The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls.
NYT is now scripture. & the internet is a brutal truth seeker:
https://mygenomix.medium.com/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-a-riddle-meet-the-twitter-detectives-who-aim-to-solve-it-5050216fd279
I don’t think it’s (just) the internet.
The US in the era just prior to the internet was a special time and place.
In other countries, and in the American past, it was different, and similar to what we are seeing now. In a way, the internet just kicked us out of an unstable situation and got things back to normal in the lower quality, but more stable, equilibrium.
In much of Europe (I am most familiar with the UK and France, but I know the same could be said for Italy and Germany), such things were completely common and part of an old tradition that long predated the internet.
In those places and times it was generally well understood that various “news” publications were merely the “journalistic” (i.e., propaganda) organs of various parties and where you would go to find the focus and interpretation of events coming from a particular ideological lens and political perspective. In countries with one Party, there was one paper, Pravda. And, in most countries with multiple parties, multiple Pravdas.
And that also, except for popular seedy tabloids, none of these publications could probably survive on their own as genuinely independent “businesses” and so had to rely on substantial subsidy from party machines or the government or wealthy individuals, often making them into mere “vanity press” for certain very rich patrons (a pre-internet foreign phenomenon that we *also* see repeated today in the post-internet US.)
In those times and places, perhaps only children or very naive simple people would fall for any pretense of any of those papers being “objective” and “neutral” and “trustworthy” presentations. This is really not unlike what you would find in the pamphlet press and attitudes about it around the time of the American Revolution and probably continuing well into the 20th century. People understood “the game”, as it were.
Something changed in the US – I’d put it in the early progressive era – and that pretense took root and even quasi-bootstrapped itself into almost reality as a new generation of people, naive or not, took those purported values and ideals seriously enough to as least pretend to insist on occasion that they be implemented in practice and to sometimes even criticize deviations that were too blatantly and obviously propagandistic.
But this was like Robin Hanson’s “Dreamtime”, to the extent it was ever true or believed at all, it was enabled by a rare confluence of factors akin to a kind of social-capital equivalent of “surplus”, and fundamentally unstable and fragile to any major disruption.
The internet turned out to be that disruption that so comprehensively and rapidly devastated the old media economy that it that only by a huge winnowing and by reverting to the old, normal, extremely partisan business model could any media entity survive in the new environment.
In my opinion Handle did an excellent job there of putting this in a larger context. Media partisanship is more accurately viewed as something very old than something very new. The less partisan atmosphere we grew up in felt normal to us but was always more fragile and unusual than we realized.
That less partisan atmosphere was facilitated by having a common enemy in WWII and the Cold War and having a successful outcome in both of those contests. The post war period being an era of historically low levels of economic inequality combined with rapidly increasing standards of living helped a lot also.
This trend towards media partisanship was probably inevitable but was certainly catalyzed by Trumps insistence that the media take sides. They are either “the enemy of the people” or loyal supporters with no middle ground in his world view.
The trend is us noticing it and acknowledging it again, not that it is occurring. What Trump did, either deliberately or, more likely, by accident is tearing the mask off of it completely.
Everyone whose looked into this notes that The Great Awakening pre-dated Trump and that he was a response to, not cause of, the media shift. Everyone can see how the graphs showing NYTimes word counts go vertical in the mid-2010s long before Trump.
There is a place where many people went each week to hear something which was not really news – Sermons, especially those working from a lectionary, were never ‘news.’
Yet everybody showed up and listened each week. Or for the most part, they did; to not was unacceptable socially. People paid for the best seats.
In your review of Kevin Vallier’s Trust in a Polarized Age, you quote the book:
“To begin to trust, we must reflect on our own intellectual limitations and adopt an attitude of humility. None of us have all the answers, and every one of us is likely to be wrong on some important political issues. The other side just might help us to get at the truth, at least from time to time. ”
The sort of creed that Gurri speaks of seems unlikely to acknowledge mistakes. And of course such creeds polarize. And it doesn’t help when “experts” are conscripts in a creed’s armies. Similar to some of your thoughts on the importance ofbcorrection, David Mamet recently observed:
“We are all, in a sense, fools, since no one person can know everything. We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes. The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.”
https://fee.org/articles/david-mamet-explains-what-happens-when-the-experts-fail/
When a creed controls, it acts the same as a command economy.
For these reasons, I would give high fantasy intellectual league consideration to Ann Althouse for her doctrine of ” cruel neutrality ” and to Judith Curry for her dogged determination in acknowledging the many ways in which uncertainty is ignored or minimized. The cruelly neutral and the righteously uncertain deserve much higher status.
Arnold, I regret that it has taken many years for Martin Gurri to acknowledge that “The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.”
I hope it doesn’t take that long for him to acknowledge that the barbarians are winning. Too many idiots that pretend to be serious intellectuals are appeasing the barbarians.
What?
The media were always partisan and biased. Every city had newspapers aimed at different political interests, left, center, right and other. You chose your paper based on how you wanted your news filtered. If you were serious, you read three or more papers a day to get some perspective. According to Berle & Means in the 1930s, the only sections people could put any faith in were the business and sports pages because people had money on the line.
If anyone remembers a period of consensus, it was during the radio and television days when there were limited channels and the government enforced a requirement for public service in the form of news of an acceptable level of centrism to minimize community complaints. Everyone might have watched television news, but they yelled different things at the screen. When television replaced newspapers as the big news source after WW2, a lot of papers folded, but the 1960s saw a flowering of the alternate press that presented another range of political views.
Internet based social media has replaced television with news tailored to the viewer, so it’s like getting to choose your own newspaper, but not quite. What is more interesting is the social aspect. Television killed spending time with one’s friends if time usage reports from the 50s, 60s and 70s are correct. That ended lynching. Instead of gossiping on the porch and egging each other on, people watched television and yelled at the screen. Social media brought back the gossiping and egging on. It’s called progress.
“Every city had newspapers aimed at different political interests, left, center, right and other. ”
Eh, the history in America is more complicated. Post WWII, many cities ended up with one dominant player and maybe a few tiny niche publications. In the 60’s there was a kind of preview of the widespread business model disruption of the internet, and that either killed off all the small ones or created pressure for formerly “rival” local publications to merge or form joint operating agreements. Well, a famous case held that turned out to violate the antitrust act, so almost immediately after the holding, in 1970, Congress passed the “newspaper preservation act” which exempted JOAs so long as it was needed for survival and wasn’t a straight up consolidating merger, but of course no one really enforced the requirement too strictly and many of those publications did end up just merging into local monopolies anyway, which was the common situation in lots of places in the 70s and 80s, until further liberalization on media ownership startoff off the trend toward big chains like McClatchy owning a lot of those “local” brands and trying to squeeze more efficiencies of scale out of them. But then, the internet.
And even those big chains are failing now. It seems symbolic that Gannett just sold its central New York printing plant to the State University of New York.
I think this post is correct. My only add is we do not have a left-wing or a right-wing media.
We have elements of the media, such as the New York Times and The Washington Post, CNN etc. that are affiliated with the Democratic Party—- essentially party house organs.
Today we find the multinationals, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street and even the foreign policy – military – industrial complex are backing the Democratic Party.
This is left-wing…or a globalist-corporatist front?