OTT is media lingo for over-the-top — and by standard definition it refers to “media service offered directly to viewers via the public Internet, rather than through an over-the-air, cable, or satellite-based provider.”
But if you know your Marshall McLuhan and believe, with him, that the “medium is the message,” then you know it isn’t just the technology, per se, but every aspect of the delivery which defines the media. And by that definition Vice President Kamala Harris is dropping a hard case of “creative destruction” on the media landscape this week — a truth bomb from which mainstream media (MSM) is having trouble recovering.
What’s Harris doing? She’s responding to plaintive calls by legacy media like CNN and the New York Times that she’s been dodging interviews — and responding to these calls by doing interviews. She’s just not doing interviews with them.
Reporters at places like NYT, Politico & NBC came up believing they were entitled to a candidate’s time and now they’re like “wait, Harris is talking to some 30-year-old podcaster we’ve never heard of and <gasp> Howard Stern, BUT NOT US!?” It’s elitism of the worst kind.
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) October 7, 2024
Instead Harris just held a highly successful interview with the podcaster Alex Cooper at Call Her Daddy, during which she spoke at length and at leisure about her history and beliefs, policies and hopes. Was it antagonistic, as traditional media insists? Not really. Was it informative? Yes.
.@alexandracooper: What values did your mother instill in you?
Vice President Harris: She taught us that we had agency. Things don’t just happen to you. If I came home with a problem, the first thing she said was, ‘what did you do?’ I realized that was a really powerful thing… pic.twitter.com/idqO4GiwoI
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 6, 2024
Who else is on Harris’s dance card this week, while the Times frets? Well, besides mainstream standard-bearer 60 Minutes, it’s shock jock Howard Stern, whose audience is about 100% loyal, about 73% male, with nearly 90 percent of those males being white.
Legacy media reminds me a lot of music companies in the late 1990s/early 2000s. They were completely unprepared for the transition to streaming/digital downloads. Places like NYT, Politico, and the fossils who appear on air on NBC have no clue that they’re going extinct https://t.co/fTJjLYDt8b
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) October 6, 2024
Traditional media outlets for a presidential candidate? Maybe not. But Harris is reaching people where they are — just as Donald Trump, talking to Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, finds the choir he hopes to preach to.
It’s so true. Cable news has an outsized belief in its importance but if you look at ratings, CNN rarely if ever has more than half a million people tuning in at one given time and often a fraction of that. https://t.co/plLD4rhiAy
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) October 7, 2024
[NOTE: Breaking the communications mold isn’t new — Bill Clinton played the sax wearing sunglasses on Arsenio Hall‘s late night show and Richard Nixon did a cameo on NBC’s then top-rated Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In after playing piano on Jack Paar‘s seminal Tonight Show. But Harris has the unprecedented power of the Internet and also, as McLuhan opined, a message intrinsic to the medium.]
Harris can point to multiple instances where she hasn’t been treated well by the Times, nor by its peers in the MSM, which may be another reason she’s opting to go over the top and break the chain. Or as they say in big tech, “move fast and break things.”
The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” — which Investopedia defines as “the deliberate dismantling of established processes in order to make way for improved methods of production.” The term’s close cousin is Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” where “an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble.”
Harris is essentially doing just that — “dismantling established processes” — in a blow to elite media egos and biases. Her move violates and seeks to upend the media power structure, dismantling the status quo that has made itself vulnerable by failing to hold disinformation operatives accountable and to treat truth, rather than profit, as the goal.
Those media elites, as active X user ScaryLawyerGuy says above, are likely to strike back, making Harris’s move a bold and potentially risky one.
There is some indication — see below — that the Times, et al, have received a message that its both-sides-ism is journalistic malpractice. But the MSM maintains its pose as a gatekeeper even as others have gathered up tools and opened gates elsewhere. The question Harris’s campaign is posing this week is can it get its message through the new gates while the old, complacent, quarrelsome keeper is snoring?
Trump has spent the last few days spewing (and repeating) an ever increasing number of lies about the government’s response to one of the worst hurricanes in modern American history and the media has by and large shrugged it off or reframed his lies & asked for “reaction” to it https://t.co/NlALfJWI0L
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) October 6, 2024