Larry King and the Decline of Traditional Media

For 25 years he has been sitting in the same seat, on the same night, in the same timeslot, and he has broadcast 40,000 interviews watched and admired (or hated) across the globe: from Bill Clinton to Lady Gaga, from Michelle Obama to Dolly Parton. But even this enormous workload would not have stopped him at his tender age if it had not been for the share, that number that indicates the percentage of all the people watching TV at that moment who are watching just you. It is a magic number to which many a contract and career is tied, and that for Larry King was a barometer of his own slow decline.

The farewell to Larry and his suspenders is more than just a goodbye to a veteran. It is in fact a goodbye to a formula, a type of interview and an era of communication TV. It will not die with him — in face, he created a genre — but with him goes the certain colloquialism that is civil and ironic, never static, but nevertheless generic, that made up his interviews. Those interviews were markers of an age in which TV spoke to everyone, had to find its way to them and be understood by all.

The conclusion of King’s career comes at the end of a long period of transformation in U.S. television and probably signals the end of an era. Though we hear little about it, this evolution very much resembles that of the printed media. In the past 20 years, the two great modern forms of media have had the same unexpected fate: they have passed from being the dominant influence on public opinion to being slowly eroded by the competition, dispersion, variety and creativity of other media.

In this way the printed word lost its monolithic control of the market to the Internet, and in this way mass television has been fragmented into the many alternative modes that TV is employed and enjoyed: cable, web, satellite, digital, etc. This transition was not only a result of technology but also of the evolution of society in the way it talks about, perceives and constructs itself.

The era to which Larry King belongs was a world in which certain giants, whose number could be counted on two hands, represented the pinnacle of information. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and network TV — CBS, ABC, NBC — were the foundations upon which American public opinion was formed. A word of theirs could make or break a president. Their journalists won and lost wars. This was the system that could decide to say nothing of the invasion of Cuba, at the request of President Kennedy, and the public would have never known had it not been for what happened. It was in this system where a single journalist, Walter Cronkite, could become “the most trusted man in America,” and where a president could say — as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968, regarding Vietnam — “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

Those were the years when writers and TV anchors could shape opinion and inspire action. Their names didn’t represent careers but stars in the sky. Stars like David Brinkley of The Huntley-Brinkley Report of the ’70s and later This Week with David Brinkley, or like Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, and still today Dan Rather, correspondent and celebrated anchor.

In other words, it was a pyramidal system, like our democracies have been for a long time.

That hierarchical system has been toppled by new media — that is, basically, the Web in all its forms. The Web has rules very different from those of the old system. It is horizontal in its diffusion, and it goes from the bottom to the top in terms of “infectiousness.” Those who talked then didn’t need anything but their own echo. Today, the Internet replicates, discusses and, above all, subverts the hierarchy. This is happening to print media, and it is also happening to TV.

Yesterday’s giants are up in arms. They’re losing readers and viewers, but most of all they hate not being in total control of the world around them. Today there are no more journalistic giants; in their place are many voices. What counts most is not the criticism offered by those voices but their originality.

The opinions and biases coming from these protagonists and new media outlets mirror the creation of different societies. Today, group identification and communities of interest often form stronger bonds than mere citizenship. Those bonds are certainly stronger than the respect people hold for the hierarchical system of old. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.