From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media
thejournal.ieThe history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.
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.
In France, at a very young age, we're taught that journalism is not impartial: people must take sides to express interesting opinions. We simply need to read them all: the Humanite to understand the communist point of view, the Monde for the socialists, the Figaro for the conservatives, the Croix for the Christians, etc.
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 ?
> the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
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.
I'm so tired of these false equivalences
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.
I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking".
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.
From my point of view journalism is or was about calling attention to points of reference that we can all agree that we are affected by in a similar way. The way you are framing this is more about agreeing with each other. IMHO that's not what journalism is about.
The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there.
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.
My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an entire stack of technologies:
• 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
People have been trying to make micropayment systems fly for a very long time.
Why doesn't it work anymore? Are there policies we could put into place that could change that?
It doesn't work because other businesses are creaming off the classifieds. Businesses like Tinder, Ebay, and Craigslist.
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.
The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.
It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.
It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.
I'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or outright false narrative while only presenting factually true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.
Not only that: it's impossible to report on everything that happened, so any outlet only reports on the important stuff. What is and what isn't considered important is a matter of bias, too.
All true. But you can choose what and how you report in order to give one side a boost, or you can choose what and how to report in order to give the best, most accurate picture you can of what's actually going on. The difference matters.
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.
I would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think -- just tell me what happened yesterday.
Thousands of newsworthy things happened yesterday. Which ones do you put on the front page?
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.
We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.
So, facts, huh.
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.
> 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?
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.
That’s exactly my point: You present yet another alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the former two groups. There is no authority to establish which of the three views is the canonical truth, regardless of how much you think your own is obviously and objectively true.
I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the things I said in such a way that either of the groups you proposed would find no objection to my saying those things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I don't think I did. My point is that we can indeed agree upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are not what people argue over. They argue over an interpretation of the facts that tells some story about who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was acceptable for those things to happen.
I see your point, but don’t think it is correct: Opposing groups will absolutely debate whether and which events happened, and will attest to a different timeline. Moreover, I don’t believe you can cleanly tell facts from interpretation. Sometimes there is just no way to know (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce. This is invariably shaped by your personal lens of opinions, then.
Journalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are focused on conveying certain facts and steering the conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological construction that is not related to reality.
they just can't help themselves as they see themselves above the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be said about the modern science community that has been thoroughly ideologically captured.
I feel nothing but schadenfreude.
I don’t understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their work. That doesn’t invalidate all their work though, and it’s vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions floating around, and citizens getting in contact with that spectrum.
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.
The newspaper industry has never been neutral. It has always been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration, reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of their owners' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from the owners' actual lines of business.
Fox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.
Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
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.
> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
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.
Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions.
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.
I guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem, anything important enough to have a constituency gets reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by somebody.
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.
Sadly, this is true.
Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.
In the words of Mon Montha from Andor:
> 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.
Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.
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.
Newspapers rely pretty heavily on wire services, which tend to have their own biases, but they do have reporters.
The Washington Post was one of the few remaining US newspapers with a large reporting staff scattered around the US and the world. That's why this is a loss. Thirty years ago, most major metropolitan newspapers had sizable local staffs and some national and international reporters. Now the New York Times is almost the only US newspaper with a large reporting staff.
It is now easier than ever to locate, contact, and spotlight for questioning individuals of any given movement, no matter how fringe. Yet the public still hears from the same journos, commentators, talking heads, and explainers, year after year, decade after decade. Really makes you think.
Related:
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
I feel like I'm in a psy op reading this comments section.
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.
So what? Soon all legacy media will die or be subsumed into different organizations save for NYT who will be the only outlet left with the gumption to have a VTuber as EIC in 7 years?
It's partly because many papers have the same stories, culled from the same few press agencies, and poor writers. Most of their original content is often on non-news topics, and the Hollywood image of the roving investigative reporter is rarely mirrored in reality.
Who coined the phrase, "legacy media?"
Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to social media bullshit.
This is a piece written by Jeff Jarvis who was a founder of Entertainment Weekly and then a long time professor focused on innovation and journalism.
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.
The last section heading about “Old media as a cultural construct and colloquialism” is pretty relevant to the parent post. Lots of theorists claim that the binary between new and old media is inaccurate.
Certainly in the UK the 'legacy' part of media orgs (print) is still far more profitable than the pennies paid for ad-clicks.
Not many people buying papers here anymore. I bought one yesterday, but it's months since I last did.
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.
No history to be found here, but the phrase 'legacy media' started making sense to me, in Australia, when it became obvious to me that said legacy media were being intentionally dishonest / obviously biased in their reporting of progressive topics like renewable energy and fiber optic internet roll out.
'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.
>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires
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.
> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine.
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.
Jarvis is off the reservation here. Newspapers aren't being "milked dry" by anyone, since they don't make money. The billionaires are there because they want their own views in the public discourse, and they can afford to lose money every year making it happen.
Hear, hear!
I don't see how the fairness doctrine will help. It feels like a brutal disgusting tool Carr whips out to censor perfectly reasonable talks.
"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.
The internet has made Bezos rich and newspapers poor. It was practically unavoidable in a society where greed has become the norm.
Don't forget the people who voted for "Get the Government off the [rich] people's back". Ronald Reagan and every subsequent government since. Neoliberalism. The rest of the Anglosphere followed suit.
It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.