Traditional media can respond to the changing media environment in a number of different ways, what’s crucial to them is the need to stay relevant and attract an audience.  There are probably many ways that traditional media can achieve these objectives.

One option is to move away from the convention of neutral news reporting and move into more opinionated territory.  This opinion could take many forms  but fundamentally newspapers either become more political or more activist.  I think a good example of the latter is The Guardian campaign in support of the International Year of Biodiversity.

On the political spectrum we have the politically aligned Fox News, which as Paul Krugman of Princeton University says in this article for the New York Times has ‘decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan’.

“Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.”

Of course, political alignment in the media is not a new thing but out and out political bias, control and affiliation is.  Perhaps its inevitable given the completely unfettered nature of the blogosphere but a potentially worrying trend nonetheless.

Will political opinion and vested interests characterise the future of media?  Do you think activism is a sustainable strategy for traditional media in print and online?

Tags: fox, Media, Murdoch, nwespapers, Politics, Print, traditional