Bad News
Legacy media must compete against a
choose-your-own-adventure reality.
November 8, 2024,
4:03 PM ET
“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to
cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election
this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy
media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining
about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after.
“You are the media.”
It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent
$44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media
institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an
invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that
involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.
“You are the media now” is also a good message because,
well, it might be true.
A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few
people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role
ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and
Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D.
Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular
host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion
over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism,
or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the
country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine
media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by
algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for
attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust,
or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have
to say.
All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving
crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet,
and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream
institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences.
Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this
election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you
are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what
audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.
Read: The great social-media news collapse
The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe
Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints
from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed
to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while
others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to
oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age. Then, Biden’s
administration leveled its own critique: “I want you to ask yourself, what have
these people been right about lately?” it wrote in an email. “Seriously. Think about
it.” Everyone seemed frustrated for understandable reasons. But there was no
coherence to be found in this moment: The media were either powerful and
incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.
The vibe felt similar around The Washington
Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after
the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers
were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was
capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10
percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.
But even that signal was fuzzy. The endorsement was never
going to change the election’s outcome. As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements
don’t matter. The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own
indicator of the Post’s waning relevance. “As a journalist, you
don’t actually want your publication to be used as a political weapon for a
billionaire,” Read wrote. “But it would be nice for your publication to be so
powerful and unavoidable that a billionaire might try.” This tension was
everywhere throughout campaign season: Media institutions were somehow failing
to meet the moment, but it was also unclear if they still had any meaningful
power to shape outcomes at all.
I’ve watched for the past year with grim fascination as
both the media industry and its audience have sparred and tried to come to some
shared understanding of what the hell is going on. The internet destroyed
monoculture years ago, but as I wrote last December, it’s recently felt
harder to know what anyone else is doing, seeing, or hearing online anymore.
News sites everywhere have seen traffic plummet in the past two years. That’s
partly the fault of technology companies and their algorithmic changes, which
have made people less likely to see or click on articles when using products
like Google Search or Facebook. But research suggests that isn’t the entire
story: Audiences are breaking up with news, too. An influencer
economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that
produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience.
Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook,
typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the
facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned. This
has presented challenges in the Trump era, which has produced genuine debates
about whether traditional objectivity is possible or useful. Some
audiences crave obvious resistance against the Republican regime. Outlets such
as the The New York Times have tried to forge a middle path—to
be, in executive editor Joe Kahn’s words, a “nonpartisan source of information”
that occupies a “neutral middle ground” without devolving into “both-sides
journalism.” This has had the unfortunate effect of downplaying the asymmetries
between candidates and putting detached, clinical language onto politics that
feel primal and urgent. When it comes to covering Trump, critics of the Times see
double standards and a “sanewashing” of his alarming behavior.
Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of
this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: They are concerned with
publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build
relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about
working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they
make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget. When I covered
the rise of the less professionalized pro-Trump media in
2016, what felt notable to me was its allergy to editing. These people
livestreamed and published unpolished three-hour podcasts. It’s easier to build
a relationship with people when you’re in their ears 15 hours a week: Letting
it all hang out can feel more authentic, like you have nothing to hide.
Critics can debate whether this kind of content is capital-J Journalism
until the heat death of the universe, but the undeniable truth is that people,
glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally
presented via parasocial relationships with influencers. They enjoy frenetic,
algorithmically curated short-form video, streaming and long-form audio, and
the feeling that only a slight gap separates creator and consumer. Major media
outlets are trying to respond to this shift: The Times’ online
front page, for example, has started to feature reporters in what amounts to
prestige TikToks.
Yet the influencer model is also deeply exploitable. One of
the most aggressive attempts to interfere in this election didn’t come directly
from operators in Russia, but rather from a legion of useful idiots in the
United States. Russia simply used far-right influencers to do their
bidding with the large audiences they’d already acquired.
Read: YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe
Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two
contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an
industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second
is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism
matter more than ever. Recently I was struck by a line from the Times’
Ezra Klein. “The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes
pretend that it does,” he said late last month. “The audience knows
what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is
true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all.” Audiences
vote with their attention, and that attention is the most important currency
for media businesses, which, after all, need people to care enough to scroll
past ads and pony up for subscriptions.
It is terribly difficult to make people care about things
they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the
trust necessary to lead your audience. As a result, news organizations
frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This
often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the
guise of newsworthiness. (Trump and Musk are great examples of people who have
sufficiently hijacked this system.) This is why there can be a herding effect
in coverage.
Numerous media critics and theorists on Threads and
Bluesky, themselves subject to the incentives of the attention economy, balked
at Klein’s perspective, citing historical social-science research that media
organizations absolutely influence political metanarratives. They’re right,
too. When the press coheres around a narrative that also manages to capture the
public’s attention, it can have great influence. But these people weren’t just
disagreeing with Klein: They were angry with him. “Another one of those ‘we’re
just a smol bean national paper of record’ excuses when part of the issue was
how they made Biden’s age the top story day after day after day,” one
historian posted.
These arguments over media influence—specifically the Times’—occurred
frequently on social media throughout the election cycle, and occasionally, a
reporter would offer a rebuttal. “To think The Times has influence with Trump
voters or even swing voters is to fundamentally misunderstand the electorate,”
the Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman posted in October. “And don’t say The Times
influences other outlets that do reach those voters. It’s not true.” The
argument is meant to suggest that newspaper coverage alone cannot stop a
popular authoritarian movement. At the same time, these defenses inevitably led
critics to argue: Do you think what you do matters or not?
In a very real sense, these are all problems that the media
created for itself. As Semafor’s Ben Smith argued last month, discussing the period
following Trump’s 2016 win, “a whole generation of non-profit and for-profit
newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause,
not just to purchase a service.” These companies sold democracy itself and a
vision of holding Trump’s power to account. “The thing with marketing, though,”
Smith continued, “is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.”
Trump’s win this week may very well be the proof that critics and beleaguered
citizens need to stop writing those checks.
A subscription falloff would also highlight the confusing
logic of this era for the media. It would mean that the traditional media
industry—fractured, poorly funded, constantly under attack, and in competition
with attention gatherers who don’t have to play by the same rules—is
simultaneously viewed as having had enough power to stop Trump, but also past
its prime, having lost its sway and relevance. Competition is coming from a
durable alternative-media ecosystem, the sole purpose of which is to ensconce citizens
in their chosen reality, regardless of whether it’s true. And it is coming from
Musk’s X, which the centibillionaire quickly rebuilt into a powerful
communication tool that largely serves the MAGA coalition.
Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is
Spaces like X offer an environment for toxic ideas paired
with a sense of empowerment for disaffected audiences. This is part of what
Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, calls the right’s “powerful, partisan,
& participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a
compelling ‘deep story’ for its participants.” By contrast, the left’s media
ecosystem, she argues, relies “upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media
and its ‘story’ is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.” The
right’s media ecosystem might be chaotic, conspiracist, and poisonous, but it
offers its consumers a world to get absorbed in—plus, the promise that they can
shape it themselves.
Would it have been possible for things to go differently if
Harris had attempted to tap into this alternative ecosystem? I’m not so sure.
Following Harris’s entrance into the race, each passing week felt more
consequential, but more rigidly locked in place. Memes, rallies, and marathon
podcast appearances from Trump offered data points, but there was no real way
to interpret them. Some Zoomers and Millennials were ironically coconut-pilled; people were leaving Trump
rallies early; everyone was arguing about who was actually garbage.
Even when something seemed to matter, it was hard to tell whom it mattered to,
or what might happen because of it. When it’s unclear what information everyone
is consuming or which filter bubble they’re trapped in, everyone tends to
shadowbox their conception of an imagined audience. Will the Rogan bros vote?
Did a stand-up comedian’s insult activate a groundswell of Puerto-Rican
American support? We didn’t really know anything for certain until we did.
“You are the media now” is powerful because it capitalizes
on the reality that it is difficult to know where genuine influence comes from
these days. The phrase sounds empowering. Musk’s acolytes see it as the end of
traditional-media gatekeeping. But what he’s really selling is the notion that
people are on their own—that facts are malleable, and that what feels true
ought to be true.
A world governed by the phrase do your own research is
also a world where the Trumps and Musks can operate with impunity. Is it the
news media’s job to counter this movement—its lies, its hate? Is it also their
job to appeal to some of the types of people who listen to Joe Rogan? I’d argue
that it is. But there’s little evidence right now that it stands much of a
chance.
Something has to change. Perhaps it’s possible to
appropriate “You are the media now” and use it as a mission statement to build
an industry more capable of meeting whatever’s coming. Perhaps in the absence
of a shared reality, fighting against an opposing information ecosystem isn’t
as effective as giving more people a reason to get excited about, and pay
attention to, yours.
