Layoffs, billionaires and political capture are hollowing out legacy news, and it’s difficult to see what will come next, writes Jeff Jarvis.
The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
I'm so tired of these false equivalences
You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.
And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.
And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.
I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking".
Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of objective truth.
> I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is.
Apparantly:
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf
* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/
A simple example: who won the 2020 election? What did each organization say?
This is a correlation, so it doesn't prove a causative association, and it's only across a very tiny subset of the entire knowledge set.
While I understand that my second point might sound like a cop-out, just consider how the survey findings may have been different, if the respondents had been asked about issues more relevant to social justice narratives, e.g. the prevalence of deadly police shootings of unarmed people of color.
Actual annual figure in recent years: roughly 10 depending on dataset and year.
Median estimates among progressive respondents in several surveys: hundreds or even thousands.
Another example:
Surveys show large fractions of progressive populations believe global poverty has worsened, when the long-term trend has been a substantial decline
From my point of view journalism is or was about calling attention to points of reference that we can all agree that we are affected by in a similar way. The way you are framing this is more about agreeing with each other. IMHO that's not what journalism is about.
I don't quite follow. You're saying journalism is supposed to only cover things in which there's unanimous consent?
> the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers.
> this consensus
Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist.
> it helped with social cohesion and national identity
Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.
> The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
We generally assume that there is an external reality that can be observed and understood. When someone 'consumes' journalism, how well does that reporting reflect the external reality? How well do people's perceptions match up with what physically happened?
For example: in November 2020 there was an election. Who got more votes, both in the popular vote and in the various states individually that counts towards the Electoral College? Who "won" the election?
It turns out that some news organizations—even with any biases—allow their readers/viewers to have a better picture of reality than others:
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf
* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/
In France, at a very young age, we're taught that journalism is not impartial: people must take sides to express interesting opinions. We simply need to read them all: the Humanite to understand the communist point of view, the Monde for the socialists, the Figaro for the conservatives, the Croix for the Christians, etc.
Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.
As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?
No, man.
> when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Trying to be impartial, trying to understand all the points of view, is a noble effort. It's impossible to do, but the process of trying is how you can achieve the best version of truth. Seems like I agree with you here.
And that's what the best newspapers do.
I need people to be making an honest effort to understand all the perspectives and distilling them down for me.
If nobody is doing that, then it makes my job (the job of understanding everyones' perspectives) a lot harder, because it's an exercise in multi-player adversarial thinking.
The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there.
The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs.
Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section.
Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.
My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an entire stack of technologies:
• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect
• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets
• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category
People have been trying to make micropayment systems fly for a very long time.
Why doesn't it work anymore? Are there policies we could put into place that could change that?
It doesn't work because other businesses are creaming off the classifieds. Businesses like Tinder, Ebay, and Craigslist.
Newspaper management has been trying to do something about it for decades. I don't know if there's anything to be done. Somehow they have to get people to pay for the high cost items, like newsgathering, that they've never really paid for in the past. As far as I can see only the NYT has had any success in this area, and it always feels like a holding action.
In the words of Mon Montha from Andor:
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to appear unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--versus one who does not.
