Why no one sympathizes with the media
Plain truths about a decaying institution
The elite, coastal media, despite crowing about its booming subscriptions, is in the midst of a terminal decline. Already, the product is unrecognizable from the halcyon days of dedicated investigative journalists, when editors were more than just glorified spellcheckers, and the press took an adversarial stance against the political establishment. Despite a slow slide into irrelevance and a deteriorating business model, the liberal media is mostly concerned about a perceived existential threat from Trump’s administration and his supporters. The threat, however, is from within. The institution has freely surrendered all the traits that made it useful. Complaints by journalists about their lost stature fall on uncaring ears. The media would do well to understand why no one feels sorry for them today.
Their victimhood rings extremely hollow
It’s popular for aggrieved journalists to claim kinship with the lower classes by making quips like “if you think we’re the elites, just look at my car!” This is transparent nonsense and an insult to the intelligence of any listener. The currency of journalism — what they take as primary compensation — is prestige and credibility, not dollars. Success among journalists is stature, access to power and elite circles, the perception as truth-tellers, and ultimately the ability to influence the public. Congressmen and CEOs do not typically hang out with real estate agents or accountants. They do hang out with journalists, since the media is useful to them and those relationships must be cultivated. Like employees of a nonprofit, journalists take mostly non-pecuniary compensation. They accept instead significant leverage (through their ability to wield powerful microphones) and the feel-good status of being truth tellers.
They manifestly failed to rise above
Anyone who is even a casual observer of the mainstream media in the last two years will note that most major publications added a line to their core remit: resist Trump. The editorial and news desks became blurred as journalists were torn between their duty to the truth and their ability to resist the president. Ultimately, Trump’s provocations won out and virtually every mainstream leftwing journalist came to understand it as their duty to wield whatever power they possessed to expose Trump and never let a populist win again. While this may have paid short term dividends (by weaponizing the fourth estate), this pivot was very evident, and permanently undermined their stature among those of us who still have realistic standards for the press. Journalists with genuine integrity would have done their jobs — yes, even in an adversarial environment — without the added histrionics. The unvarnished truth is sufficiently damaging to Trump; they did not need to add garnish to expose him.
Despite a reduced stature, they maintain an unflappable arrogance
Journalists still manifestly believe themselves to be the arbiters of truth, even though they will concede privately that they deliberately weaponized their megaphones against Trump and other adversaries, thus compromising their neutrality. The modern press is uniquely insufferable because they provide a service that is much degraded, compared with the news of 40 years ago, yet they crow their importance with historically elevated vigor. From “democracy dies in darkness” to endless op-eds and opinion pages packed with mockery of flyover America and the MAGA crew, the media has never been more self-important. Naturally, this is a manifestation of their creeping irrelevance, as they rage impotently against the dying of the light.
They are unapologetically partisan
Despite the popularity of Fox News on the airwaves, the media by and large is overwhelmingly liberal, especially the publications that adorn the coffee tables of urban professionals. This includes publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the hangers-on like the Guardian and Vox. Liberals outnumber conservatives in the news by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1. And this ratio will probably not normalize — why would a college-age conservative or heterodox thinker contemplate entering a career where they would be marginalized and mocked for having divergent political views? Social media mobs are particularly effective against noncompliant journalists, as publications are heavily reputation-indexed and hence happy to fire anyone at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. Of course, it’s farcical to demand that a professional industry find perfect societal representation. But the base rates of high partisanship, combined with the admission from news desks that coverage has been weaponized for a political goal, render that coverage suspect by default.
The media is also a willing mouthpiece for the political strands of academia that have gone totally berserk in the last decade. Disciplines like post-structuralism, post-colonialism and [generic minority] studies have led to patent nonsense making its way into popular journals. Kooky academic redefinitions of conventional words (“racism = power + prejudice”) is a popular modus operandi, and the media willingly assists in the proliferation of these narratives. Mainstream media, starved for content and legitimacy, is happy to outsource fact-finding to academics, who themselves revel in the ability to publicize whatever political or social talking points they desire to a mainstream audience.
The ruse is hard to penetrate. Most people still grant the benefit of the doubt to academia, although their patience is wearing thin.
They are solipsistic in the extreme
Anyone with a basic understanding of conventional morality knows that individuals tend to care more about people that resemble themselves. It’s a fact of human nature that we assign stronger duties and moral status to our inner circle — family, kin, friends, ethnic group — than we do to strangers or foreigners. It is therefore no coincidence that journalists care a disproportionate amount about other journalists. It is surprising, however, that journalists imagined that we wouldn’t see through their endless hand-wringing about a press under siege. The Khashoggi murder, however gruesome, is a typical example. Between 50,000 and 80,000 people have been killed in the Yemeni war as a result of Saudi aggression. Fourteen million Yemenis face starvation today. Naturally, coverage of the murder of a single individual eclipsed reportage about civilian deaths in Yemen — which are also attributable to Saudi Arabia!
The breathless headlines about Khashoggi were written, of course, because he was a journalist, and a western-friendly one at that. Journalists saw themselves in him, and saw the opportunity to portray themselves collectively as victims. After all, claiming victimhood is powerful political capital in today’s day and age — and offers a nice serotonin boost too.
The predictable, hysterical reaction of the press to each and every crime against journalists does little to help their cause. The self-interest is so obvious and self-serving that only the most naive dupes fail to identify the scheme.
They enjoy a perverse mutualistic relationship with Orwellian Big Tech
As narratives spiraled out of control at Facebook, Google, Twitter, they responded with an iron fist. Google continually re-architects their search rankings to push desired cultural narratives, as well as kowtowing to dictators and enabling ethic cleansings as needed. Tweets no longer appear in order — censorship would be too easy to spot that way. Mass purges for trivial, unknowable thought crimes are now utterly conventional. Hashtags don’t trend by popularity but are instead a mixture of advertorials and and some inoffensive, milquetoast topic. Edgy, popular hashtags are silently omitted from the rankings. Facebook ratchets up the intrusion to its maximum level, not only actively determining what is fit to be news, but also performing MK-ULTRA style psychological experiments that would make the CIA blush.
Core to all of these efforts is a set of willing media collaborators, trusted whitelisted sources that are entrusted with filling user feeds. Of course, these are the largely indistinguishable establishment — inoffensive mouthpieces like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (at a stretch) and the Economist. If they can get themselves whitelisted and get the likes of Drudge and Breitbart (hell, expunge Jacobite and Quillette for wrongthink too) blackballed, they can reinforce their grip on cultural and political narratives. And so the media establishment seized the opportunity to build a new fiefdom in these new censorious digital realms.
Recall that “fake news” was originally coined as an effort to delegitimize media startups on the margins of legitimacy. It was then weaponized to label frequent-but-not-exclusive nonsense peddlers like Drudge and Infowars as completely illegitimate; not only misleading but literally fake. The fake news charge was used, for a time, as a pretext to cleanse platforms like Facebook from any and all undesirable news sources. Unfortunately for the planners of the fake news gambit, Trump weaponized fake news against the originators of the term, stripping it of its semantic weight.
Additionally, Twitter in particular is avowedly determined to boost the reach of journalists on the platform — as if they didn’t already enjoy disproportionate influence. This further adds to the resentment and entrenches their status as cultural elites.
They bear no consequences for being wrong
There is no yardstick to measure journalists by, no consequences for confident predictions gone awry, no mea culpas — hell, corrections are few and far between these days. Mutable websites (versus very much irreversible newspapers) mean alterations to stories with falsities tend to be covertly inserted without so much as a mention. Pundit-journalists that have proven themselves spectacularly wrong about every major trend in the last few years — the rise of Trump, Bernie, populism, right wing leaders in Europe and South America, Bitcoin, the failure of the political establishment in the US, the rise of a totalitarian Silicon Valley Big Tech mafia — not one has faced any repercussions for being blind to these trends.
At the very least, forward-looking statements about future political or economic trends should be treated with extreme skepticism. But there is no skin in the game. Normal individuals that bear significant risk for their actions respect risk takers and despise rent seekers. The takings of the press vary with drama, not with accuracy. This lack of accountability does little to endear the press to normal people.
The world has become more specialized
Internet culture — which realistically is synonymous with just “culture” — optimizes for niche-ification. Individuals specialize and specialize and end up in subcultures that are impenetrable to outsiders, the press included. Since the prevailing journalistic business model is “gain just enough knowledge about the subject to churn out click-worthy content and prod the algorithms into squeezing out some attention juice,” journalists cannot, by definition, specialize. In this context their ineptitude is all the greater. Historically, we have thrown up our hands when the press incorrectly reports on our field but blindly trust them on other issues: this is Gell-Mann amnesia.
However, as our information landscape has become more fragmented, the ability of an individual to spot journalistic ignorance has increased. I suspect our limited patience has run out, and we have collectively realized that the press is not only fallible in our own particular domains but across the board, too. The current business model just doesn’t support smart specialists; truly talented individuals prefer not to seek careers in attention hacking, gaming rankings in facebook’s news plugin or on twitter to get traffic. So we are faced instead with inept generalists.
They are self-congratulatory about a dismal product offering
Most mainstream press today is either meta-reporting (reporting what other outlets have already reported so as not to be left out), social-media post aggregation, covert PR, advertorials, opinion pieces disguised as news, or general puffery. Original, bold reporting that doesn’t conform to some mainstream narrative is vanishingly rare. Most journalists are essentially algorithms for turning smatterings of semi-related content into a piece that will do well on the socials. Indeed, sports and financial news is already mostly written by robots. It’s only a matter of time until those algorithms improve and the humans are put out of work entirely. Margins have been compressed, print advertising is obsolete, and alternative monetization models must be found. Begging isn’t a business model. You can’t subsidize hard-hitting, yearlong investigations with a glorified Patreon.
The news is no longer the news, it’s content. It is designed to trigger the algos and make its way to the top of the aggregators. Forget broadsheets — barely anyone even goes to w w w dot nytimes dot com any more. It’s “alexa give me some headlines” or a quick scan through 10-second morsels on snapchat or the news panel on the top right of the facebook newsfeed. The business model has changed, and newsrooms have grown to reflect this. News editors are practically obsolete. In their place you have engineers, video content specialists, UI designers, and conference organizers. Despite this pivot, they aren’t very good at their job. They are outfoxed at every turn by citizen journalists on Youtube, Periscope and Twitter who are simply savvier, less constrained, more authentic, and less wooden. Corporate content is grim, almost by definition. The unvarnished thing is far more genuine, and it shows.
They have a mutualistic relationship with the extremists they decry
The press enables, encourages, and abets “white nationalists,” neo-klansmen and run of the mill psychopaths by giving them a willing audience, exposure, and access to publicity. I’d be willing to bet that >95% of the people reading this article saw breathless, front-page coverage of a miserable gathering of a couple dozen weak-chinned men in chinos and sperrys LARPing as neonazis on the UVA campus in August 2017. These pieces massively hyperbolize the presence of “nazis” in America today, making it seem like there has been a massive resurgence of nazism. Fear and outrage are best-sellers, false positives and hoaxes be damned. One recalls that in the late 70s, hundreds of neonazis routinely marched in the streets of Chicago. This trend is nothing new.
Mass shooters, too, know that the press will extol them at the conclusion of their grisly crimes, delving into their personal histories, assessing their motivations, and broadcasting their manifestos. This is precisely how they get their message across, and the press is complicit in rebroadcasting it. It’s also an open secret among any internet native that gathering places for undesirables like 4chan and Stormfront exalt in their ability to get press coverage. Getting their torrid ideas in front of a general audience is success, and the press is happy to comply, because what sells better than outrage? The more tone-deaf and alarmist the coverage, the more lulz to be had. “Who is this 4…chan, anyway?” Who indeed.
They are epistemically challenged
For all the lamenting about the “post-truth era,” normal epistemic standards still apply to most thinking people. “Post truth” is a lament that signifies that the speaker has lost the ability to foist their impressions on an uncritical audience. The days of swallowing media narratives are gone. As reportage has gone downhill, consumers have rightly taken a more adversarial stance. For an example, consider how outfits like politifact abuse the notion of a fact to sell a narrative. Excessive pedantry, over-literality, as well as the insertion of straight opinion disguised as context into the rubric, have turned political “facts” into a sad irony.
Enterprising “data-driven” journalists create contrived metrics aggregating the ratios of truths told to lies, as if the aggregates, rather than magnitudes matter. (What’s the use of a career of truths if one big lie leads to the invasion of Iraq?)
Just as it is popular for to entreat individuals to “speak your truth” and to “believe victims” regardless of due process or any relevant facts, the cultural elite has plunged headlong into a subjective, unscientific morass. The same set of individuals lectures the public for being anti-science on issues of climate change, while simultaneously informing us that gender and sex are social constructs, with no basis in biology.
The actual truth here is that everyone relies on perceived authorities to find scientific facts; no one is able to independently verify them all on their own. It’s just that academia and its mouthpiece in the press have become steadfastly political, and so individuals have rightfully taken a more skeptical view of their reportage. If the media was serious about facts, they would take a consistent epistemic approach, instead of demanding that their readers bow to the god of science where convenient and ignore it where not.
They disdain actual risk-taking journalists
The coastal elite press is blind to the plight of actual oppressed journalists, believing themselves to be far more disadvantaged. After all, mean tweets are worse than indefinite confinement, right? If journalists were sincere in their belief that the free press should be globally enshrined, they would be reporting ceaselessly on Julian Assange, rather than delighting in his continued extrajudicial confinement. Or they might be more sensitive to citizen journalists in Russia or China facing torture or death for their efforts.
But focusing on actual disadvantaged journalists would devalue the plight of the latte-sipping, Brooklyn- and DC-based cohort, so that is avoided at all costs. Trump’s mean tweets are the problem, not executions of journalists in totalitarian countries.
In short, journalists, already in a bad spot, have done themselves no favors recently. Far from obtaining sympathy from the public about their noble struggle, the hand-wringing and victimhood only increases our contempt for them. The real war on the press is economic; their business model simply ceased to exist and now they eke out a living selling a worse product while insisting on their virtue as truth-tellers. Media elites should not be surprised that they are widely disdained; the question is why anyone tolerates them at all.
