Andrey Mir’s Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers would have made my list of best books of 2020 except that I only recently read it. I recommend the entire book, even though Mir’s writing is repetitive. A few quick thoughts.
When I was growing up, you needed to read the sports section to see all the box scores, you needed the financial pages to look up specific stocks, and you turned to the comics section for entertainment.
Mir points out that advertising is what really supported the newspapers. In fact, although he does not say this, it was classified advertising that really paid the bills.
In a sense, the news and opinion that came bundled with your sports, financial news and comics was included courtesy of the advertisers. Mir points out that the advertisers were better off without angry, negative, divisive news and editorial content. Journalists were free to uphold standards for objectivity, because advertisers did not mind.
Then advertising went away. And you could get your sports and financial information from specialty web sites, and newspaper comics were no longer a compelling form of entertainment. So newspapers lost their readers, and their advertisers.
Staying in business required a different revenue model, which turned out to be donation via subscription. To motivate what Mir calls donscriptions, newspapers had to take strong stands. The survivors–WaPo and NYT–succeeded at this. Their readers look to these publications to validate their world view. Objectivity becomes a luxury that the papers can no longer afford–too much objectivity and readers will cancel their donscriptions.
Mir predicts a big drop in news site activity with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Already that looks like a good call.
Arnold,
I think the Wall Street Journal non-OpEd sections do a great job being objective. They are much better than the Washington Post. And I subscribe to both. Am I wrong? Maybe the Journal just does a better job fitting into my world view.
People tend to read the WSJ because they want to make money; all things being equal it’s easier to make money if you have accurate facts and harder to make money if you hide away in a self-affirming anti-reality bubble. (Of course some people do profit by keeping others in anti-reality bubbles but that’s another conversation.) There’s a market for business-focused news that helps you make money; there isn’t much of a market for business-focused news that doesn’t help you make money. At least that’s how I see it.
WSJ gets a lot of subscriptions from business and finance professionals, who want to keep up with the latest business news.
The morning Post and afternoon Globe were fixtures in my youth. It will be nice when the libraries open up again so us crusty old farts can go back to dropping in to read real newspapers.
You need to explain why people don’t value objectivity and neutrality in journalism. And why they don’t value decency and excellence in editorial essays.
This is not a naive question. People would leave any source that delivered inaccurate information on sport scores or financial prices or did a bad job forecasting the weather. Why does that apply to politics?
Many people believe that journalism that validates their opinions IS objective and neutral. If Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person, then a diet of stories saying how terrible, horrible, no good, very bad he is are objective and neutral. Stories that said he was simply an imperfect human would be biased and partisan.
Objective journalism is non-offensive, which is great when 1-2 newspapers and 3 major TV networks serve an entire metro region. Papers start with 50-100% of market share, TV channels with 30-40%, and the goal is to not piss people off so much that they cancel their subscriptions or change the channel. With 2 major papers and 3 major TV stations, one captures a large fraction of anyone that is pissed off by one’s competitors. There’s not much difference between attracting viewers because they love you or attracting them because they hate the small number of other choices. Thus, one strives to be non-offensive and not hated.
With internet and hundreds of cable channels, broad non-offensiveness no longer cuts it. Instead, media tries to attract a passionate niche following. Market share of 5-10% is great when people have hundreds of options. One can piss off a lot of people as long as some people love you. Also, when competitors piss off readers and viewers, they are dispersed among many of your competitors. There’s not much difference between not attracting viewers because they hate you or not attracting them because they are indifferent. The key is to find some viewers that really like you. Strong opinions can anger those that disagree, but those that agree tend to really like it.
Objective and neutral journalism by definition is non-differentiated. Two objective reporters should report the same story in the same way. Non-differentiated is often the goal when one has few competitors. With many competitors, the goal becomes differentiation and niche appeal.
The pre-postjournalism environment was like a two-person election, which tends to favor centrist, non-offensive candidates. Postjournalism is like a crowded primary, which favors minority-plurality candidates with passionate followings like Trump in 2016 and Sanders in 2020 (before Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out to narrow the field).
Objective and neutral journalism can make a comeback if a new media technology emerges that broadcasts the same content to a broad audience rather than differentiated content to niche audiences. I have no idea what that technology might be.
The Boston metropolitan area has 6 television news outlets, the network affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox, an independent (slogan: Your news station), and New England Cable News. In terms of what stories are covered and the “narrative” the stories fit into, they are pretty much indistinguishable. It’s all moderately progressive, Biden stories have been mostly positive, Trump stories were mostly negative. Almost nothing is covered outside the respectable left bubble. E.g., you will never hear of First Doses First or how FDA conservatism has slowed vaccine supply (among other bad things). The idea that a good government agency could be “part of the problem” rather than “part of the solution” just doesn’t seem possible. It’s not just that they don’t cover such things from a non-progressive perspective. They don’t cover them at all.
As far as I can tell, they just never hear of such things. The problem isn’t so much explicit politicization. It’s a world view where contrary facts just don’t exist and there’s no desire to look for them.
The problem isn’t so much consumer demand as producer supply. Why doesn’t somebody create a “non-progressive” news division? Because there’s nobody to staff it with.
With the internet and cable, the point is that every metro area is no longer limited to local stations and papers. The Boston media market (like everywhere else) also includes Fox News, a plethora of right-wing websites, MSNBC, and a plethora of left-wing websites. Not to mention lots of Twitter commentary, Facebook memes, and YouTube videos. These alternative media don’t just exist, they draw significant advertising revenue away from the local news stations and newspapers. It’s this last aspect — the economic forces — that leads to postjournalism.
You are certainly right that there are a lot of alternatives out there. What I was trying to suggest was that, at least around here, most people don’t see them. An ordinary person looking for the weather or “did anything important happen?” will turn on their TV to a political monoculture and won’t know or care that there is anything different.
At least right now, none of the six local TV news outlets seem to be having problems making money.
I think if you parse this passage with the changes outlined above, you can see what has happened. The newspapers no longer are the source for the content of the “working class”, the “girls falling out of windows”, the sports scores. The “journalists” have been left to try to survive off feeding the “educated” who want confirmation of their social status and are easily manipulated.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
What struck Mark deeply was the almost complete absence of indignation among the speakers, or even of any distinct sympathy with the refugees. Everyone present knew of at least one outrage in Edgestow; but all agreed that these refugees must be greatly exaggerating.“It says in this morning’s paper that things are pretty well settling down,”said the landlord.“That’s right,” agreed the others.“There’ll always be some who get awkward,”said the potato-faced man.“What’s the good of getting awkward?” asked another,“it’s got to go on.You can’t stop it.”“That’s what I say,” said the Landlord. Fragments of articles which Mark himself had written drifted to and fro. Apparently he and his kind had done their work well; Miss Hardcastle had rated too high the resistance of the working classes to propaganda.
—
I always found it interesting the contrast of these two passages in the book.
It is not merely a decline in objectivity, as Arnold so delicately puts it, but outright fiction, as in the Washington Post article with an anonymous source claiming President Trump had said things that a newly disclosed recording show he never had. The WaPo piece had only the one source, who was an obvious partisan. The old rule in journalism was “if your mother says she loves you, get a second source.” There were also stories “confirming” the WaPo piece, i.e., the same mendacious partisan source told the same story to them, which is what passes for “confirmation” these days.
President Trump was much maligned for calling the press the “enemy of the people” back in April, 2019. I think regularly and deliberately misrepresenting reality, especially for venal motive, does indeed make the press the enemy of the people.
You could print that Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody and you wouldn’t lose subscribers.
Bezos invested his time and money into WaPo to produce the agitprop you refer to. A common misperception is that was a sincere mistake, they don’t recognize their own bias; no, this is very intentional. They are deliberately trying to control the messages the public hears. They aren’t trying to be fair, objective, or honest at all. Bezos is free to do as he wishes.
When Andrew Mir writes of the wealthy in 16th century Venice controlling the news that the public hears; Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs are two of the wealthy today, deliberately crafting the agitprop that the public hears.
Andrey Mir’s writing on journalism is excellent. This post is also excellent (Andrey’s first name is misspelled however).
One omission: this post discusses the financing of journalism, but omits the wealthy donors and owners who wish to control the messaging the public hears. As Andrey Mir writes:
https://human-as-media.com/2021/02/16/the-eternal-failure-of-selling-news/
WaPo gets money from it’s subscribers, but also received a lot of money from it’s wealthy owner, Jeff Bezos. I presume Bezos controls the narrative at WaPo more than aggregate readers do. I also presume WaPo’s purpose isn’t mainly to generate and maximize revenue but rather to influence public opinion for its owners. Wealthy patrons often spend money to buy political leverage or influence, WaPo is a tool for that purpose.
Something else happened beyond advertising revenues collapsing: newspapers were able to judge engagement of their stories like never before. They can now tell not just who heir subscribers are, but which stories they read, for how long, how far into, and which they entirely skip. If you pass a story along via Twitter or email, they can tell who you sent it to, and their buying habits (the latter is about the be severely curtailed). They can tell the order you read stories in, which writers you read and who you don’t.
This part of the story isn’t covered like the death of ad revenue. Newspaper staffs have been growing in areas like analytics, while reporting and editorial staffs shrink. This level of analysis, not paywall, is what drives the IT investments papers have made, and has permitted their move to only serve certain audiences.
+1 A huge increase in “reporting” and analysis is based on click analysis of the various web pages of the org paying for the reporting.
Tableau instead of Excel is excellent for presenting such info.
Any “personalized” newspaper, substack or elsewhere, would be doing this to improve your experience (based on the algo) – and save you time.
Andrew Sullivan has great note on the Fake news of Asian hate rather than sex addiction as the issue in the Atlanta shooting:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-narrative-replaces-the-news-9ea
the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.
Andrew documents that there is NO evidence of “hate crime” motivation, but the killer’s own confession that he’s a sinning religious fundamentalist, addicted to sex and going to the safer Asian massage parlors. He documents how the NYT, WaPo, and Trevor Noah mis-describe the events, despite these alleged motives having no evidence to support them, contrary to a lot of evidence to support sex addiction frustration.
Noah knew the killer’s motive more surely than the killer himself.
None of them mentioned that he killed two white people as well — a weird thing for a white supremacist to do — and injured a Latino. None pointed out that the connection between the spas was that the killer had visited them. None explained why, if he were associating Asian people with Covid19, he would nonetheless expose himself to the virus by having sex with them, or regard these spas as “safer” than other ways to have quick sex.
They didn’t because, in their worldview, they didn’t need to. What you see here is social justice ideology insisting, as Dean Baquet temporarily explained, that intent doesn’t matter. What matters is impact. The individual killer is in some ways irrelevant. His intentions are not material. He is merely a vehicle for the structural oppressive forces critical theorists believe in. And this “story” is what the media elites decided to concentrate on: the thing that, so far as we know, didn’t happen.
All “facts” are re-interpreted to fit the CRT narrative. (my bold above) Impact – generate outrage – generate page clicks. It’s not so much infotainment nor quite clickbait as clickfotainment . {Would I get a Meme point for clickfotainment?}
This media is not so different from the last 4 years when facts were re-interpreted to fit Trump hate TDS — and for similar clickfotainment reasons.
They are shutting down schools for being too Asian all over the country and are desperate to both defend and expand Affirmative Action. That creates obvious tension with Asians. You’ve got to keep them in the coalition somehow.
Arnold’s statements are precisely what is lacking in Sharyl Attkisson’s book, Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism, but her book deals more with televised media than print, chapter on NYT notwithstanding. My summary and review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3891461048
Read NYU professor of journalism Mitchell Stephens’ famous article in Politico, “Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance. Disinterested reporting is overrated.” Journalism schools are “teaching a new generation of reporters to inject agendas and opinions into their news stories; to forget about the firewall we used to attempt to maintain between news and opinion. The kind of reporting Stephens applauds would have gotten a traditional news journalist fired not all that long ago. Today it’s part of what makes it so easy for The Narrative to take hold and can make it so difficult for the truth to be told” (53). Journalism students are taught to be activists.
Read Cynical Theories, which Arnold reviewed 8/20. What most people who lack a connection to today’s higher education fail to realize is that university journalism majors must take many courses within the broader field of communication, which has been entirely seized by postmodernism and its adamant assertion that there is no objective reality or scientific or historical truth. Therefore, journalists can only work from their subjective and personal truths and journalism necessarily assumes an entirely different purpose. Postmodernism, which is rapidly superseding liberalism as the prevailing political philosophy, seeks to deconstruct all of society’s institutions and structures as the means by which dominant elites wield repressive power over all others. Its negative aims have become focused by Critical Theorists [my summary and review of Cynical Theories is almost finished] on liberation.
This plus “Journalists were free to uphold standards for objectivity, because advertisers did not mind,” seems to create an awkward position for Libertarians.
It sounds a lot like an odd validation of the people who used to make complaints about the distorting character of intense (sometimes also ‘wasteful’) market competition.
They say things like any good behavior that is not compatible with ruthless profit-maximizing is only possible to maintain in the long term by the ‘surplus’ created by insulation and security of excess rents.
They would go on to say that when exposed to intense competition, companies will lose their scruples and principles and professional standards, all matters of taste and refinement and propriety will descend to the lowest common denominator and base animal impulses, and no effective tactic of manipulation and provocation of anti-social sentiments (a negative externality of pollution of the commons of social harmony and solidarity) will remain off-limits. “Short-termism”, hyper, vapor, etc. will dominate, and people will burn down in an instant the social capital it took centuries to accumulation, to make a quick buck. That the implication of such incentives would inevitably result in nothing but optimizing for accelerating addictiveness.
We got a more open market for media, and everything quickly went to hell. Now people are trying to close the market again, mostly by being very nasty to competitors. And even when they succeed, the damage is done, they won’t stop being nasty, indeed, need to stay perpetually nasty to preserve the barrier to entry and to constantly be on guard against any new attempts at re-opening.