From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media
thejournal.ie
thejournal.ie
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers.
> this consensus
Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist.
> it helped with social cohesion and national identity
Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.
You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.
And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.
And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.
Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of objective truth.
Apparantly:
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf
* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/
A simple example: who won the 2020 election? What did each organization say?
While I understand that my second point might sound like a cop-out, just consider how the survey findings may have been different, if the respondents had been asked about issues more relevant to social justice narratives, e.g. the prevalence of deadly police shootings of unarmed people of color.
Actual annual figure in recent years: roughly 10 depending on dataset and year.
Median estimates among progressive respondents in several surveys: hundreds or even thousands.
Another example:
Surveys show large fractions of progressive populations believe global poverty has worsened, when the long-term trend has been a substantial decline
Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.
As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?
> when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Trying to be impartial, trying to understand all the points of view, is a noble effort. It's impossible to do, but the process of trying is how you can achieve the best version of truth. Seems like I agree with you here.
And that's what the best newspapers do.
I need people to be making an honest effort to understand all the perspectives and distilling them down for me.
If nobody is doing that, then it makes my job (the job of understanding everyones' perspectives) a lot harder, because it's an exercise in multi-player adversarial thinking.
We generally assume that there is an external reality that can be observed and understood. When someone 'consumes' journalism, how well does that reporting reflect the external reality? How well do people's perceptions match up with what physically happened?
For example: in November 2020 there was an election. Who got more votes, both in the popular vote and in the various states individually that counts towards the Electoral College? Who "won" the election?
It turns out that some news organizations—even with any biases—allow their readers/viewers to have a better picture of reality than others:
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf
* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/
The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs.
Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section.
Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.
Newspaper management has been trying to do something about it for decades. I don't know if there's anything to be done. Somehow they have to get people to pay for the high cost items, like newsgathering, that they've never really paid for in the past. As far as I can see only the NYT has had any success in this area, and it always feels like a holding action.
• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect
• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets
• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to appear unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--versus one who does not.
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.
Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.
The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.
The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.
That, I think, is the loss.
I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.
> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.
Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.
But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.
If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.
Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.
Journalism for quite sometime has little to do with informing and more manipulating. If not for money then political/personal agendas. Sadly for most people it's only clear in retrospect.
Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.
You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.
But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.
And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.
Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?
Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?
Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?
You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.
As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.
This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.
Let us try something simpler: is the world round or flat?
"Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro
Who won the 2020 US presidential election? If viewers think it was A and you report that it was B, will they believe you? Will they continue to watch/read you? If not, what does that do to your revenue and ability to pay your bills?
As Jason Zweig wrote:
> There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.
So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms that replaced some biased ones.
Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to social media bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis
So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
Even the Metro free sheet goes uncollected a lot of the time. I just go to its puzzle page now. Constant scare stories and manipulation.
'Legacy' basically meaning a representation of the past, not the future.
I'm just realising that Google is pretty much 'legacy search' given that the choice is generally between paid promotions and scams (which could be two ways of saying the same thing). AI may actually have saved Google as their search results were enshittifying themselves into oblivion.
I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.
"Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and good left people every now and then), but these people are there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that be. It's not gonna help .
I agree about limiting the number of media companies. Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how, is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.
There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.