IN my lectures about audience metrics — who and how audiences view and share stories — I always bring up Freaks and Geeks, a 1999 TV show that was cancelled after just one season.

The show enjoys cult status today but met a terrible fate for various reasons, including a difficult relationship between the creators and the network. Its air time was unsuitable — Saturday 8pm when teenagers, the prime target audience, did not watch TV. It was competing against Who Wants to be a Millionaire, a popular game show which drew 18 million viewers followed by a new show, Friends, which had 14m. The 12 episodes of Freaks and Geeks, which had an erratic schedule as it went on a few weeks’ break, had 6.7m views, so the network didn’t think it was worth renewing.

Every year I bring up this show, fewer students know about it, but inevitably every student who watches it returns to tell me they loved it. And ask why it didn’t work.

Popularity is not an indicator of quality. It is also not the same as truth.

News media is a profit-driven business.

This may help us understand why the well-known anchor Mehdi Hasan’s show on the American cable network MSNBC was cancelled. The British political commentator is known for his tough style of interviews; he challenged guests, was progressive and humanised Palestinians — things you don’t see on TV news, at least not in the US. This is why most people believe Hasan’s pro-Palestinian stance caused the show’s cancellation.

Ayman Mohyeldin’s programme will be extended to two hours to replace Hasan’s show so one can’t cite anti-Muslim discrimination. Hasan himself has not spoken on the issue other than to echo the MSNBC press release on the issue. Many ‘media insiders’, however, say his show was axed because it had poor ratings.

Of course, it did. It aired on the weekends when rarely anyone watches TV, a medium with fewer takers. This is probably hard to believe given how you’ve likely come across at least a few of Hasan’s clips on social media — where he’s obliterating Israel’s point of view. The audiences for TV and social media are different, with different expectations. Advertisers, however, have one expectation.

Advertisers don’t want controversial TV anchors challenging dominant views. Neither do media owners who want to protect their business interests that audiences may know about. When it was owned by General Electric, MSNBC was pro-Iraq war and even fired Phil Donahue, who was anti-war and promoted those voices, when few dared to question the Bush administration. An internal company memo described Donahue then as a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war” giving “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity”. Then too they cited poor ratings as the reason for his show’s cancellation but we know General Electric was a huge defence contractor.

Donahue reflected on his firing 10 years later. “They were terrified of the anti-war voice,” he said in 2013. “Anti-war voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an anti-war voice on a cable channel that you own; Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer.” He also described how audiences perceived anti-war voices. “We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.”

News media is a profit-driven business. That model, which does not practise journalism in the public interest, creates a less-informed citizenry. In his book Democracy Without Journalism the media scholar Victor Pickard wr­­ites how journalism is at the mercy of the marketplace. News organisations supported by advertising will continue to be in trouble especially in the face of economic uncertainty. The market decides the news agenda and how much news audiences will receive. He also says social media companies profit from disinformation.

It’s why we need to amplify voices calling for public journalism. Pickard’s book reminds us that such models exist and he advocates for government intervention in ensuring the public has access to information that allows for democracy to function. A government supporting free press may sound like anathema but Pickard writes how governments have invested in communication systems, like the postal system, that gave people access to information. Governments fund public broadcast systems everywhere; it can work provided journalism reflects the communities it is meant to serve, not the media owners.

We will soon — hopefully — have a new government. I request them to read Pick­ard’s prescription: create a robust public fund to support a public media system, one that is run by partnership of policymakers, academics and journalists who want to strengthen democracy, not the market, not the owners, not the politicians’ rich friends.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2023