But somehow The Media held on to its centrifugal position in many Western societies for forty more years, despite scandal and the seething masses it disenfranchised from its mythical but dominant ‘centre’, and the corroding effects of the internet upending its business models. 5) as a coherent body that reflected or shaped the world out there, interestingly, just as trust in news media began to slide. It even left the screen for the stage in a new play at The National Theatre in London in 2017–2018.īut the era of Network’s original production is also significant in that it marked the popularizing of the term ‘The Media’ (Boyer 2007, p. From the Trump 2016 presidential campaign onwards, Network was placed as a template over the realisation that new media insurgents had, largely unnoticed and for some time, been dismembering the liberal mainstream media. The character of Beale, previously an archetypal mainstream news anchor, turns on the same mainstream embodying a new wave of populism against the organisations that had for years suppressed voices they deemed marginal and extreme.

Trust in the mainstream politics of the day had been exhausted by Vietnam, Watergate, and the depressed US economy.

The 1976 movie Network depicted the breakdown of a fictional US television evening news anchor Howard Beale, whose sudden rage against the establishment found a cult following among his previously declining audience.

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