Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy
mattdpearce.substack.com
mattdpearce.substack.com
Also outrage sells more and bad journalists outclass good ones by clicks. The "modern activist type" of journalist rarely writes anything substantial or interesting, only very few master the balancing act between helpful news and entertainment.
I remember articles that more often than not could really broaden your understanding on a topic. Sometimes research for a short text took months. I have no idea how you could finance such endeavors anymore.
To pick up your McD's analogy, I'm sure they did focus groups and test runs to gauge interest and build the product up. If memory serves, they did this in the context of many low-end buffets adding a salad bar and "healthier" alternatives becoming available. I think they added this option as popularity of salads started to decline. I'm sure many people bought them, but it wasn't profitable enough so they discontinued it, in favor of other healthy options.
Now, to pivot back to news, they used to be awash in print ads, both classified and throughout the copy pages, which subsidized their operations a great deal. There are lots of demand for news, but the challenge is how you pay for it. I think it would have been great if the big players (FB, Google) had set up revenue shares with legit outlets; but they don't want to share their $$ pie so we are all worse off.
I don't see the connection. My parents and grandparents watched news everyday on television and it was all free.
> Also outrage sells more
This is may or may not be true, but I think you are hinting at the actual underlying reason - news often isn't compelling. My parents and grandparents didn't have the near infinite number of choices for how to spend their time at 6pm. They were probably going to watch tv, or at least have it on, and the three available channels were all playing a newscast, so that's what they watched.
Keeping up with local and world events might be important, but it also has a real eat-your-vegetables vibe to it. There are so many other things I'd rather do than read or watch reporting on what happened today.
There are some segments of journalism that I think are doing quite well. For example, sports writing is still turning out great stuff and attracting an audience.
They also made good (if not quite so excellent) margins on ads interspersed in the main body of the paper for department stores, auto dealerships, restaurants, and most other kinds of local/regional businesses.
On top of that, people didn't just buy the paper to get investigative journalism. They were also buying low cost content like the funny pages, movie reviews, weather forecasts, and sports scores. Even with limited competition for advertising, few newspapers in the 20th century could have turned a profit while filling their pages with nothing but investigative journalism. In-depth reporting is too expensive to make up the bulk of a paper.
Investigative journalism was a kind of expensive spice that gave zest to the rest of the lower-cost content. Newspaper owners took pride in it and tried to steadily produce it but there was no way to fill daily issues with nothing but investigation.
Craigslist killed the margins for classified ads. A million sources killed the newspaper's allure for delivering weather forecasts, sports scores, and other low cost information. Keyword and geo-targeted advertising on major digital platforms added fierce competition for print display ads.
The main thing people miss from the newspaper is investigative journalism. But investigative journalism, unbundled from cheap filler and high margin advertising, can't be delivered at prices most people are willing to pay. There are a few maybe-outliers like the New York Times and Los Angeles times that survive on a reputation for depth and a national audience. But the days of every mid-sized American city having a local newspaper or two with investigative reporters on staff has passed, unless someone can come up with a new business model.
It does not matter whether you're talking about the broadcast and cable television media (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), the new wave media of online-first reporting (All the properties of Conde Nast and Ziff Davis, incl. Wired, Vice, Cracked, Buzzfeed, etc.), or even the third-generation blogosphere (Substack, Medium). There's no trust because success is inversely correlated with trustworthiness.
People of all stripes seem quite happy to trust news as long as it delivers facts that already fit their worldview
"""Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year."""
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
And these stats hold for liberals as well; they feel their outlet isn't the "MSM", but that Fox is and is untrustworthy.
Since the job of news is now to sell ads and not tell the truth, a lot of "supporters" only hear what their side wants them to hear, and not the facts.
The real problem of course is that each party has different policies; but if we as citizens don't agree on the facts and problems facing us, then there is no way to evaluate the strength of the policies against the problems.
Bias in news has always been a problem, and I think you just have to listen to a variety of sources with different biases to find out the truth.
It’s not like journalists are collectively agreeing to lie to the public.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust...
People are supporting politicians because there is literally nothing else to do but not vote. Also, personally, I expect a politician to lie while holding a journalist to a higher standard. We need proper journalism to hold the government accountable.
This in turn causes low trust because if one type of article is manipulative then the other types must be right?
If people weren’t so anti-capitalism then the journalism would have incentive to be less manipulative across the board.
Furthermore the politicians want manipulative journalism, there is no incentive on either side to do the right thing. If there was we wouldn’t have the political candidates we do today.
Instead we invest in the weakness because be uneducated means you don’t actually have to understand just vote emotionally.
I'm struggling to put into words the thoughts this sentence triggered. We're on HN, not reddit, so I'm going to assume good faith.
What reasons over the past 30-50 years have capitalists given the population to root for them? When your business model is to fuck over everyone in your path in a race to the bottom for the gain of a select few at the top, why would anyone expect anything else from the people capitalism stomps all over?
The average American maintains finances by putting their money in a bank where it rots with inflation, of course they get stomped by capitalism.
The most fascinating part of Trump's success is that his supporters know he's lying, exaggerating and making stuff up on the spot and are ok with it. They believe he supports the things they support in a general sense and they believe all politicians lie and cheat, so they don't care even about his most egregious stuff.
I think there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, where people think they're being savvy about a corrupt system. The belief is that the whole edifice of American institutions is really just a facade on top of a corrupt system controlled by elites, and that Trump is being honest in a sense by exposing the corruption, but that his own obvious corruption is just a requirement to succeed in the way the game is played.
And of course Trump makes great use of this. The more he can get people to believe that the other side are liars and crooks, the more they'll tolerate his corruption and lies.
A litmus test for recent journalism is the hunter Biden laptop story.
And the reason is that most journalists nowadays believe that presenting other views is harmful[1]
Most boomers and their children grew up in an unusual period in news when broad and balanced coverage was expected, and even somewhat required in the TV news. "Yellow journalism" is back, though, and we haven't quite adjusted (compare abc news coverage of Biden's plagiarism and lying in the 1980s to their coverage of his mental decline during his presidency)
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/13/u-s-journ...
It's really not. Stories about the families of politicians are better suited for tabloids. They're a distraction at best.
And let's be honest: only a total ignoramus would vote or change their vote based on Hunter Biden. There are a million better reasons.
That was a lie
No, that's not what they said. Here's what they said: "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...
> The laptop exists. It's contents exist.
So what?
Several Republican-led Congressional committees found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden in the matter. So yes, it's nothing but a tabloid story.
The media reports a million lies verbatim, because politicians lie.
That was known to any journalists who chose not to report on it
At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.
The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.
What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.
You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."
The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.
That's an example of a story not going anywhere, it's commonplace.
What is less common is partisan hacks circling back like a dog to its own vomit and spending months of news cycles pumping up a cardboard outline as a real live bit of news.
Anything real-time can't be reported on either, because choosing what to report on is a form of bias - even reporting on the latest mass shooting is "Giving coverage to someone that shouldn't be glorified", or "Only showing negatives for the second amendment". There is no way to please people without admitting bias, and then detractors will use tgat to tear down your "unbiased, facts-only" source.
Imagine saying this in the US about any other race. They write this stuff and then blame us for not wanting to read their other output.
A 29 year old whom I spoke with recently made the same comment: they don't have the patience to watch movies.
I can feel the same atrophication happening to my(older)self, to a lesser extent. Though I still love watching movies and reading books, I find it difficult to finish uninterrupted. During a movie, I usually take one or two breaks, and not simply to go to the bathroom. With books, I tend to read a chapter at a time and then stop, sometimes taking weeks to finish a long book. I remember when I was young, I would tear through an interesting book in one day; you couldn't tear the pages away from me.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-became-way-too-importa...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/27/twitter-i...
There is a demand for bias free news. Or at least news that doesn't come bundled with editorial opinion.
If we're going to be force fed opinion, it's only natural that individuals will gravitate towards channels with opinions they agree with.
My own experience with the press was during Gulf War I. Traveling around the Mid-East, it was eye-opening to me seeing how many reporters mostly hung out at the hotel, swapping gossip, and adding datelines for wherever they supposedly had been. It was a joke among photojournalists that they were the only ones who actually had to go there.
Talk about hubris.
Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
My hope is that from the "death of truth" a more diverse group of media rises from its ashes.
Yes. We live in a new gilded age, a new age in need of anti-trust reforms.
https://www.cabletv.com/entertainment/americas-favorite-news...
There's almost zero shoe-leather ground truth reporting in any of those places. Is YouTube going to send a foreign correspondent to Crimea? Are podcasters going to start attending the mayor's press conferences?
If that's true, why is Fox News so much bigger than Reuters.
Fox news was founded to support a specific worldview. People "want" neutral reporting. What they "pay" for is to be outraged (pay with their attention).
I know that's odd to say in this forum but we're probably all unusual here
The alternative news sources you mentioned are merely opinion echo chambers that serve to reinforce preconceived ideas and inflame passions rather than offering up any kind of neutral reporting.
People I’ve spoken to are sick of media that pretends to be neutral, while they are clearly serving the interests of the rich. In that sense it’s really refreshing to have someone tell you what they really think.
I don’t have any solutions, but I can certainly understand the thought process.
Respectfully, I challenge you to ask yourself how you can argue to the contrary and then say that there's great content on platforms and mediums that essentially exist to preach and serve as surrogates for certain institutions (journalism being one of them).
Humanity is at odds with objective truths (i.e., neutral facts) because the fundamentals that support contemporary notions of objectivity were erected by people with implicit biases.
The problem with journalism is that it harkens to an idea of the world that is effectively dead. Journalism is just a string upon strings keeping the marionette-corpse of modern civilization erect. Its own survival depends on Journalists convincing "consumers" that what's dead is alive or rather, just "sickly".
But people who know better are tired of being treated like "consumers".
I always assume something a random citizen says is 99% false because yes, most people know very little.
That's one way to look at it. Another is, a random citizen has no reason to lie to you. A journalist working for an "organization with standards" does.
My hierarchy of trust is random people 10, government 40, journalists 60, science papers 80, scientists talking about their own area 88. Everything else 0.