Segmentation in the news indsutry

When producing television was an expensive business, with high capital startup costs and thus economies of scale, only a small number of entities could survive (particular if one was state-funded via the license fee, as was the case with the BBC in the 1960s). When there was only a handful of channels, each had to appeal to the entire viewing audience with a generic one-size-fits-all product so news was not tailored to particular demographics or market segments. The news you saw on the 9 o'clock News on BBC was little if at all different in terms of content and approach from what you'd see on the 10pm ITN broadcast. 

But as production costs fell, and satellite and cable broadcasting lowered entry barriers by providing channels at lower costs, competition in the TV industry increased; news rooms were asked to become profit centers rather than cost centers. While state funded entities could resist segmentation pressure, new entrants found they could be profitable (and attract more advertising) by appealing to narrower demographics.  Market entry is always easier when you target a niche. 

The 1980s in Britain saw the rise of the tabloid newspapers; the "stuffy" broadsheets (which were hard to read in a crowded tube because of their size) were augmented and supplanted by the smaller "tabloids" whose pages were half the size. Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, the two innovators, in this segment understood that their product, still quaintly referred to as "papers" if only because of the material on which they were printed, did not have to be truthful to sell well. And thus began the tailoring and manufacturing of content to appeal to particular demographics. 

Rupert Murdoch took that insight into his TV empire, Fox in the US and and Sky in Britain. He now understood that by tailoring content to lucrative segments, dispensing with expensive fact checking and introducing opinion shows (which, like reality TV, were cheaper to produce), he could turn the news into a very profitable business. 

The result of lower entry barriers has been a proliferation of channels targeted at different segments like MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox, OANN and Newsmax.  And with that segmentation, audiences self-selected into the audience groups they preferred. Over time the segments diverged not only in terms of their perspectives on events but on the very events they chose to cover. So now, in contrast to the 1960s when everyone say the same stories covered in much the same way, people now see completely different stories covered with vastly different interpretive frames.  

And so here was are with a country (the USA) divided broadly into two market segments - which also means two information universes. That is why we can no longer have a civil discussion on policy; we are living side by side in different informational worlds. We speak the same language but what we know and how we interpret things, shaped by these divergent media outlets, are so radically different as to make constructive dialog "problematic".