Here is the part I’m curious about - it’s Wednesday February 15th 1983 - does the NYTimes have any idea what articles were actually read in that day’s paper? I’m assuming no.
That they now know with an absolute certainty must have changed journalism.
And that leads to a self-reinforcing "follow the audience" spiral, which creates a market for competitors to capture different audiences. The net result is that we trade an exclusionary mono-culture for a fragmented landscape of audiences organized around various subcultures. It's more fracas, but I think an improvement overall because it means there is more choice and more people are engaged and included. Now we just have to learn how to depolarize the zeitgeist.
I think we tend to romanticize some past period of consensus and sanity that never existed - as one of MY’s recent columns points out, the flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers (or their equivalents) have always been a part of the broader Republican coalition and so were receiving a hearing of sorts in the halls of power. And the “exclusionary monoculture” represents a fairly brief and exceptional period of time in the context of the history of journalism during which “balance” was considered a virtue.
I’m not disagreeing that fractiousness in the media is corrosive; I just don’t think it’s quite as much of a radical shift as we sometimes make it out to be.
If you're looking at the narrow question of whether it's better to have a small group of large media companies tacking to the middle in order to capture the largest possible market share, or a large group of small media companies targeting niche groups with extreme takes, you can make an argument that the old days were better. But the cheap cost of publishing is just one aspect of how society has been transformed by technological advances, and it's very difficult to separate this from the vast benefits the Internet has afforded us.
Certainly not the way they do now, but they knew what articles generated letters to the editor and also what everyone was talking about, because there were definitely stories like that--things that dominated water-cooler chatter for a days.
This is a longer feedback loop that requires people to both remember a story and form cogent opinions about it afterward, so that probably creates a different bias than just looking at what gets read.
I think this article correctly describes the causes of the *long-run* decline in trust in the media.
But I think it also conflates that long-run trend with the discourse about how the NYT, CNN etc. suddenly changed their reporting standards after 2016 and then doubled down on that in 2020.
When Bari Weiss talks about how the media is untrustworthy, it’s the latter rather than the former. And you even see some journalists making explicit calls for lower standards (e.g., the moral clarity debate).
So I don’t think it’s crazy to claim that *in the short run*, the media has become less trustworthy in some sense. (In fact, the last bit about 538 illustrates how this might happen.)
This is on target, and articulates a key point missed in the original post. There was both an increase in overtly partisan coverage in outlets which had previously were at least in principle neutral, plus a new focus on stories from a social justice angle. As a daily NPR listener at the time, this change was jarring.
Exactly this. Stories about crime and national politics in the nytimes got heavily biased during Trump, and have stayed that way since. Unfortunately they are so by far still the best newspaper that I have had to stay with them. NPR, on the other hand, I've almost entirely dropped from my commute.
With zero exaggeration, upon turning on NPR, I'd bet there is a greater than 70% chance of race or LGBTQ-ness being mentioned within 1 minute. (Unless there's a pledge drive going on.)
Car Talk has a lot of nostalgic appeal, but it’s been obviated by podcasts. There is an almost unlimited well of “two guys with a great rapport taking about a subject for an hour” online, and you can get a Car Talk about any topic under the sun.
I agree with your analysis, and yet I'm reliably assured in on-line progressive spaces that "NPR" stands for "Nice Polite Republicans" and is campaigning to reelect Trump . . . .
A lot of that seems like over-correction from thinking that Obama's presidency heralded a "post-racial" era--we're now in the post-post-racial era, which has gone from taking down Confederate monuments (which was good) to doing the same to statues of Lincoln (kinda nuts) to an unending quest for examples of racism, real or imagined.
my favorite example of this genre is whenever a chatbot or AI of some sort gets introduced, journalists spend countless time trying to get it to say racist things so they can write the "New AI is Racist" article
Come on people, the circlejerk needs to be broken here. It isn't journalists trying to get chat bots to say racist things... it's 4chan trolls (or equivalents) intentionally trying to break AI chat bots to say racist stuff for the lolz*. The journalists then report "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Assholes on the Internet Have Ruined Another Thing". This has been a thing they've done to everything for over a decade now. Mountain Dew had an online poll contest in 2012 to name a new flavor and the top vote was "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong".
*They've figured out they can do this with ChatGPT by telling it to play a game where it pretends to be a character that isn't bound by ChatGPT rules and always gives the most hateful, offensive response to whatever the user queries.
Yes, news organizations followed the Fox News model. They had different politics but the structure and ethics were the same. You see far less telling of whole stories and more narrative telling.
Meet the Press last weekend challenged the Utah Governor on trans issues. Chuck Todd’s language and questions could have been written by trans activists. It really is crazy.
A show like Meet the Press really could have experts with different views on to educate people but they have so called journalists and political professionals on talking about issues that they don’t really understand. There just isn’t a seeking of truth and knowledge. It’s all horse race. Meet the Press’ horse is clearly blue.
Yes. Reporting and editorial standards fell off a cliff in 2016 and into a chasm in 2020, wholly apart from structural changes in the media. I’m not a particular Bari Weiss fan, but her complaints about political bias seemed pretty verifiable. James Bennett was fired for printing an op-ed by a US senator that expressed a pretty widespread view at the time, on the ludicrous grounds that it endangered staff (evincing impressive levels of cowardice, narcissism, and bad faith all at once). They ran the 1619 claim about the American Revolution despite being told repeatedly by their own fact checkers that it was false. One could go on and on.
I don't read Bari Weiss, but I noticed she apparently pissed off Elon with what she wrote after being given special access. Sure, one could say it's just about branding, but that demonstrated a degree of independence.
Her recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast about the media was very interesting. She and another writer talk about the actual process of getting information for the Twitter files, how they had to query a database and get a hose of communications after their query was vetted by lawyers. And it was extremely difficult to go through all the data. It sounded very stressful and a sub optimal way of conducting research. It was very difficult to explore topics because they had to specify whose communication and what dates they wanted, so she says they were forced to focus on things like January 6th because there were clear timelines that they could request from. She makes it clear that Elon Musk was a biased source who was providing info and access for his own reasons, which is just the way journalism has always worked.
I think there's a good long-form piece to be written, maybe even a book, that examines the thesis that, between about 2014 and 2020, Twitter uniquely, almost singlehandedly, rotted the brains and judgment of America's elite opinion makers, both professional journalists and political operatives and the segment of private citizens who closely follow politics.
The polemic version would be something like this: From fueling Trump's initial rise, to skewing coverage and journalism thereafter, Twitter infected the American body politic like a virus, and it's only recently that our political immune system has recognized the problem and begun fighting back.
I think it's plausible. Being the kind of person who's always looking for snappy-but-often-superficial parallels, Twitter makes me think of the explosion of political journalism during the French Revolution. Desmoulins and Marat basically invented the closest thing to Twitter that was probably possible in the late-18th century version - not just in volume of content, but also in creating the same sleight-of-hand in which strident extremism is presented as representative of public opinion.
Or maybe not. Like I said, could be a dumb comparison.
It is interesting to extrapolate the idea and root cause. Basically twitter is a mob; the same kind thing happens in-person during witch-trails, or soccer-games and other hysteria just via close-proximity and word-of-mouth. Might the problem be the "echo-chamber" and things like long-form communication force a more deliberative way of thinking?
And then a segment of the audience that didn't dig the moral clarity style of journalism followed Bari to a different outlet that is still very much part of the media. The net result is that both audiences have media outlets that they trust, yet that would likely show up on a survey as "I don't trust the media" because both audiences can now identify media outlets that they don't trust, but that they also don't read.
I think Bari’s outfit is more consciously a supplement to other media that it assumes you’re consuming. The NYT and some other outlets (NPR, WaPo) still hope to lay claim to being a primary news outlet for readers or listeners.
That’s pretty disingenuous though, the way that John Stewart used to retreat to “but we’re a comedy show and no one should get their news from a comedy show” whenever someone complained about the Daily Show. They were the best politics show on television - they can’t pretend they’re just comedy! And similarly, there surely are plenty of people for whom Bari Weiss is the center of their news consumption.
It's funny you mention Bari Weiss. I used to admire her a lot for her principled, rational objection to woke excesses, and i cheered for her new substack.
Then I started reading her substack and... yikes! The articles themselves were good, but the comments? Not just conservative, but ultra-fringe, bat-guano "Biden is tHe AntIChRisT and Dumbocrats are LitErAlLy the BigGest ThReAt to America EVER!!!" wingnuttery. I lost all respect for someone who keeps that kind of company. I don't read her substack anymore. It's sad.
As someone said, riffing on Nietzsche: "When you gaze into the anti-woke abyss, you see James Lindsay gazing back into you."
It's a minor miracle that this comment section is as civilized and informative as it is after reading the comment threads on Taibbi's and Weiss' Substacks. I still subscribe to both and certainly don't agree with everything they post, but I do appreciate their outsider's perspective. And I never, ever look at the comments these days.
Likewise, while I believe Weiss is principled Im not quite sure how to reconcile that with the fact she platforms pseudo intellectuals like Michael Shellenberger.
> The articles themselves were good, but the comments?
Restricting comments here to paying commenters makes a gigantic difference. The only two ways to maintain a semblance of civility or intelligence in any internet forum are to stay small and incognito, or to charge. That's still not a guarantee, but not doing at least one of those two is a guarantee of disaster.
It’s a complicated question as to whether one can hold a writer responsible for “keeping company” with their readership. Weiss (or MY) is obviously not choosing who reads or comments. At the same time, successful writers on a platform like Substack cultivate particular readerships: MY’s basic thesis is “the world is complicated and hard things are hard,” while Weiss’s is “I am literally the only thing standing between the woke mobs and freedom.” Her takes are sometimes good and fair; it’s her messiah complex (and Greenwald’s, for that matter) that really disgusts me.
"It’s a complicated question as to whether one can hold a writer responsible for “keeping company” with their readership. Weiss (or MY) is obviously not choosing who reads or comments."
No, it's not complicated. If I were to comment on Matt's Substack: "Republicans are EVIL INCARNATE and they deserve to DIE," Matt would (and should!) very easily ban me for breaking the rules of civil discourse. Bari Weiss has the same ability! She could have chosen to ban the more ridiculously over-the-top comments. She could have posted, "Look, I know a lot of us feel passionately about these issues, but that's no excuse for being an abusive a-hole, and if you act like an abusive a-hole on my Substack, I will ban you with extreme prejudice."
She could have chosen to do these things. She didn't. That's all.
Agreed; in that sense you’re correct she (or likely whoever maintains her Substack) could (and should) do that. And she’s chosen to set herself up as the Source of All Truth in such a way that she won’t, as you say.
I sincerely wonder what she (and Taibbi, and Greenwald, etc.) think of her readership. MY has expressed that it really troubles him when discussions about trans issues go off the rails, and Milan has stepped in to tell people to knock it off a couple of times I’m aware of. I imagine Weiss kind of shrugging, if she reads the comments at all.
The thing that strikes me, beyond the sheer rage that fuels the kind of extremist comments that shows up on her and other Substacks, is how utterly symmetrical, at least rhetorically, is it with far-left extremism. As in, swap out the hated targets, maybe add the word “problematic” here and there, and it sounds identical.
Actually, there’s probably an interesting political psychology experiment in there; cull some unhinged online comments or other extremist rhetoric, take out keywords that would obviously identify them with a particular perspective, and ask people to guess where they’re coming from or ask which ones they prefer.
Yep, I'm almost of two minds on this issue. On one hand MY and Weiss can't control who reads their work product but on the other hand your audience kinda reflects who you are.
I was briefly subscribed to her Substack, and the thing that made me quit was her description of her and her partner’s attempt to get pregnant. In and of itself, that was totally fine; it was when she said something to the effect of (I’m paraphrasing) “raising the next generation of the righteous” that I was like, “okay, I think I’m done here.”
There’s a decent chunk of antivax content on The Free Press! Makes me not want to go there even though I definitely like about 25% of the writers there and respectfully disagree with another 25%.
Right. I grew up (in the 90s and 00s) being taught that some media are more trustworthy than others, and the New York Times was the most trustworthy. I read Bari Weiss because Trump-era changes in how the NYT covers the news have reduced my trust in it.
I think one of the things that happened, and it's effects are much broader than just the media, is that Trump's election destroyed a lot of liberal belief that people could make up their own minds upon consideration of the available media.
This will be confusing because I'm also JA, but I disagree. He conflates the two because what happened over the past 7 years is nothing but what has happened over the last ~33 years. Right wingers used to have to meet in John Birch Societies, but then they could listen to talk radio. Moderates used to read the NYT and NPR, and now they read Substack. And his general point is still correct---there's moderates all over the NYT and NPR, just fewer of them than there used to be. They still employ David Brooks. Most NPR stories are not headlined "Trump lies again" where they used to say "Trump makes claims about border," they're stories about what actually happened in X place and time and they're reported as such without needless extra moral clarity.
Weiss, Greenwald, Sullivan, DeBoer et. al are marketing themselves as more trustworthy. That's fine! But it's marketing to a very narrow slice of people who are (generally) suspicious of authority, interested in a wide range of ideas including those from the right, and most importantly extremely well-read in the media discourse over the past decade. That doesn't make them more trustworthy. At least MY is honest about it. And as he said, Vox still published the articles that he wrote that the rest of the staff hated, and he didn't get fired (he left).
I do think there has been a real shift in mainstream center-left media since the mid-2010s (Trump was the main factor, but there were stirrings of it before he came along), but you’re right that this shift is best viewed as part of broader media changes that started with the rise of talk radio, cable news and the internet in the 80s and 90s. But it just so happens that the kind of people who comment here are very much the sort of people who would have noticed that particular change at outlets like NYT, NPR, etc.
Yes, this is my general idea. There's lots of tranches---Air America/The Daily Show/Daily Kos are a (pretty unpopular) left of left tranche, then Chapo House and other dirtbag left are left of that, etc. NYT/NPR are still not as left as Air America/Daily Kos on most things, just on identity.
I can't say I follow any one outlet closely. My sense nevertheless is that NYT, MSNBC, NPR exhibit bias mostly by selection and by verbiage. (As opposed to the outright lies told by the most popular shows on Fox.) For example, I'm not sure I ever got a sense of how much violence was going on in Portland last summer. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Quick question - I know Weiss left the NYT during the Cotton op-ed debacle, but my impression was that it was not under particular duress - which, fair enough, if I felt like the atmosphere in my workplace was turning toxic and I could jump ship to something more personally and financially fulfilling I would too. But she talks about it like she was chased out the door by a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers. Does anyone happen to know the details?
Bari's own resignation letter has some specifics, which (assuming you trust her account) includes some stuff that goes beyond general workplace toxicity and becomes something a little more twisted and personal imo : https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
Blocked and Reported, in its early days, covered this and from what I remember did a pretty good job; you want Episode 14 and especially Episode 21 (about the resignation itself).
I don't think she was being squeezed by management or that her job was in danger, but a bunch of the rank and file were actively mistreating and shunning her. Rukmini Callimachi verified that Bari was a punching bag on the NYT slack channel. When Bari offered a coffee date to a lower-ranked employee who was upset at something she'd written, the woman refused. It was 7th grade bullying behavior that should be unacceptable in any workplace. I can't imagine having the gall to insult a coworker on a company forum or refusing to meet with a superior - both seem like no-brainer firing offenses. Dean Baquet should have established a one-strike rule for this crap and started sacking people.
Right. Fair enough - I’d feel resentful too, and I agree that such behavior is unacceptable, not to mention cowardly. I don’t know about one-strike firing - that seems heavy handed and like prime martyr-making fodder to boot - but certainly some kind of reprimand. I’ve never had to deal with that kind of talking behind backs or outright snubbing, so it’s hard for me to appreciate how corrosive it must be for one’s well-being (then again, I’m in academia, which has its own, more formalized snubbing systems).
"After all, the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light — so why are so many stories false and misleading, and why do so many true, important facts go under covered?"
I'm hardly the first to make this point (and I can't find a link for it now), but while this is *what I grew up thinking* was the purpose of journalism, it's not what journalism historically has been. Pretty much all of journalism from the colonial era forward was about providing a mouthpiece for certain interests (primarily wealthy ones).
What changed is that at some point, newspapers became huge advertising revenue generators, so their purpose switched from promoting the interests of their owners to appealing to as broad a swath of society as possible, thus garnering greater appeal and more money. Throw in television to the mix in the 1950s/60s and you have basically three stations with all of the eyeballs focused on them. It didn't make sense for them to rock the boat, so again, they appealed to as much of the mainstream as possible for the same reasons.
The last 40 years have led to more options, thus greater incentives to differentiate themselves. Newspapers are no longer cash cows (leading to a lot of consolidation/failures as people got out of the game). So now you have people like Murdoch or Bezos who own large media operations and are perfectly happy to take a loss if necessary to promote their beliefs. Once you start seeing media through its historical lens, the current system makes a lot more sense.
Yes. Add to this that straight reporting of information is generally not going to win a competition for most entertaining content. MY says he doesn't "know why people read what they read, but they are mostly not seeking actionable intelligence about the state of the world". Here's the answer: most media consumers, most of the time, are looking to be entertained.
And there just isn't that much entertainment value in straight news reporting to make a viable, broadly competitive business. In the 20th Century mass media era, this was solved by confining "hard news" to just small, concentrated portions of the daily programming, except for those who actively sought out more because of being weird to find news entertaining -- 30 minutes in the evening, some in the morning; national and local news sections of the paper you could quickly skim or skip entirely on your way to the comics or sports section, etc. The rest was unabashedly entertainment. Turns out that was probably healthier for society than political propaganda as entertainment.
Exactly. News today is an entertainment business clamoring for attention and only getting paid when it can deliver lots of attention to itself and therefore it’s advertisers. In the hypermedia era there’s no general incentive toward truth or “journalism,” the incentive is to preach to a choir so that you can rely on a hardcore (and ideally well differentiated) base of attention to support you.
I don’t think this reckons very well with the obvious fact that large, trusted outlets really did increase their suppression and slanting of generally true stories more aggressively starting 2020. Like, are we still pretending that John Fetterman just has hearing issues or are we ok to be honest now that we have 51 senate seats?
Making renditions arguments around “what is the media really” just intentionally obscures the fact that a lot of people would like there to be media outlets that aren’t overtly partisan. like, if we’re at a place where your point is that Rush & Tucker are the same as the NYT so who cares… that is bad! I want “the media” to be a class of publications that does NOT include Tucker and Rush and Maddow!
remember when Kara Swisher and the like attacked that one reporter for completely truthfully reporting that Fetterman was having cognitive difficulties?
I would ask how the fuck she became anything but a basement-dweller on mommy and daddy's dime, but I know already: her parents were rich enough to build her resume to let her leech off other people instead of them.
Yeah, I get a bit annoyed at the "Taylor Lorenz is ugly" cracks that are ubiquitous on Twitter. There are enough legitimate things to criticize her for without making fun of her appearance and it's also just silly to pretend that she isn't within the range of "conventionally attractive by modern American standards" (which I, in fact, would cynically credit as being a major reason for the level of success she's achieved in journalism -- I've never even seen anyone defending Lorenz point to anything she's published as being a great piece of writing).
When I was in college I got my news from "the media". Sans a few quirky radio shows and magazines, the news came from the newspapers and TV news networks and it was congruent. Fast-forward (through the rise of Fox News, MSNBC, etc.) to today and "the media" is what I program my computer to show me.
Today, when I mention "the media" to a college student, I get a quizzical look. They consume information, have a coherent worldview, are very well-informed and occupy a shared reality, but have a completely different conception of "the media" than me. On the other hand, my parents still get most of their news from their TV and have a tenuous grasp of the concept of filter bubbles.
I think that "the media" *is* a class a publications that does not include Tucker and Rush and Maddow because it is whatever you define it to be. I also find it hard to execute that theory in practice because the landscape is constantly evolving and old habits die hard.
I think your sense that this is actually true is largely due to the fact that you are actually aware of “generally true stories” that weren’t covered in major outlets.
> But I also read Bloomberg News, which really gives you a sense of how different journalism can be when it’s bundled with economic data as an actual information service.
I also strongly endorse Bloomberg News and it’s my primary source of daily news. Yes, they are biased towards business and economics, but they still cover all major news events. If anything, I appreciate their concise coverage of non-finance stuff that results from their incentives in catering to a business audience. Particularly, Bloomberg’s “Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day”, is a great daily newsletter for staying abreast of national and global events.
Also, their bundled streaming service, Bloomberg TV, is a gem. They cover all the major events, with a heavy focus on finance/econ, while still being fairly entertaining. Each morning I have to make a hard decision between Slow Boring and Bloomberg Surveillance since they both start at 6 AM ET. You can find a lot of this content for free on their YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@markets
It's really impressive how putting money on the line straightens things out: if you make major financial decisions based on bad information, you're going to get burned. It's basically a corollary to "A bet is a tax on bullshit".
I just wish a Bloomberg subscription weren't so expensive...
Holy shit yo. I have much more sympathy for the Bari Weiss take when, since 2015 at least, the most strident propagandists in the major outlets are the one's on these mis/disinformation/fact checking beats.
I do think the terms like mis/disinformation are used as political cudgels frequently, but I also think that there's genuinely people out there who just make bullshit up. Hell, Reason itself points to NewsGuard as a valuable service for distinguishing outlets based upon a relatively objective criteria of journalistic practices. There's clearly some standards which can and should be used to distinguish between individual outlets
For sure, it would be laughable to think Breitbart or Buzzfeed are super committed to factually accurate journalism. My point is that the self appointed "fact-check" industry is among the most reliably agenda driven beats in journalism. So many instances of, "Well, there's nothing factually incorrect about this article, but it fails to conform to the approved narrative framing. Four Pinocchios."
A good local political wonk blog around here, Iowa Starting Line, got a bunch of funding to "fight misinformation" and quickly turned into clickbait trash
I agree that “fact-checking” has become politicized (sigh), but it’s funny that the linked article never specifically refutes the charge. Instead, it uses loaded questions and Pavlovian triggers (“taxpayer dollars”) and basically says “you can trust us because freedom.” Also, it counters one fact-checker by…citing another fact-checker that provides more favorable ratings.
I’m not saying that Reason is untrustworthy; what I’m saying is that if they (or, really, any publication) want to be convincing, they should make actual arguments instead of relying on rhetorical tropes.
And since we’re on the topic of Reason, I find it fatiguing for the same reason I find socialists tiresome; libertarian ideas are absolutely worth consideration, but when they turn into considering any instance of government overreach as prima facie evidence of malfeasance, it’s like, okay, chill for a sec (cf. socialists considering any instance of capitalist overreach as prima facie evidence of counter-revolution).
I read the Washington Post every morning and over time I find that the information I receive is accurate and truthful. However, while reading an article suggesting some below-the-radar movies to go watch there was a line about how the live-action Little Mermaid caused a racist backlash, with a link. Curious, I followed the link.
That story cited exactly one source as evidence of this backlash, a hashtag on Twitter. It then started discussing representation of nonwhite families in children's stories, with links. Following those links I encountered a study that says that, since the 1940's representation of white families in children's literature has fallen from 100% to 45%. That seems like a good thing, except the study cast it as a bad thing, conflating 'plurality' with 'majority' and asserting that 45% figure as evidence that children's literature was inappropriately dominated by stories about white families. The original article then went on to discuss a bunch of interesting research going back to the 40's on how representation of racial group in children's literature impacts people's perceptions of all sorts of things both as children and later in life.
My takeaway was that researchers started looking at this topic in the 40's and surfaced a pernicious problem that has subsequently led to a measurable improvement and has raised awareness. I learned a lot of interesting facts that were true and was happy to see that children's literature had become so much more diverse than when I was a kid. (My kids were born abroad, so I don't have experience with modern children's literature in the US, but I'm a parent so these things interest me.) But the whole narrative arc of the story was super pessimistic and, in my opinion, absurdly hyperbolic (and/or Twitter-centric) in elevating a hashtag to the level of Racist Backlash, while also not being untrue.
That is one of many examples of what I think sows mistrust with "the media", at least among people old enough to have grown up with three TV networks and a local newspaper; ironically, because it produced a single, coherent narrative that manufactured consent. It's nigh impossible these days to find news that isn't infused with a specific and often tribal worldview, which is probably a result of the competitive incentive structure and lack of gatekeeping Matt wrote about (which reduces to engagement metrics). It's something I have to get used to because it isn't going away, but I can very much see how it can feed into the "you can't trust the media"—or the "you can't trust *their* media"—narrative.
This article is talking about COVID, but I actually think is related to what you are noting; there is a very uniquely American bias in media to cover every story in a more negative light than it needs to be. You're example of the WaPo piece is almost a perfect example of this. It's stuff like this that get's people like Andrew Sullivan to sneer that the Washington Post is "Woke Po". But what you're getting at is something more subtle and why I think Sully's snide remark is pretty unfair and yet has a kernel of truth. As you say, the piece in question is actually pretty accurate and conveys some genuinely interesting information about representations of white characters in media and how that's changed over time. But as you I think rightly say, it's really odd to frame this story in a negative light like this. fi anything, it's one of the more heartening examples of racial progress.
There's name I've been wanting to bring up more in this discourse about "the great awokening" over the past 7 years...Ta-Nehesi Coates. If there is a founding essay of this movement, you could do worse than point to "The Case for Reparations" (as an analogy, think Rachel Carlson's "Silent Spring"). His book "Between the World and Me" was absolutely lauded at the time and I think did an enormous amount of work towards expanding the definition of "White Supremacy" to something beyond lunatics in SS uniforms or white hoods (along with other essays he was writing at this time). I think one problem with a lot of discourse lately, is there is very few people as good a writer as Coates. And yet, he's been kind of absent the past 4-5 years from the discourse.
A mish mash of thoughts regarding Coates for sure, but he's a name I've been thinking about lately.
Theres nothing uniquely American about this. News consumers of all sorts generally demand negativity, so the media figure out how to frame things to give that to them. Matt mentioned this a few weeks ago, and it’s why he now begins his mailbags with good news stories.
Yeah - living in the UK, I’m blown away by how misleading and frankly emotionally manipulative headlines in the major papers (to say nothing of the tabloids) are. And not just for politics stuff; every time the temperature dips ever so slightly below freezing, there’s a deluge of totally contextless headlines saying something like “temperatures plummet” (having grown up in a place where below-freezing winter temperatures were extremely ordinary, it also makes me feel like this country really needs to prioritize proper weatherproofing). And “soar”: they love the word “soar” to describe increases in basically everything in a contextless way (e.g. Covid cases, inflation, etc.). Also “chaos” (strike-induced travel disruptions, etc.)…I could go on.
I read one of the “some idiot on twitter is mad” articles yesterday on “People’s” site. The article was about a groundswell of disgust over a random remark Terry Bradshaw made about Andy Reid’s bulk in a post-Super Bowl interview.
By whatever means, I hope Elon dislodges Twitter from the central position it occupies in journalism. I read the news because journalists have access to important, influential and interesting people. If I wanted to read their tweets, I would be on Twitter!
I would like to throw in a little about stuff before Matt's time (outing myself as old in the process)--as another person in the comments pointed out, the big change was from the time when news went from a Serious Public Interest thing to primarily entertainment, a development that was accelerated by technology (from radio and TV to internet). One reason JFK's affairs were not the subject of news stories was that serious journalists did not cover "gossip"--that was for movie-star rags and such.
If there was a pinpoint time when political coverage broke the taboo on gossip, it would be in 1987 when a reporter asked Senator Gary Hart (presidential candidate) if he was having an affair and Hart dared them to follow him if they thought there was a story, evidently assuming they'd be ashamed of themselves, which they were not, which led to the whole Donna Rice/"Monkey Business" story and torpedoed Hart's candidacy as well as his reputation. It must seem crazy to people today that anyone would think they could get away with behaving like that, but that was the "the way it was" in those days. I do have to wonder how much better we are for knowing this stuff, though--of course we want to know because it's entertaining, but does it improve the quality of people we elect?
Outing myself as a person who also remembers the whole Gary Hart thing. I also agree that this evolution of what's covered as "news" is, at least in some respects, of dubious value.
True story - when I was approximately 1 year old, Gary Hart ran into my parents on the street and picked me up for one of those classic “kiss a baby” photo ops when he was swinging through New Hampshire.
I really enjoyed Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent when I read it in college. I also enjoyed learning how to make a gravity bong out of my sink and a half a milk carton that summer. Memories!
Now I can’t help wondering how half a milk carton delivers in comparison with half of a 2-liter Coke bottle that I may or may not have used for the same purpose. If only I could find reporting outlets that weren’t overtly anti-milk or anti-Coke.
There's certainly something to be said about "zombie" publications that used to command respect but have been purchased for their intellectual property and now churn out dogshit work hidden behind a formerly trusted brand. Newsweek is the most egregious of these, but I think it also applies to most of America's alt-weeklies as well. Locally the Washington City Paper used to have excellent local politics coverage - which WaPo has never done well or cared about - in addition to investigatory longform and arts coverage. Now it's a two year pit stop for wealthy children playing journalist to pop by, complain about how unprogressive locals are, and then jump to bigger and better (paying) lefty journalism or advocacy jobs. A really pathetic end for a once great paper.
The most jarring change in media over the last few years has been NPR, which by all accounts has been fully captured by activist 20 somethings. Yesterday they ran an article that was straight up junk science called "What's your attachment type?" - with buzzfeed-esque personality quiz included! - that was indistinguishable from some woo girl shit I would expect to see from Gwyneth a Paltrow aligned blog trying to sell me mood crystals. Our local NPR reporter now just straight up rewteets lefty politicians opinions uncritically. Absolutely pathetic to see what NPR has become. The Trump years broke everyone's brains, and we're all worse off for it.
The thought of losing 538 makes me really sad. They're really the best in the game. And better than their most direct competition, too (RealClearPolitics)!
Agreed. Unfortunately, I can conceive how ABC News (and ESPN before them) could see 538 as an effective loss leader--but now they're not agreeing with the effective part. If so, it's really sad there isn't enough of an audience for this type of information delivery (the original Vox concept had the same problem). It's also sad that Nate Silver's dry, straightforward delivery doesn't play as well to most people than the showmanship of, say, a Steve Kornacki, but it sadly is what it is.
The weird thing is that I think 538 is one of the worst for lefty Vox-type takes on many topics! They just sprinkle those in between their probability assessments of elections. (Vox itself is similar - I think of Future Perfect and Even Better and some of their other verticals as doing really solid writing on some topics, interspersed between their very online leftist takes on other things.)
Never really noticed that with 538, but maybe I was deft enough to avoid those articles. And considering my negative view of EA, it's safe to say that I'm not a fan of Future Perfect, either. I don't find anything useful out of Vox after the inaugural writers all left.
Very correct. If Silver doesn't have more control over 538, I suspect he's Yglesias'd out of there fairly soon because its very clear his opinions are not nearly as leftist as the average writer on the site.
This is a fine assessment of structural changes and pressures in the media, but I think the individual angle plays a big role in declining trust. We see reporters more closely and clearly than we did in the past, and people don’t like what they see. I have reflexive (but rebuttable) contempt for reporters under 40. They are disproportionately rich kids with an insular worldview, transparent political bias, zero research skills, no bullshit detector, and primary interest in building their personal brands and status. Give me a cynical old timer from a state school any day, but they’ve all but disappeared.
As a social scientist, I’m now thinking that it would be genuinely interesting to conduct some kind of ethnographic study of the group you mention. We know newsrooms are hugely skewed on the basis of fairly one-dimensional measures of political affiliation, and we can see the results of that, but I wonder if an ethnography of, say, the NYT newsroom would help flesh out the details.
I think the media in general in excellent and there are definitely axes on which it has gotten better.
But when I complain about the media, as one is wont to do, my complaints are not really answered by any of this. For instance, it was pretty clear pretty soon after COVID vaccines became available that they didn't provide sterilizing immunity and that the medium- to long-term positive effects nearly all accrued to the vaccinated individual. That is, 'avoiding the unvaccinated' was not a good COVID prevention strategy. And yes, there were NPR and New York Times articles that said this. But this was not the overwhelming impression that one got from reading the kind of media that the people around me (liberals in liberal places) read. Similarly, while the evidence for mask mandates was frankly not great, this was also not the impression one got.
And in large part as a result of this, institutions I belong to and people around me made really poor decisions and in some cases are still making really poor decisions. Like, "not seeing grandma"-type decisions*, or "vaccine mandates for five-year-old" decisions. It felt like the media was making people and institutions just way dumber in ways that affected their everyday lives.
That's the big example, but there are others I'd put in this same general bucket of "making people less-informed about what's going on directly around them to their detriment".
And for that matter, a conservatives-media analogue to this, sort of, is the number of people who really truly thought that their state/local election people were committing massive, widespread election fraud. That's probably not affecting your day to day choices, but it's still a "lying about what your neighbors are doing/making you less-informed about things in your backyard" situation.
Is there an earlier analogue to this? Potentially! I'm certainly open to it.
*not that there were not situations where you shouldn't see people, but that the vaccination status of other people was not substantially affecting your risk
I agree. I remember an article in the Washington Post claiming that the evidence for masking was rock solid. And they proved it…with a video of someone coughing into a cloth mask. Some of this might have been due to most journalists working on the pandemic not having much of a scientific background, though those with one often did a terrible job too.
One thing I also noticed was that a lot of the reporting didn’t differentiate between science and values. Science tells you that Covid is very bad for elderly people and so is isolation. Your own values tell you whether it’s okay to meet your lonely elderly relatives outside in the middle of a pandemic. I think a lot of journalists did not understand that distinction
The evidence that masking has some benefit is rock solid. But there couldn’t be such a thing as evidence that we should require masks, or that mask mandates work, without some agreed-upon idea of how much benefit it takes to “work” or would justify a mandate. Too many people wanted science to answer the question of what we should do, in a value free way, which it can’t.
I listened to Bad Takes before reading this and noticed (or thought I noticed) an interesting point in common: that it’s easier now than it used to be for people to simply take the path of least resistance: click on the story that confirms your opinion/hopes, watch another video rather than catching up with a friend or suffering a few minutes of boredom alone in your thoughts, eat another donut (which is much better than the donut you could have eaten 10 years ago). Matt has made this point in other posts as well, and especially seems focused on it when he talks about his son.
Life today, while amazing on many measurable dimensions, seems to be organized to make it harder and harder to make thoughtful decisions about what to consume and what to do with your time. We have access to so much “content” and so much stuff. In the Slow Boring world this is generally celebrated, which is not wrong. I appreciate that Matt doesn’t hold himself out as a guru, but given his background in philosophy I would enjoy some more explicit discussions of the tradeoffs.
Agreed. Feels like perhaps the news menu days of yore was more of a "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit" (a phrase my son hears frequently at school) and has now evolved into a hyper-competitive, all-you-can-stand-to-eat buffet. Of course that kind of market would drive businesses to sell more of the news-equivalent of junk food.
In this brave new world of media, something that I wish would be a norm (yet I know is probably just a dream) is if every publication had a strong, prominent mission statement on what news they find is important, and what their values are that drive the decisions on why they find said news that they cover important.
I feel like a lot of distrust of "the media" comes from people disagreeing with the legacy mass media on these questions. For example, I think that certainly stoked a lot of right wing discontent that resulted in the rise of Fox News, and Fox News in turn stoked a left wing backlash accusing them of not being on the level with the whole "fair and balanced" slogan.
Knowing where publications stand, be it partisan, ideological, or not, I think would lower the temperature of some of this discontent.
Here is the part I’m curious about - it’s Wednesday February 15th 1983 - does the NYTimes have any idea what articles were actually read in that day’s paper? I’m assuming no.
That they now know with an absolute certainty must have changed journalism.
And that leads to a self-reinforcing "follow the audience" spiral, which creates a market for competitors to capture different audiences. The net result is that we trade an exclusionary mono-culture for a fragmented landscape of audiences organized around various subcultures. It's more fracas, but I think an improvement overall because it means there is more choice and more people are engaged and included. Now we just have to learn how to depolarize the zeitgeist.
I think we tend to romanticize some past period of consensus and sanity that never existed - as one of MY’s recent columns points out, the flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers (or their equivalents) have always been a part of the broader Republican coalition and so were receiving a hearing of sorts in the halls of power. And the “exclusionary monoculture” represents a fairly brief and exceptional period of time in the context of the history of journalism during which “balance” was considered a virtue.
I’m not disagreeing that fractiousness in the media is corrosive; I just don’t think it’s quite as much of a radical shift as we sometimes make it out to be.
If you're looking at the narrow question of whether it's better to have a small group of large media companies tacking to the middle in order to capture the largest possible market share, or a large group of small media companies targeting niche groups with extreme takes, you can make an argument that the old days were better. But the cheap cost of publishing is just one aspect of how society has been transformed by technological advances, and it's very difficult to separate this from the vast benefits the Internet has afforded us.
Certainly not the way they do now, but they knew what articles generated letters to the editor and also what everyone was talking about, because there were definitely stories like that--things that dominated water-cooler chatter for a days.
This is a longer feedback loop that requires people to both remember a story and form cogent opinions about it afterward, so that probably creates a different bias than just looking at what gets read.
They more than likely did observe trends in which cover stories led to higher sales.
I think this article correctly describes the causes of the *long-run* decline in trust in the media.
But I think it also conflates that long-run trend with the discourse about how the NYT, CNN etc. suddenly changed their reporting standards after 2016 and then doubled down on that in 2020.
When Bari Weiss talks about how the media is untrustworthy, it’s the latter rather than the former. And you even see some journalists making explicit calls for lower standards (e.g., the moral clarity debate).
So I don’t think it’s crazy to claim that *in the short run*, the media has become less trustworthy in some sense. (In fact, the last bit about 538 illustrates how this might happen.)
This is on target, and articulates a key point missed in the original post. There was both an increase in overtly partisan coverage in outlets which had previously were at least in principle neutral, plus a new focus on stories from a social justice angle. As a daily NPR listener at the time, this change was jarring.
Exactly this. Stories about crime and national politics in the nytimes got heavily biased during Trump, and have stayed that way since. Unfortunately they are so by far still the best newspaper that I have had to stay with them. NPR, on the other hand, I've almost entirely dropped from my commute.
With zero exaggeration, upon turning on NPR, I'd bet there is a greater than 70% chance of race or LGBTQ-ness being mentioned within 1 minute. (Unless there's a pledge drive going on.)
I miss Car Talk. I don’t really care for cars or car culture broadly but it was genuinely enjoyable. *turns into dust and blows away*
Car Talk has a lot of nostalgic appeal, but it’s been obviated by podcasts. There is an almost unlimited well of “two guys with a great rapport taking about a subject for an hour” online, and you can get a Car Talk about any topic under the sun.
+1 It was a great show -- I listened to it for many years despite not even owning a car!
Yes, but that was a WBUR (Boston) show. NPR only distributed it.
I agree with your analysis, and yet I'm reliably assured in on-line progressive spaces that "NPR" stands for "Nice Polite Republicans" and is campaigning to reelect Trump . . . .
A lot of that seems like over-correction from thinking that Obama's presidency heralded a "post-racial" era--we're now in the post-post-racial era, which has gone from taking down Confederate monuments (which was good) to doing the same to statues of Lincoln (kinda nuts) to an unending quest for examples of racism, real or imagined.
my favorite example of this genre is whenever a chatbot or AI of some sort gets introduced, journalists spend countless time trying to get it to say racist things so they can write the "New AI is Racist" article
Come on people, the circlejerk needs to be broken here. It isn't journalists trying to get chat bots to say racist things... it's 4chan trolls (or equivalents) intentionally trying to break AI chat bots to say racist stuff for the lolz*. The journalists then report "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Assholes on the Internet Have Ruined Another Thing". This has been a thing they've done to everything for over a decade now. Mountain Dew had an online poll contest in 2012 to name a new flavor and the top vote was "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong".
https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/14/mountain-dews-dub-the-dew-online-poll-goes-horribly-wrong/
*They've figured out they can do this with ChatGPT by telling it to play a game where it pretends to be a character that isn't bound by ChatGPT rules and always gives the most hateful, offensive response to whatever the user queries.
Yes, news organizations followed the Fox News model. They had different politics but the structure and ethics were the same. You see far less telling of whole stories and more narrative telling.
Meet the Press last weekend challenged the Utah Governor on trans issues. Chuck Todd’s language and questions could have been written by trans activists. It really is crazy.
A show like Meet the Press really could have experts with different views on to educate people but they have so called journalists and political professionals on talking about issues that they don’t really understand. There just isn’t a seeking of truth and knowledge. It’s all horse race. Meet the Press’ horse is clearly blue.
The MSM was center-left-ish for decades.
Conservatives complained for years, to no avail, then got fed up and created their own media ecosystem centered on Fox.
That conservative ecosystem may suck in many ways, but I don't see how it excuses (or even explains) the 2015/2016 'spasm', as you put it.
I apologize.
I misinterpreted your post and thought you were making a kind of 'But conservatives...' claim.
That being said, I do not think that US conservatives as a whole can be considered broadly illiberal, in the classic sense of liberal.
“that trend isn't some magical moment where the evil media just up and decided to go insane”
Haidt provides a solid case to the contrary. He does it in a wider societal level but I think you could include much of the media in his theory.
This isn’t to contradict the conservatives have been undermining media trust for a long time. Both can be true.
Yes. Reporting and editorial standards fell off a cliff in 2016 and into a chasm in 2020, wholly apart from structural changes in the media. I’m not a particular Bari Weiss fan, but her complaints about political bias seemed pretty verifiable. James Bennett was fired for printing an op-ed by a US senator that expressed a pretty widespread view at the time, on the ludicrous grounds that it endangered staff (evincing impressive levels of cowardice, narcissism, and bad faith all at once). They ran the 1619 claim about the American Revolution despite being told repeatedly by their own fact checkers that it was false. One could go on and on.
I don't read Bari Weiss, but I noticed she apparently pissed off Elon with what she wrote after being given special access. Sure, one could say it's just about branding, but that demonstrated a degree of independence.
Her recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast about the media was very interesting. She and another writer talk about the actual process of getting information for the Twitter files, how they had to query a database and get a hose of communications after their query was vetted by lawyers. And it was extremely difficult to go through all the data. It sounded very stressful and a sub optimal way of conducting research. It was very difficult to explore topics because they had to specify whose communication and what dates they wanted, so she says they were forced to focus on things like January 6th because there were clear timelines that they could request from. She makes it clear that Elon Musk was a biased source who was providing info and access for his own reasons, which is just the way journalism has always worked.
Link?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opinion/hong-kong-china-security-law.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/519262-nyt-opinion-piece-backing-chinas-crackdown-in-hong-kong-sparks-backlash/
I think there's a good long-form piece to be written, maybe even a book, that examines the thesis that, between about 2014 and 2020, Twitter uniquely, almost singlehandedly, rotted the brains and judgment of America's elite opinion makers, both professional journalists and political operatives and the segment of private citizens who closely follow politics.
The polemic version would be something like this: From fueling Trump's initial rise, to skewing coverage and journalism thereafter, Twitter infected the American body politic like a virus, and it's only recently that our political immune system has recognized the problem and begun fighting back.
I think it's plausible. Being the kind of person who's always looking for snappy-but-often-superficial parallels, Twitter makes me think of the explosion of political journalism during the French Revolution. Desmoulins and Marat basically invented the closest thing to Twitter that was probably possible in the late-18th century version - not just in volume of content, but also in creating the same sleight-of-hand in which strident extremism is presented as representative of public opinion.
Or maybe not. Like I said, could be a dumb comparison.
It is interesting to extrapolate the idea and root cause. Basically twitter is a mob; the same kind thing happens in-person during witch-trails, or soccer-games and other hysteria just via close-proximity and word-of-mouth. Might the problem be the "echo-chamber" and things like long-form communication force a more deliberative way of thinking?
And then a segment of the audience that didn't dig the moral clarity style of journalism followed Bari to a different outlet that is still very much part of the media. The net result is that both audiences have media outlets that they trust, yet that would likely show up on a survey as "I don't trust the media" because both audiences can now identify media outlets that they don't trust, but that they also don't read.
I think Bari’s outfit is more consciously a supplement to other media that it assumes you’re consuming. The NYT and some other outlets (NPR, WaPo) still hope to lay claim to being a primary news outlet for readers or listeners.
That’s pretty disingenuous though, the way that John Stewart used to retreat to “but we’re a comedy show and no one should get their news from a comedy show” whenever someone complained about the Daily Show. They were the best politics show on television - they can’t pretend they’re just comedy! And similarly, there surely are plenty of people for whom Bari Weiss is the center of their news consumption.
It's funny you mention Bari Weiss. I used to admire her a lot for her principled, rational objection to woke excesses, and i cheered for her new substack.
Then I started reading her substack and... yikes! The articles themselves were good, but the comments? Not just conservative, but ultra-fringe, bat-guano "Biden is tHe AntIChRisT and Dumbocrats are LitErAlLy the BigGest ThReAt to America EVER!!!" wingnuttery. I lost all respect for someone who keeps that kind of company. I don't read her substack anymore. It's sad.
As someone said, riffing on Nietzsche: "When you gaze into the anti-woke abyss, you see James Lindsay gazing back into you."
It's a minor miracle that this comment section is as civilized and informative as it is after reading the comment threads on Taibbi's and Weiss' Substacks. I still subscribe to both and certainly don't agree with everything they post, but I do appreciate their outsider's perspective. And I never, ever look at the comments these days.
Likewise, while I believe Weiss is principled Im not quite sure how to reconcile that with the fact she platforms pseudo intellectuals like Michael Shellenberger.
> The articles themselves were good, but the comments?
Restricting comments here to paying commenters makes a gigantic difference. The only two ways to maintain a semblance of civility or intelligence in any internet forum are to stay small and incognito, or to charge. That's still not a guarantee, but not doing at least one of those two is a guarantee of disaster.
It’s a complicated question as to whether one can hold a writer responsible for “keeping company” with their readership. Weiss (or MY) is obviously not choosing who reads or comments. At the same time, successful writers on a platform like Substack cultivate particular readerships: MY’s basic thesis is “the world is complicated and hard things are hard,” while Weiss’s is “I am literally the only thing standing between the woke mobs and freedom.” Her takes are sometimes good and fair; it’s her messiah complex (and Greenwald’s, for that matter) that really disgusts me.
"It’s a complicated question as to whether one can hold a writer responsible for “keeping company” with their readership. Weiss (or MY) is obviously not choosing who reads or comments."
No, it's not complicated. If I were to comment on Matt's Substack: "Republicans are EVIL INCARNATE and they deserve to DIE," Matt would (and should!) very easily ban me for breaking the rules of civil discourse. Bari Weiss has the same ability! She could have chosen to ban the more ridiculously over-the-top comments. She could have posted, "Look, I know a lot of us feel passionately about these issues, but that's no excuse for being an abusive a-hole, and if you act like an abusive a-hole on my Substack, I will ban you with extreme prejudice."
She could have chosen to do these things. She didn't. That's all.
Agreed; in that sense you’re correct she (or likely whoever maintains her Substack) could (and should) do that. And she’s chosen to set herself up as the Source of All Truth in such a way that she won’t, as you say.
I sincerely wonder what she (and Taibbi, and Greenwald, etc.) think of her readership. MY has expressed that it really troubles him when discussions about trans issues go off the rails, and Milan has stepped in to tell people to knock it off a couple of times I’m aware of. I imagine Weiss kind of shrugging, if she reads the comments at all.
The thing that strikes me, beyond the sheer rage that fuels the kind of extremist comments that shows up on her and other Substacks, is how utterly symmetrical, at least rhetorically, is it with far-left extremism. As in, swap out the hated targets, maybe add the word “problematic” here and there, and it sounds identical.
Actually, there’s probably an interesting political psychology experiment in there; cull some unhinged online comments or other extremist rhetoric, take out keywords that would obviously identify them with a particular perspective, and ask people to guess where they’re coming from or ask which ones they prefer.
At some point you are who are you cater to.
Yep, I'm almost of two minds on this issue. On one hand MY and Weiss can't control who reads their work product but on the other hand your audience kinda reflects who you are.
I was briefly subscribed to her Substack, and the thing that made me quit was her description of her and her partner’s attempt to get pregnant. In and of itself, that was totally fine; it was when she said something to the effect of (I’m paraphrasing) “raising the next generation of the righteous” that I was like, “okay, I think I’m done here.”
There’s a decent chunk of antivax content on The Free Press! Makes me not want to go there even though I definitely like about 25% of the writers there and respectfully disagree with another 25%.
Right. I grew up (in the 90s and 00s) being taught that some media are more trustworthy than others, and the New York Times was the most trustworthy. I read Bari Weiss because Trump-era changes in how the NYT covers the news have reduced my trust in it.
I think one of the things that happened, and it's effects are much broader than just the media, is that Trump's election destroyed a lot of liberal belief that people could make up their own minds upon consideration of the available media.
This will be confusing because I'm also JA, but I disagree. He conflates the two because what happened over the past 7 years is nothing but what has happened over the last ~33 years. Right wingers used to have to meet in John Birch Societies, but then they could listen to talk radio. Moderates used to read the NYT and NPR, and now they read Substack. And his general point is still correct---there's moderates all over the NYT and NPR, just fewer of them than there used to be. They still employ David Brooks. Most NPR stories are not headlined "Trump lies again" where they used to say "Trump makes claims about border," they're stories about what actually happened in X place and time and they're reported as such without needless extra moral clarity.
Weiss, Greenwald, Sullivan, DeBoer et. al are marketing themselves as more trustworthy. That's fine! But it's marketing to a very narrow slice of people who are (generally) suspicious of authority, interested in a wide range of ideas including those from the right, and most importantly extremely well-read in the media discourse over the past decade. That doesn't make them more trustworthy. At least MY is honest about it. And as he said, Vox still published the articles that he wrote that the rest of the staff hated, and he didn't get fired (he left).
I do think there has been a real shift in mainstream center-left media since the mid-2010s (Trump was the main factor, but there were stirrings of it before he came along), but you’re right that this shift is best viewed as part of broader media changes that started with the rise of talk radio, cable news and the internet in the 80s and 90s. But it just so happens that the kind of people who comment here are very much the sort of people who would have noticed that particular change at outlets like NYT, NPR, etc.
Yes, this is my general idea. There's lots of tranches---Air America/The Daily Show/Daily Kos are a (pretty unpopular) left of left tranche, then Chapo House and other dirtbag left are left of that, etc. NYT/NPR are still not as left as Air America/Daily Kos on most things, just on identity.
I can't say I follow any one outlet closely. My sense nevertheless is that NYT, MSNBC, NPR exhibit bias mostly by selection and by verbiage. (As opposed to the outright lies told by the most popular shows on Fox.) For example, I'm not sure I ever got a sense of how much violence was going on in Portland last summer. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Quick question - I know Weiss left the NYT during the Cotton op-ed debacle, but my impression was that it was not under particular duress - which, fair enough, if I felt like the atmosphere in my workplace was turning toxic and I could jump ship to something more personally and financially fulfilling I would too. But she talks about it like she was chased out the door by a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers. Does anyone happen to know the details?
Bari's own resignation letter has some specifics, which (assuming you trust her account) includes some stuff that goes beyond general workplace toxicity and becomes something a little more twisted and personal imo : https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
Blocked and Reported, in its early days, covered this and from what I remember did a pretty good job; you want Episode 14 and especially Episode 21 (about the resignation itself).
I don't think she was being squeezed by management or that her job was in danger, but a bunch of the rank and file were actively mistreating and shunning her. Rukmini Callimachi verified that Bari was a punching bag on the NYT slack channel. When Bari offered a coffee date to a lower-ranked employee who was upset at something she'd written, the woman refused. It was 7th grade bullying behavior that should be unacceptable in any workplace. I can't imagine having the gall to insult a coworker on a company forum or refusing to meet with a superior - both seem like no-brainer firing offenses. Dean Baquet should have established a one-strike rule for this crap and started sacking people.
Right. Fair enough - I’d feel resentful too, and I agree that such behavior is unacceptable, not to mention cowardly. I don’t know about one-strike firing - that seems heavy handed and like prime martyr-making fodder to boot - but certainly some kind of reprimand. I’ve never had to deal with that kind of talking behind backs or outright snubbing, so it’s hard for me to appreciate how corrosive it must be for one’s well-being (then again, I’m in academia, which has its own, more formalized snubbing systems).
"After all, the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light — so why are so many stories false and misleading, and why do so many true, important facts go under covered?"
I'm hardly the first to make this point (and I can't find a link for it now), but while this is *what I grew up thinking* was the purpose of journalism, it's not what journalism historically has been. Pretty much all of journalism from the colonial era forward was about providing a mouthpiece for certain interests (primarily wealthy ones).
What changed is that at some point, newspapers became huge advertising revenue generators, so their purpose switched from promoting the interests of their owners to appealing to as broad a swath of society as possible, thus garnering greater appeal and more money. Throw in television to the mix in the 1950s/60s and you have basically three stations with all of the eyeballs focused on them. It didn't make sense for them to rock the boat, so again, they appealed to as much of the mainstream as possible for the same reasons.
The last 40 years have led to more options, thus greater incentives to differentiate themselves. Newspapers are no longer cash cows (leading to a lot of consolidation/failures as people got out of the game). So now you have people like Murdoch or Bezos who own large media operations and are perfectly happy to take a loss if necessary to promote their beliefs. Once you start seeing media through its historical lens, the current system makes a lot more sense.
Yes. Add to this that straight reporting of information is generally not going to win a competition for most entertaining content. MY says he doesn't "know why people read what they read, but they are mostly not seeking actionable intelligence about the state of the world". Here's the answer: most media consumers, most of the time, are looking to be entertained.
And there just isn't that much entertainment value in straight news reporting to make a viable, broadly competitive business. In the 20th Century mass media era, this was solved by confining "hard news" to just small, concentrated portions of the daily programming, except for those who actively sought out more because of being weird to find news entertaining -- 30 minutes in the evening, some in the morning; national and local news sections of the paper you could quickly skim or skip entirely on your way to the comics or sports section, etc. The rest was unabashedly entertainment. Turns out that was probably healthier for society than political propaganda as entertainment.
It matters that the entertainment claims to be true though. It’s like true crime podcasts.
Exactly. News today is an entertainment business clamoring for attention and only getting paid when it can deliver lots of attention to itself and therefore it’s advertisers. In the hypermedia era there’s no general incentive toward truth or “journalism,” the incentive is to preach to a choir so that you can rely on a hardcore (and ideally well differentiated) base of attention to support you.
I don’t think this reckons very well with the obvious fact that large, trusted outlets really did increase their suppression and slanting of generally true stories more aggressively starting 2020. Like, are we still pretending that John Fetterman just has hearing issues or are we ok to be honest now that we have 51 senate seats?
Making renditions arguments around “what is the media really” just intentionally obscures the fact that a lot of people would like there to be media outlets that aren’t overtly partisan. like, if we’re at a place where your point is that Rush & Tucker are the same as the NYT so who cares… that is bad! I want “the media” to be a class of publications that does NOT include Tucker and Rush and Maddow!
remember when Kara Swisher and the like attacked that one reporter for completely truthfully reporting that Fetterman was having cognitive difficulties?
that's *disabled* reporter Taylor Lorenz to you sir
https://twitter.com/DeathCripps/status/1625267185718374402/photo/1
I would ask how the fuck she became anything but a basement-dweller on mommy and daddy's dime, but I know already: her parents were rich enough to build her resume to let her leech off other people instead of them.
Is there a way I can verify your knowledge on that last point? (Not disagreeing)
Being an actual lizard person is a legitimate disability.
https://twitter.com/wrong_speak/status/1527637129475522560?lang=en
Idk I think she's quite pretty. The victim complex is just a bit much.
Yeah, I get a bit annoyed at the "Taylor Lorenz is ugly" cracks that are ubiquitous on Twitter. There are enough legitimate things to criticize her for without making fun of her appearance and it's also just silly to pretend that she isn't within the range of "conventionally attractive by modern American standards" (which I, in fact, would cynically credit as being a major reason for the level of success she's achieved in journalism -- I've never even seen anyone defending Lorenz point to anything she's published as being a great piece of writing).
When I was in college I got my news from "the media". Sans a few quirky radio shows and magazines, the news came from the newspapers and TV news networks and it was congruent. Fast-forward (through the rise of Fox News, MSNBC, etc.) to today and "the media" is what I program my computer to show me.
Today, when I mention "the media" to a college student, I get a quizzical look. They consume information, have a coherent worldview, are very well-informed and occupy a shared reality, but have a completely different conception of "the media" than me. On the other hand, my parents still get most of their news from their TV and have a tenuous grasp of the concept of filter bubbles.
I think that "the media" *is* a class a publications that does not include Tucker and Rush and Maddow because it is whatever you define it to be. I also find it hard to execute that theory in practice because the landscape is constantly evolving and old habits die hard.
I think your sense that this is actually true is largely due to the fact that you are actually aware of “generally true stories” that weren’t covered in major outlets.
> But I also read Bloomberg News, which really gives you a sense of how different journalism can be when it’s bundled with economic data as an actual information service.
I also strongly endorse Bloomberg News and it’s my primary source of daily news. Yes, they are biased towards business and economics, but they still cover all major news events. If anything, I appreciate their concise coverage of non-finance stuff that results from their incentives in catering to a business audience. Particularly, Bloomberg’s “Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day”, is a great daily newsletter for staying abreast of national and global events.
Also, their bundled streaming service, Bloomberg TV, is a gem. They cover all the major events, with a heavy focus on finance/econ, while still being fairly entertaining. Each morning I have to make a hard decision between Slow Boring and Bloomberg Surveillance since they both start at 6 AM ET. You can find a lot of this content for free on their YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@markets
It's really impressive how putting money on the line straightens things out: if you make major financial decisions based on bad information, you're going to get burned. It's basically a corollary to "A bet is a tax on bullshit".
I just wish a Bloomberg subscription weren't so expensive...
I used the private browser trick for a while, but I used the site enough that I felt I should pay for it.
I read the FT for similar reasons
This is maybe a minor tangent, but the rise of "misinformation" journalism is a nightmare of Orwellian propaganda.
For example: https://reason.com/2023/02/14/global-disinformation-index-state-department-list-risk-reason/
Holy shit yo. I have much more sympathy for the Bari Weiss take when, since 2015 at least, the most strident propagandists in the major outlets are the one's on these mis/disinformation/fact checking beats.
I do think the terms like mis/disinformation are used as political cudgels frequently, but I also think that there's genuinely people out there who just make bullshit up. Hell, Reason itself points to NewsGuard as a valuable service for distinguishing outlets based upon a relatively objective criteria of journalistic practices. There's clearly some standards which can and should be used to distinguish between individual outlets
For sure, it would be laughable to think Breitbart or Buzzfeed are super committed to factually accurate journalism. My point is that the self appointed "fact-check" industry is among the most reliably agenda driven beats in journalism. So many instances of, "Well, there's nothing factually incorrect about this article, but it fails to conform to the approved narrative framing. Four Pinocchios."
A good local political wonk blog around here, Iowa Starting Line, got a bunch of funding to "fight misinformation" and quickly turned into clickbait trash
I agree that “fact-checking” has become politicized (sigh), but it’s funny that the linked article never specifically refutes the charge. Instead, it uses loaded questions and Pavlovian triggers (“taxpayer dollars”) and basically says “you can trust us because freedom.” Also, it counters one fact-checker by…citing another fact-checker that provides more favorable ratings.
I’m not saying that Reason is untrustworthy; what I’m saying is that if they (or, really, any publication) want to be convincing, they should make actual arguments instead of relying on rhetorical tropes.
And since we’re on the topic of Reason, I find it fatiguing for the same reason I find socialists tiresome; libertarian ideas are absolutely worth consideration, but when they turn into considering any instance of government overreach as prima facie evidence of malfeasance, it’s like, okay, chill for a sec (cf. socialists considering any instance of capitalist overreach as prima facie evidence of counter-revolution).
The variable that's changing over time is partisanship within media.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
I read the Washington Post every morning and over time I find that the information I receive is accurate and truthful. However, while reading an article suggesting some below-the-radar movies to go watch there was a line about how the live-action Little Mermaid caused a racist backlash, with a link. Curious, I followed the link.
That story cited exactly one source as evidence of this backlash, a hashtag on Twitter. It then started discussing representation of nonwhite families in children's stories, with links. Following those links I encountered a study that says that, since the 1940's representation of white families in children's literature has fallen from 100% to 45%. That seems like a good thing, except the study cast it as a bad thing, conflating 'plurality' with 'majority' and asserting that 45% figure as evidence that children's literature was inappropriately dominated by stories about white families. The original article then went on to discuss a bunch of interesting research going back to the 40's on how representation of racial group in children's literature impacts people's perceptions of all sorts of things both as children and later in life.
My takeaway was that researchers started looking at this topic in the 40's and surfaced a pernicious problem that has subsequently led to a measurable improvement and has raised awareness. I learned a lot of interesting facts that were true and was happy to see that children's literature had become so much more diverse than when I was a kid. (My kids were born abroad, so I don't have experience with modern children's literature in the US, but I'm a parent so these things interest me.) But the whole narrative arc of the story was super pessimistic and, in my opinion, absurdly hyperbolic (and/or Twitter-centric) in elevating a hashtag to the level of Racist Backlash, while also not being untrue.
That is one of many examples of what I think sows mistrust with "the media", at least among people old enough to have grown up with three TV networks and a local newspaper; ironically, because it produced a single, coherent narrative that manufactured consent. It's nigh impossible these days to find news that isn't infused with a specific and often tribal worldview, which is probably a result of the competitive incentive structure and lack of gatekeeping Matt wrote about (which reduces to engagement metrics). It's something I have to get used to because it isn't going away, but I can very much see how it can feed into the "you can't trust the media"—or the "you can't trust *their* media"—narrative.
One has to wonder what fraction of white representation would be acceptable in a country which is still around 60% non-Hispanic white...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html
This article is talking about COVID, but I actually think is related to what you are noting; there is a very uniquely American bias in media to cover every story in a more negative light than it needs to be. You're example of the WaPo piece is almost a perfect example of this. It's stuff like this that get's people like Andrew Sullivan to sneer that the Washington Post is "Woke Po". But what you're getting at is something more subtle and why I think Sully's snide remark is pretty unfair and yet has a kernel of truth. As you say, the piece in question is actually pretty accurate and conveys some genuinely interesting information about representations of white characters in media and how that's changed over time. But as you I think rightly say, it's really odd to frame this story in a negative light like this. fi anything, it's one of the more heartening examples of racial progress.
There's name I've been wanting to bring up more in this discourse about "the great awokening" over the past 7 years...Ta-Nehesi Coates. If there is a founding essay of this movement, you could do worse than point to "The Case for Reparations" (as an analogy, think Rachel Carlson's "Silent Spring"). His book "Between the World and Me" was absolutely lauded at the time and I think did an enormous amount of work towards expanding the definition of "White Supremacy" to something beyond lunatics in SS uniforms or white hoods (along with other essays he was writing at this time). I think one problem with a lot of discourse lately, is there is very few people as good a writer as Coates. And yet, he's been kind of absent the past 4-5 years from the discourse.
A mish mash of thoughts regarding Coates for sure, but he's a name I've been thinking about lately.
Theres nothing uniquely American about this. News consumers of all sorts generally demand negativity, so the media figure out how to frame things to give that to them. Matt mentioned this a few weeks ago, and it’s why he now begins his mailbags with good news stories.
Yeah - living in the UK, I’m blown away by how misleading and frankly emotionally manipulative headlines in the major papers (to say nothing of the tabloids) are. And not just for politics stuff; every time the temperature dips ever so slightly below freezing, there’s a deluge of totally contextless headlines saying something like “temperatures plummet” (having grown up in a place where below-freezing winter temperatures were extremely ordinary, it also makes me feel like this country really needs to prioritize proper weatherproofing). And “soar”: they love the word “soar” to describe increases in basically everything in a contextless way (e.g. Covid cases, inflation, etc.). Also “chaos” (strike-induced travel disruptions, etc.)…I could go on.
I read one of the “some idiot on twitter is mad” articles yesterday on “People’s” site. The article was about a groundswell of disgust over a random remark Terry Bradshaw made about Andy Reid’s bulk in a post-Super Bowl interview.
By whatever means, I hope Elon dislodges Twitter from the central position it occupies in journalism. I read the news because journalists have access to important, influential and interesting people. If I wanted to read their tweets, I would be on Twitter!
I would like to throw in a little about stuff before Matt's time (outing myself as old in the process)--as another person in the comments pointed out, the big change was from the time when news went from a Serious Public Interest thing to primarily entertainment, a development that was accelerated by technology (from radio and TV to internet). One reason JFK's affairs were not the subject of news stories was that serious journalists did not cover "gossip"--that was for movie-star rags and such.
If there was a pinpoint time when political coverage broke the taboo on gossip, it would be in 1987 when a reporter asked Senator Gary Hart (presidential candidate) if he was having an affair and Hart dared them to follow him if they thought there was a story, evidently assuming they'd be ashamed of themselves, which they were not, which led to the whole Donna Rice/"Monkey Business" story and torpedoed Hart's candidacy as well as his reputation. It must seem crazy to people today that anyone would think they could get away with behaving like that, but that was the "the way it was" in those days. I do have to wonder how much better we are for knowing this stuff, though--of course we want to know because it's entertaining, but does it improve the quality of people we elect?
Outing myself as a person who also remembers the whole Gary Hart thing. I also agree that this evolution of what's covered as "news" is, at least in some respects, of dubious value.
True story - when I was approximately 1 year old, Gary Hart ran into my parents on the street and picked me up for one of those classic “kiss a baby” photo ops when he was swinging through New Hampshire.
I really enjoyed Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent when I read it in college. I also enjoyed learning how to make a gravity bong out of my sink and a half a milk carton that summer. Memories!
Now I can’t help wondering how half a milk carton delivers in comparison with half of a 2-liter Coke bottle that I may or may not have used for the same purpose. If only I could find reporting outlets that weren’t overtly anti-milk or anti-Coke.
There's certainly something to be said about "zombie" publications that used to command respect but have been purchased for their intellectual property and now churn out dogshit work hidden behind a formerly trusted brand. Newsweek is the most egregious of these, but I think it also applies to most of America's alt-weeklies as well. Locally the Washington City Paper used to have excellent local politics coverage - which WaPo has never done well or cared about - in addition to investigatory longform and arts coverage. Now it's a two year pit stop for wealthy children playing journalist to pop by, complain about how unprogressive locals are, and then jump to bigger and better (paying) lefty journalism or advocacy jobs. A really pathetic end for a once great paper.
The most jarring change in media over the last few years has been NPR, which by all accounts has been fully captured by activist 20 somethings. Yesterday they ran an article that was straight up junk science called "What's your attachment type?" - with buzzfeed-esque personality quiz included! - that was indistinguishable from some woo girl shit I would expect to see from Gwyneth a Paltrow aligned blog trying to sell me mood crystals. Our local NPR reporter now just straight up rewteets lefty politicians opinions uncritically. Absolutely pathetic to see what NPR has become. The Trump years broke everyone's brains, and we're all worse off for it.
The thought of losing 538 makes me really sad. They're really the best in the game. And better than their most direct competition, too (RealClearPolitics)!
Agreed. Unfortunately, I can conceive how ABC News (and ESPN before them) could see 538 as an effective loss leader--but now they're not agreeing with the effective part. If so, it's really sad there isn't enough of an audience for this type of information delivery (the original Vox concept had the same problem). It's also sad that Nate Silver's dry, straightforward delivery doesn't play as well to most people than the showmanship of, say, a Steve Kornacki, but it sadly is what it is.
The weird thing is that I think 538 is one of the worst for lefty Vox-type takes on many topics! They just sprinkle those in between their probability assessments of elections. (Vox itself is similar - I think of Future Perfect and Even Better and some of their other verticals as doing really solid writing on some topics, interspersed between their very online leftist takes on other things.)
Never really noticed that with 538, but maybe I was deft enough to avoid those articles. And considering my negative view of EA, it's safe to say that I'm not a fan of Future Perfect, either. I don't find anything useful out of Vox after the inaugural writers all left.
Very correct. If Silver doesn't have more control over 538, I suspect he's Yglesias'd out of there fairly soon because its very clear his opinions are not nearly as leftist as the average writer on the site.
This is a fine assessment of structural changes and pressures in the media, but I think the individual angle plays a big role in declining trust. We see reporters more closely and clearly than we did in the past, and people don’t like what they see. I have reflexive (but rebuttable) contempt for reporters under 40. They are disproportionately rich kids with an insular worldview, transparent political bias, zero research skills, no bullshit detector, and primary interest in building their personal brands and status. Give me a cynical old timer from a state school any day, but they’ve all but disappeared.
As a social scientist, I’m now thinking that it would be genuinely interesting to conduct some kind of ethnographic study of the group you mention. We know newsrooms are hugely skewed on the basis of fairly one-dimensional measures of political affiliation, and we can see the results of that, but I wonder if an ethnography of, say, the NYT newsroom would help flesh out the details.
I think the media in general in excellent and there are definitely axes on which it has gotten better.
But when I complain about the media, as one is wont to do, my complaints are not really answered by any of this. For instance, it was pretty clear pretty soon after COVID vaccines became available that they didn't provide sterilizing immunity and that the medium- to long-term positive effects nearly all accrued to the vaccinated individual. That is, 'avoiding the unvaccinated' was not a good COVID prevention strategy. And yes, there were NPR and New York Times articles that said this. But this was not the overwhelming impression that one got from reading the kind of media that the people around me (liberals in liberal places) read. Similarly, while the evidence for mask mandates was frankly not great, this was also not the impression one got.
And in large part as a result of this, institutions I belong to and people around me made really poor decisions and in some cases are still making really poor decisions. Like, "not seeing grandma"-type decisions*, or "vaccine mandates for five-year-old" decisions. It felt like the media was making people and institutions just way dumber in ways that affected their everyday lives.
That's the big example, but there are others I'd put in this same general bucket of "making people less-informed about what's going on directly around them to their detriment".
And for that matter, a conservatives-media analogue to this, sort of, is the number of people who really truly thought that their state/local election people were committing massive, widespread election fraud. That's probably not affecting your day to day choices, but it's still a "lying about what your neighbors are doing/making you less-informed about things in your backyard" situation.
Is there an earlier analogue to this? Potentially! I'm certainly open to it.
*not that there were not situations where you shouldn't see people, but that the vaccination status of other people was not substantially affecting your risk
I agree. I remember an article in the Washington Post claiming that the evidence for masking was rock solid. And they proved it…with a video of someone coughing into a cloth mask. Some of this might have been due to most journalists working on the pandemic not having much of a scientific background, though those with one often did a terrible job too.
One thing I also noticed was that a lot of the reporting didn’t differentiate between science and values. Science tells you that Covid is very bad for elderly people and so is isolation. Your own values tell you whether it’s okay to meet your lonely elderly relatives outside in the middle of a pandemic. I think a lot of journalists did not understand that distinction
The evidence that masking has some benefit is rock solid. But there couldn’t be such a thing as evidence that we should require masks, or that mask mandates work, without some agreed-upon idea of how much benefit it takes to “work” or would justify a mandate. Too many people wanted science to answer the question of what we should do, in a value free way, which it can’t.
I listened to Bad Takes before reading this and noticed (or thought I noticed) an interesting point in common: that it’s easier now than it used to be for people to simply take the path of least resistance: click on the story that confirms your opinion/hopes, watch another video rather than catching up with a friend or suffering a few minutes of boredom alone in your thoughts, eat another donut (which is much better than the donut you could have eaten 10 years ago). Matt has made this point in other posts as well, and especially seems focused on it when he talks about his son.
Life today, while amazing on many measurable dimensions, seems to be organized to make it harder and harder to make thoughtful decisions about what to consume and what to do with your time. We have access to so much “content” and so much stuff. In the Slow Boring world this is generally celebrated, which is not wrong. I appreciate that Matt doesn’t hold himself out as a guru, but given his background in philosophy I would enjoy some more explicit discussions of the tradeoffs.
Agreed. Feels like perhaps the news menu days of yore was more of a "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit" (a phrase my son hears frequently at school) and has now evolved into a hyper-competitive, all-you-can-stand-to-eat buffet. Of course that kind of market would drive businesses to sell more of the news-equivalent of junk food.
In this brave new world of media, something that I wish would be a norm (yet I know is probably just a dream) is if every publication had a strong, prominent mission statement on what news they find is important, and what their values are that drive the decisions on why they find said news that they cover important.
I feel like a lot of distrust of "the media" comes from people disagreeing with the legacy mass media on these questions. For example, I think that certainly stoked a lot of right wing discontent that resulted in the rise of Fox News, and Fox News in turn stoked a left wing backlash accusing them of not being on the level with the whole "fair and balanced" slogan.
Knowing where publications stand, be it partisan, ideological, or not, I think would lower the temperature of some of this discontent.