Who Broke Journalism? You Did. (OK, Me Too…)
I spend most of my waking hours working with entrepreneurs. Since they’re usually at the earlier stage of the journey, I find myself saying “Yeah, but what’s the problem?” about a dozen times a day. As this ‘68-like summer smears into Election 2020, that’s a fair question to ask about an information ecosystem that is simply not functioning. Our world obviously has a lot of issues right now — COVID, income inequality, partisan divisions — but there’s one relatively recent trend that has a doctors-smoking-cigarettes-on-TV kind of quality to it, and it’s especially dangerous because it’s not a problem we really had, say, 15 years ago. This newly acquired handicap can quite literally kill us. It has already started.
Media Literacy.
This may feel like one of those high-falutin’ first-world problems that some academic dreamt up on campus, like misusing the Oxford comma. But our stunning illiteracy around how we consume information is impacting every facet of our lives. It is overwhelming us, isolating us, and radicalizing us, even as more and more choice explodes from our fingertips. I didn’t understand its severity until I did a project with Started and the New York University Carter Institute of Journalism this summer, where we provided mentorship to startups in the new media and journalism sectors. We worked with companies who were attacking well-known problems in the journalism industry: the collapse of ad revenue, increased competition, the death of local news. But what we came back to over and over again in our discussions was a marked loss of trust in media by the public, and the consequences of that broken relationship.
The public’s relationship with “The Media”¹ has always been a rollercoaster, going back to Revolutionary-era pamphleteering. In the past half-decade, though, we’ve seen some accelerated trends. General trust in media (actually, trust in most civic institutions) began trending downwards after Vietnam/Watergate era, which is not surprising. The past ten years, however, have seen an exaggerated decline, with around 90% of Republicans saying they’ve personally lost trust in the news. As the Knight Foundation and Gallup lay out, what’s key here is how people express their dissatisfaction; the problem is less about the known political leanings of the news outlet than perceived failings in accuracy and bias from the viewer’s perspective. In other words: I’m not mad that MSNBC is liberal, but their own bias diminishes their accuracy to report the news! You will see this lament pop up in any social media argument that has warmed to a lazy boil: “I wish ______ would just report the actual news, like in the good ‘ol days!”
The difference between external bias and personal politics may feel like semantics, but the subtleties speak to the core issue. The public longs for a media that reports facts objectively, calls balls and strikes impassionately, doesn’t put its thumb on the scales. They don’t feel that is happening; instead media conglomerates are distorting reality to push their agenda. We long for a Walter Kronkite or Peter Jennings to report the straight stuff without any English, and are lost in a sea of half-truths and hopelessly politicized propaganda. Now, if you’re running a journalism-focused company, your best bet is to lean into that perception and try to deliver a solution that makes the reader feel as if his compass is righted again. We had companies like 6am City, who deliver local news — no politics, no crime — to small American cities every morning; and Readocracy, which seeks to credential readers for the things they’ve consumed online, a sort of good citizen award for a responsible information diet.
All interesting stuff. Fortunately, though, since I don’t actually have a startup in news media, I can breathe freely and say this: your fears about the death of good journalism are complete and utter horsesh**t.
Now, this isn’t to say that objectivity has not declined in journalism over the past generation. It has, but that’s mostly due to the fact that the industry has frantically chased the market, creating much more opinion-based reporting and analysis. Regardless of what people say they want, they’re rewarding subjective journalism with their clicks and pageviews. But let’s approach this from a deeper level. I’m going to lay out two very simple theses. Thesis #1: We are in one of the best eras of journalism (the craft, not the business) in history. Thesis #2: The information products you are using are not only blinding you to Thesis #1, but are poisoning you against the objective journalism you say you want.² The poisoning is slow and insidious, and it has left you more isolated, more paranoid, and more radicalized. The bright spot is that if you can do something about Thesis #2, Thesis #1 will flower in front of you in all its glory. Ready? Let’s do it!
WE ARE IN A GLORIOUS ERA OF JOURNALISM
What’s truly remarkable about journalists is how they keep doing more with less. American newsrooms have been cut in half since the Great Recession, concentrated in smaller markets (a third of Americans live in what’s called a “news desert”). Yet I’m always shocked at the unbelievable evidence-based reporting that happens on a daily basis in this country. The only reason you know Enron=Bad is because Bethany McLean dug into their wacky, brain-numbing P/L statements when everyone else was drunk with envy. We know that Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes had conned the world because of John Carreyrou’s brilliant, years-long work. The reason we know about Hillary Clinton’s emails is because The Smoking Gun wrote about them in 2013. We know about the scourge of pedophilie priests in Boston due The Globe’s dogged Spotlight team, while the plucky Indianapolis Star methodically uncovered rampant abuse throughout USA Gymnastics.
Even on a smaller scale, journalists are doing incredible work. The death of a trans woman at Rikers that was covered up. A non-profit hospital sitting on millions while relentlessly suing its poor patients. A collaborative report on Hawaii under the threat of climate change and development. The sustained reporting on contaminated wastewater in central Wisconsin. And the above batch was all in 2019 alone. I could go on and on without even having to reference The New York Times, Donald Trump, Watergate, or any of the other new amazing investigative tools like podcasts, citizen journalism, or fancy mics and cameras democratizing the trade. It’s very simple: none of this stuff comes out without the obsessive work and skill that good journalism requires, because people with power and incentive would not want it to.
We are drowning in amazing journalism, from the investigative to the personal to the niche, meticulously reported, most of it for little material gain. So why do so many of us not think that? There’s a few reasons here. The first is that we always do this. We always say that they don’t make any decent hip-hop anymore or that New York City isn’t the same place as it was back in the day. It’s a cognitive bias called rosy retrospection — different than nostalgia — that helps us ward off depression and maintain self-esteem. Unfortunately, it also impedes behavior change and makes us immune to new information (for example, I know full well that the high-water mark for NYC was 2000–2003, when I lived there, and the matter is closed). This is more of a feature, not a bug, of being a person. We all exhibit rosy retrospection to a degree, and it’s not going anywhere. But even accounting for this evolutionary tic, one can remark at the amazing yields that journalism, fact-finding, expert analysis, and amateur sleuthing provide every day around the world. That’s the good news…
OUR USE OF MODERN MEDIA IS THE PROBLEM
The real reason for our newfound illiteracy is new, but is still grounded in our evolutionary weaknesses. As we already saw, the first thing to slip was trust in institutions. The second thing that happened was an explosion of new communication tools that arrived with a fundamental misunderstanding of how they work. Think back to, say, 2010. This is about the time that you had to friend Aunt Judy so she could share those new baby photos, when the first YouTube millionaires started to mint. It’s also around the time that social media had to come up with a second act. Facebook in particular was the first social media platform that actually had to make some money, and it looked to Google’s elegant product line as the answer. Why Google (as opposed to, say, Amazon)?
Well, the average person thinks of Google as a search engine, which is its outward public facing utility. But the company makes money hand over fist through advertising in the form of search ranking, ads on its sites, and placement on third party sites. You want to know the difference between a phillips and a flat head screwdriver, and thousands of merchants pay for the opportunity to be in your field of vision when you do a search, perchance that you should need to buy one. This is why Google exists, not for your search. To hoist up the hoary cliche: you are not Google’s customer. You are the product being sold to Google’s customers.
Facebook followed those design principles to great success. In Zuck’s world, it’s one thing to make a profile, upload your photos, and stalk your high school crush. But what do you do after that? Well, the News Feed, Facebook Ads, and Likes were a few of the answers, among many. The mission of a free site is to keep you as an active user; that means putting engaging things in front of you (News Feed, b. 2006), selling you things (Facebook Ads, b. 2010), and tapping your evolutionary need to be validated by a tribe (Likes, b. 2010). At its core, today’s Facebook (and all social media) is not designed to keep you informed, connected, or content. It is designed to incentivize you to be a DAU, or a Daily Active User. The armies of engineers at these companies know that the way to keep someone active is to make them emotionally engaged. And what is the emotion that produces the most activity? Anger.
Most of us do not understand the transaction that’s taking place on Facebook or Twitter.
This is the thing that’s different from before. A person understands the transaction when watching Modern Family on ABC: I get to watch this for free, they show me a car commercial…OK. They even get this from a political perspective: I’m a God-fearing conservative and I’m going to listen to Rush Limbaugh break it all down and give it to those liberals during rush hour. But most of us do not understand the transaction that’s taking place on Facebook or Twitter. I’m there to stay connected to my kids at college, but my sister posted this link about a town on the southern border of Texas where the mayor was dragged into the street and…
What to us feels like a place for relationships and information-sharing (i.e., a place of trust) is actually an auction site to capture your attention and direct to something tangible and monetizable.³ Buy a camping tent, post an emoji on your kid’s photo, join a QAnon group…but do something. In addition to the misunderstood incentives, it’s now packaged in a device you carry everywhere that constantly pulls your attention and changes your mood from a chemical standpoint. Put simply, we are engaged in a relationship we don’t understand. So when we can’t sleep, become constantly agitated, develop body dysmorphia, begin to believe that Tom Hanks might be eating children, it’s very hard to attribute this to the correct source. It’s my daughter, my job, the president, immigrants, American history, etc. But it’s not Facebook. Why not?Because Facebook is just how I keep up with my grandkids.
So what does this have to do with broken journalism? Well, while social media vacuums all the ads out of the classifieds section, it also sharply departs in mission from what journalism purports to do. You can make every East Coast, Ivy League, reflexibly liberal joke you can think of about your average Washington Post reporter — and you’d probably be right — but she’d give her Montessori-schooled first born to break a story that would bring down any presidency.⁴ These values have nothing to do with any social media company you’ve heard about. No one from Facebook, Google, or Twitter wades through tax returns, sets up outside a politician’s hotel, or sits through days of court proceedings to get a story. That’s not related to their business model at all, which, in and of itself, is no crime. But most people get their news from social media. An article from www.nytimes.com is right on top of one from newyorktime.com, and nyctimes.co, and nyt.news, and Cousin Eddie. For most people on their phone or squinting through their bifocals, all of these sources are the same. For better or worse, Facebook and Twitter is the news. And everything on there is saying something terrible and important is happening. Only one of those sources has a century-plus record to stand behind, but who can tell who it is at a certain point…?
The fact that we do not understand the relationship that we are in with social media is breaking many things, with our ability to distinguish journalism from propaganda nearing the top of the list. If we can’t identify it, we can’t value it. If we don’t value it, we don’t pay for it. We don’t pay for it, we don’t get it. What we get instead is people in the Year of Our Lord 2020 unironically believing that the Earth is flat. That’s not a world we want to live in. A society that jumps backwards twenty or so centuries in its basic fact set is not a society that’s long for this world.
By happenstance, this piece is being published right as Netflix’s The Social Dilemma hits the airwaves. The documentary dives into these issues far more elegantly than I do, but there’s a moment at the beginning that I found funny. Some of the most esteemed technologists from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and beyond are asked in the beginning of the film, “What’s the problem?” And they all pause, struggling to find an answer that will encapsulate the enormity of the issue before us. But to me the answer’s fairly obvious. It’s literacy. We are misinterpreting a brand new, ubiquitous force in our lives, and that mistake is changing us on the atomic level, all the way to major institutions like the Fifth Estate. Step One is recognizing that fact.
¹ We’ve obviously had media since the country’s founding, but “the media” as a concept is a Nixon-era creation. Before that, Americans generally thought of media regionally: my ABC affiliate, my metro news daily, etc.
² I’m admittedly doing a lot of othering in this piece, but this isn’t coming from a place of moral superiority. I continue to struggle with these exact same issues. It took me six months to get rid of Facebook, and I continue to check Twitter like a nervous facial spasm.
³ One of the things that social media does for is make relationship building incredibly efficient (I just added 25 new friends!). But making new relationships, which is essential to building trust, is not supposed to be efficient! It’s supposed to take a long time. So we’re now in situations where our brain is telling us to trust relationships that contain none of the nutrition of an actual relationship.
⁴ Anyone who believes this — that journalists are by nature in cahoots with the rich and powerful and are constantly covering each other’s tracks — they are just flat wrong and don’t know any decent journalists. The average journalist is gloriously petty and competitive, and would write a scoop on their own mother if it would make it above the fold on the front page.
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX and co-founded GRID110. He is adjunct faculty Cal State LA’s Dept. of Television, Film & New Media, and is excited to oversee the Started|NYU New Media Hyper Accelerator. He advises that you (1) delete Facebook, (2) support a local news source, and (3) subscribe to a site that showcases outstanding investigative journalism, like Longreads.
