996), vol. 132, no. 4666, December 1, 2003, p. 11.

Thompson, Rebecca R, et al. “Media Exposure to Mass Violence Events Can Fuel a Cycle of Distress.” Science Advances [WASHINGTON], vol. 5, no. 4, no. eaav3502, April 2019, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav3502.