The "media" is an interesting thing to me only from a business perspective. If you look at my post history I have no love of what most people consider "media" these days. The news is bloody terrible at everything. TV is a gong show. Fiction is simplistic and formulaic. We can talk about the art of television/media, but I want to talk about the money part of it from a purely outsider perspective.

Odds are if you are a 15-30 year old male you do not watch TV any more except for sports. This demographic has moved on to other forms of entertainment, mainly streaming services like Netflix and of course the dreaded evil video games. Cord cutters are mostly male and heads of households including women with kids. More kids watch Netflix and Hulu than watch TV which means we are raising a generation of children who do not think commercial television broadcasting is normal.

Add this up and now you can see that traditional cable and TV distribution is in a deep, deep demographic crisis. TV ad revenue is down, cable subscribers are down for the first time ever, and again from the outside it looks like a slow panic is starting to set in. Want to know why sports stars can get $30 million a year for playing a game? If you sell a product aimed at men and boys one of the only ways to do that is bombard sports broadcasts with ads. One chart to look at is here Want to know why people willingly pay $5 million for a 30 second ad on the Superbowl? It is the only event left in the American media landscape that can generate enough simultaneous eyeballs that your ad can get out into the other spaces that people like me live in.

Now there are two ways to fix this. First you innovate, expand into the new spaces, push your brand into the arenas that the people are migrating to, move your media to places like Netflix as fast as possible. etc. This is expensive, requires new and scary risk, and demands that you hire people who can look forward a few years while taking a hit to stock returns as you get all this set up. Or, YOU CAN SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THE PARENTS AND CREATE A MORAL PANIC TO DEMONIZE THE NEW. This is easy, it is cheap and it works. It works The War of the Worlds Radio broadcast that supposedly caused riots? Newspapers used that broadcast to generate a moral panic that Radio is going to kill us all. Comic books cutting into your revenue streams? Moral Panic Time! What about a site like craigslist that gutted classified ad revenue? Hookers! Drugs! Murder! Violence!

And now, video games are making the youth violent murdering nutjobs, even though the crime rate in the western world has plunged 80% since 1990. Wikipedia is a bad source, but has all the charts Almost all violent crime in the US is due to drug prohibition. If you don't use illegal drugs you live in the safest society in recorded history. Steven Pinker's book is here and a neat read. Every shooting from someone not into drugs must be linked to comics and gaming, not because it is true, but because video games are the new TV, the new Radio, the new Comics, the new Craigslist.

And now, I answer the crux of the question. Old media is once again shitting on the youth of America. The same youth that have a trillion dollar student loan anchor on their future. The same youth that cannot find a job because the old people cannot afford to retire. The same youth that either work 80 hours or two jobs to pay outrageous rents because if they leave California they can't work in their chosen field. The same youth that is looking at the world through a lens where they can talk to people everywhere in the world and have honest relationships with people they never met is starting to realize that they are being sold a lemon. And for one of the first times in history young people can get together somewhat anonymously and watch their character be trashed in real time as a narative is built to demonize them by the same media that is clueless about the demographic shift that is screaming in their face has to do something, ANYTHING! to get eyeballs.

Death threats, real death threats that end up in the hands of law enforcement, are rare. Look at the WAM report. In the four months they were given access to the Twitter, they had 811 harassment complaints. In Four months? That's all? And when you go in and look at the 'harassment' it is "go die in a fire asshole" level shit talking, not "I have your address and am on my way to murder your family" stuff. But these threats generate drama, and certain demographics love drama. And where a demographic congregates, ad revenue will follow.

Kimmel is making fun of people watching video games because they are cutting into his paycheck. How is this any different than people watching sports? Sports generates ad revenue for his bosses so that is good. And IMO Kimmel was never funny by himself. Kimmel and Carola fed off each other and were mildly amusing to me, but separately? eh.

Your second question is does PewDiePie make people dumber. PewDiePie's demographic is 12-14 year olds. Look at the TV pointed at that age range and ask the same question. Or is he an escapist form of entertainment? Most of the 14is year olds I know watch minecraft stuff, Crash Course and you tube stuff that I as the old guy just don't get. Hell my mom though that Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes was going to make me stupid. Aristotle complained that the books his students were reading was making them neglect the "important" studies. And so it goes forever.