BuzzMachine

Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. 

The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that America is deeply racist and sexist, incapable of electing a Black, Asian woman to its highest office because of our culture’s innate, widespread, and unreconciled bias and hatred. That is the root of it. That is the weed that will now grow unkempt no matter how much media wish to groom the nation to make us look as if it were not so. Its aims of oppression will grow daily.

Women will lose control over their bodies, their health, their lives. 

Black Americans know better than anyone, of course, how racist America is. Now there will be no limits to it; this election gives it permission. 

LGBTQ+ people may be deprived every precious right they fought so bravely to attain as bigots try to force them back into closets.

Some portion of Latino voters may think — like Italians long before them, who once were considered people of color and then were not — that they might buy their way into favor with white America with their votes. But note well that even today, Italian-Americans are a protected class at CUNY; discrimination never ends. No matter their contribution to Trump’s victory, some citizens will again be called garbage by those in power. 

Immigrants, whether documented or not and citizens or not, will find their families and lives torn apart as Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportation, tearing husbands, wives, parents, and children from each other on the suspicion brought by an accent, a name, the color of skin. 

Every consumer will suffer higher prices — no matter what their yard signs promised — as Trump undertakes his deportations and tariffs. They admit the economy will be in shambles.

God save the people of Ukraine, who will face defeat as Trump gives his Putin anything he wants, and the people of Gaza, with Netanyahu completely unconstrained by his friend Trump. NATO, South Korea, Taiwan, and the beneficiaries of American generosity, support, and diplomacy are all at risk. 

Trump’s political opponents and whistleblowers will suffer in ways he is only beginning to imagine. 

Justice will suffer as Trump and his Senate can now stack every federal court with young extremists for generations to come, allowing them to tear down the institution of the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it with convenient pedantry to support their absolute power. The institutions of voting rights, fair elections, and equal rights under the law will diminish further. 

Every institution will be attacked, for that is the goal of this brand of so-called conservatism: not to conserve institutions but to destroy them, rather than share their benefits with those who follow. 

Elon Musk will do Trump’s bidding, outlawing the institution of the civil service, replacing it again with political patronage.

RFK Jr. will drive Trump to outlaw vaccinations, essentially outlawing the institutions of medicine and science.

Education is under constant attack from the right. What DeSantis has done to universities in Florida will no doubt provide a model for the destruction of the university and its institutions: academic freedom, faculty governance, tenure, pure research, the humanities. 

The institution of free speech will be very much at risk, even as Trump, Musk, and their supposedly contrarian lock-step thinkers argue they are its protectors. They will forbid and harass speech of which they do not approve. 

The institution of journalism will suffer, as it is likely that more journalists will be harrassed, even sued or jailed by Trump and his thugs. Mogul publishers will think themselves vindicated for obeying in advance and continue to squash controversy unpopular with power. Journalists — some of them — will let themselves be carried along with the right wing, declaring it the will of the people. Just this morning, I heard one guest commentator on MSNBC say that identity politics is dead and that Democrats will have to abandon progressivism to win — which is like saying that Democrats must commit suicide to live. 

Journalists and media executives refuse to acknowledge their key role in sane-washing dangerous insanity, soft-pedaling fascism, enabling amnesia and historical ignorance in the populous they serve. These journalists will get angry with the liberals who are angry at them. Their incumbent institutions — Trump bump: the sequel or not — will decline and they will have the gall to wonder why.

What is to be done? That is the question I am hearing from friends and family. No one has an answer. 

In my books, I theorize that what the most important thing the internet has done is give people who were not represented, heard, or served in so-called mainstream mass media their stage at long last — and that is what those who controlled the stage resent and resist. Thus I wonder whether the Reformation of this era of technological change will turn out to be the racial Reformation of #BlackLivesMatter, and the January 6 attack on the Capital and Trump’s triumph its counter Reformation. 

Where will this end? Print and Luther’s reformation led to peasants’ wars of exactly five hundred years ago and the Thirty Years’ that followed. Must we find ourselves in such open struggle to reach a conclusion or at least a truce?

I write this while on an ill-timed trip to Germany to give a talk, wishing I were not away from home right now as everyone I know and love is in pain. But being here, I wonder whether American fascism will have to find its denouement as it did here in Europe, in vast tragedy and destruction, before sanity might return. 

This election was my hope that we could find a different way, to rebuild not from the ashes but from where we stood. Now I am not sure. What is ultimately broken is not the set of institutions the extremists are trying to destroy but instead our nation itself. Until we face its faults of racism, sexism, and inequity we will never be finished fighting our war, our endless Civil War. 

Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive decline: 

On the latest episode of This Week in Google, we discussed parents’ legitimate concerns about their children’s technology use as they seek help in monitoring and managing it, as cohost Paris Martineau explores in her excellent reporting. I challenge the assumption of addiction in framing the discussion and read bit from my new book, The Web We Weave, so I thought I’d share the rest, in which I look at the source of the addiction argument regarding the internet and now phones:

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In July 1996 — only two years after the introduction of the Netscape web browser — Columbia University psychiatry professor Ivan Goldberg posted a notice to an online bulletin board he founded, intending to parody the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the profession’s encyclopedia of mental disorders. Goldberg announced criteria for a new diagnosis: internet addiction. The astute might have noticed the word “humor” in the announcement’s URL or the odd symptoms listed: “voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers.” Even so, folks appeared on the bulletin board, claiming they suffered the ailment he had just concocted, so he kept the joke going by creating the Internet Addiction Support Group, even though he believed that “support groups for internet addiction made about as much sense as support groups for coughing.”

Goldberg regretted the coinage of internet addiction disorder. “I.A.D. is a very unfortunate term,” he told The New Yorker. “It makes it sound as if one were dealing with heroin, a truly addicting substance that can alter almost every cell in the body. To medicalize every behavior by putting it into psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous. If you expand the concept of addiction to include everything people can overdo, then you must talk about people being addicted to books, addicted to jogging, addicted to other people.”

Kimberly Young founded the Center for Internet Addiction and in 1996 presented a paper to the American Psychological Association declaring “the emergence of a new clinical disorder: internet addiction.” Mind you, = Google didn’t come along until two years later in 1998, Facebook until 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. She declared that folks had become addicted to the crude, slow, ugly — and expensive — early web. Young modeled her definition of internet addiction on pathological gambling and created questionnaires to measure the affliction’s severity: “How often do you find you stay online longer than you intended? . . . How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? . . . How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users? . . . How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online? . . . How often do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?” How would any of us answer those questions — about the internet or a binge-worthy TV show or good book?

Young advertised for volunteers for her first study from Goldberg’s parody Internet Addiction Support Group as well as a Webaholics Support Group — hardly representative populations. On that basis she
declared the condition serious, with 98 percent of people reporting moderate or severe impairment in work and relationships. She layered the report with anecdata: “Dependents gradually spent less time with real people in their lives in exchange for solitary time in front of a computer.” Thirty-five percent of her dependent subjects said they spent time in chat rooms, 28 percent in multiuser games, 15 percent in news discussion groups, and 13 percent in email — all of which entails interacting with people I would classify as real. “Initially,” Young continued, “Dependents [her capitalization] tended to use the Internet as an excuse to avoid needed but reluctantly performed daily chores. . . . For example, one mother forgot such things as to pick up her children from school, to make them dinner, and to put them to bed because she became so absorbed in her Internet use.” I cannot help but be reminded of a critic writing of novels in 1795: “My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books. I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread.”

Young was not alone in sounding the alarm. Psychology Today declared in 1998, “Internet users who become addicted to online activity usually face divorce, unemployment, financial and legal difficulties and child neglect.” Usually? The magazine said unnamed experts estimated that for as many as five million Americans, “the Internet has become a destructive force.” Only two years later, in 2000, Psychology Today upped the ante to estimate that 25 million Americans “qualify as compulsive surfers.” At least the magazine exercised sufficient self-awareness to note, “Today, so-called addictions are everywhere: sex, exercise, work, chocolate, TV, shopping, and now the Internet. Have we been, well, abusing the word?”

Young founded the first inpatient hospital clinic for internet addiction in Pittsburgh. Others followed. In 2009, two therapists founded reSTART atop “Serenity Mountain,” twenty-five miles from Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington, to treat teens and young adults for a long list of alleged ailments associated with the net: screen dependence (now including virtual reality), internet gaming disorder, gambling, compulsive shopping, social-media use, and intimacy disorder. The program costs a reported $18,000 to $20,000 per month. Inpatient programs run two to twelve months, then reSTART offers off-campus living in “tech-limited” apartments, for six to twenty-four months, followed by ongoing coaching. I do not diminish the painful reality of compulsive behavior around any activity and its connection to co-occurring conditions, including depression, anxiety, ADD/ADHD, and personality disorders. Often internet use is a symptom of other issues — and sometimes a salve for them, a way to grapple with concerns we all can share, like loneliness. If there is an internet pathology, how prevalent might it be? We do not know, for there is as yet no agreement even on definitions, in spite of almost five thousand papers on “internet addiction” appearing on the National Institute of Health’s database.

Mark Griffiths wrote the first academic paper examining the idea of internet addiction, in 1996. He questioned Young’s research: “It is unlikely that very many of her dependent Internet users was a bona fide Internet addict.” Writing in 2003, he noted that “the Internet can be used to counteract other deficiencies in the person’s life (e.g. relationships, lack of friends, physical appearance, disability, coping, etc.)” and that “text-based relationship can obviously be rewarding for some people.” In another paper, he proposed that “many of these excessive users are not ‘Internet addicts’ but just use the Internet excessively as a medium to fuel other addictions.”

Griffiths’ observation speaks to much controversy about the net: it is blamed as the cause of many ills when often it is merely a conduit for them. I emailed Griffiths and asked whether his opinion had changed in the intervening decades of research. He replied with a paper that expressed his current view: “There are also much wider problems with the use of the term ‘internet addiction’: though the number of studies in the field of internet addiction has certainly grown, most have really investigated addictions on the internet rather than to the internet. . . . In short, the overwhelming majority of so-called internet addicts are no more addicted to the internet than alcoholics are addicted to the actual bottle.”

Not infrequently, writers call on biology to back up their claims of addiction, reporting that smartphones and their apps induce the production of dopamine, as drugs do. “Digital addictions are drowning us in dopamine,” claims a headline in The Wall Street Journal over a Stanford psychiatrist’s contention that the smartphone is “the equivalent of the hypodermic needle for a wired generation.” In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria decides that TikTok is “dangerously addictive” and must be regulated because it delivers dopamine. Except as Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson points out, “Anything fun results in an increased dopamine release in the ‘pleasure circuits’ of the brain — whether it’s going for a swim, reading a good book, having a good conversation, eating or having sex. Technology use causes dopamine release similar to other normal, fun activities: about 50 to 100 percent above normal levels.” That is versus cocaine, which increases it 350 percent, and methamphetamine, 1,200 percent. Says Ferguson, “Technology is not a drug.”

Nevertheless, journalists continue to insinuate that we are wired addicts. Forbes: “Digital Addiction: Should You Be Worried?” The BBC: “Is Internet Addiction a Growing Problem?” CNN: “How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?” They pose these headlines as questions because they don’t have the facts to back up their allegations. Let us note the irony of journalists crying addiction: news organizations themselves are dying to addict us. As with so many of the press’ charges against the net, it is that press that invented and perfected the crime.

It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?”

I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of incumbent journalism:

You have refused to recognize fascism at the door. You insist on covering authoritarianism as just another side in still-symmetrical American politics. 

You do not read history. For God’s sake, reread or read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (or at least listen to the podcast). You fail to cite history for your readers, explaining the context of what is occurring, because you insist on thinking you are writing your “first draft of history.” What hubris. 

You think, as is often said, that our problem is disinformation and since you are in the information business, you must be the solution. Arendt teaches instead that “totalitarian government … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” By this, she does not mean the insipid “loneliness epidemic” you and the Surgeon General prattle on about: incels unable to get laid. She means isolating people from their communities through unfounded fear, making them vulnerable to the siren call of race hatred. That is Springfield. 

You let yourselves be exploited by these malign forces to spread their bigotry and bile, cushioned with your white-gloved euphemisms and sane-washing. You do not explain blood libel to your readers. Is that because you do not recognize it yourself?

You quote their noxious words, taking them at face value — as beliefs, as “alternative facts” — unable to see how they are instead saying these things to signal their belonging to the cult and cause. The call-and-response of Trump and Vance and their mob is the authoritarian ruler’s loyalty test. Arendt observed in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” Guns, abortion, immigration, and trans rights cannot be the central guideposts in the everyday lives of these people; they are flags to fly. In your quotation and coverage, you salute them. 

You hide behind your impotent fact-checking, never seeing — though frequently warned — that in the ways you debunk their lies, you spread them, and by pedantically nitpicking the other side in your misguided search for balance you create false equivalence. This is how they exploit you.

You thus lie to yourselves and the public you serve by refusing to call lies lies, racism racism, misogyny misogyny, authoritarianism authoritarianism, fascism fascism. 

Before I examine your all-too-recent efforts to understand what you are doing wrong, let me offer two counter examples of wise journalism. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the Helsingen Sanomat, reporting to a nation vitally concerned about the aggression of its neighbor, quoted historians atop its home page to provide context. You should be reaching out to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars who study ethics, media studies, communication, and rhetoric to explain to you and the public what is occurring. You are not yourself expert.

When Trump and Vance’s hate directed at Haitians in Springfield became memes, The Times’ Jamelle Bouie took to TikTok to explain — as he often does there — what is actually happening. Please take two minutes and forty-two seconds to watch. 

I am glad to see the Post’s columnists begin self-reflection on their — and my — field’s coverage of this time. Here, Matt Bai recognizes how ineffectual modifiers are in front of Trump’s lies. That seems a good start. 

“And by now,” Bai writes, “it seems tragically obvious to me that, by constantly holding Trump to a different standard of proof than we do anyone else, we in the news media are actually making him less accountable for his mendacity, rather than more so….

“Here’s the dilemma. The news media can’t credulously publish things we know to be untrue — and yet, if the president says them, we can’t exactly not publish them, either. At the same time, we find ourselves pressured by critics on social media for whom no level of scrutiny, when it comes to Trump, will ever be enough.”

Bai’s odd argument is that because Trump is a pathological liar, he is held to a different standard of truth, and journalists are expected — by “a bunch of preening media critics” — to subject him to “this policy of hyper-skepticism,” demanding that he provide evidence, for example, in blaming Democrats for assassination attempts against him. Bai asks: “Must a candidate walk around all day with an armful of data to back up every assertion? Is there really no room to advance a controversial and speculative argument without producing slides to support it?”

So he begins by reflecting on the ineffectiveness of journalism’s strategy of adjectival caveats to hateful lies but ends by justifying Trump’s incendiary assertion that Democrats’ assertion that he is a threat to democracy is what is incendiary. He argues that “our need to append qualifiers to everything he says is making us look like we’re out to discredit him. In other words, we appear to be proving Trump’s entire point not just about the news media but about the nation’s elite institutions as a whole. Rather than reinforcing trust in news coverage, I fear we’re further eroding it.” 

So what then? Let him skate? Or — here comes the predictable journalistic reflex — do unto Harris as is done unto Trump. Bai tries to apply the same level of scrutiny to Harris and Biden, ending up in just one more journalistic exercise in bothsidesing. 

Sigh. 

Next, here is Catherine Rampell positing her theory of what she calls idiotception, “a self-perpetuating, IQ-destroying cycle: Politicians hear or invent a stupid lie, which they plant in the minds of their followers. Their followers then repeat that stupid lie back to those same politicians. Then, the politicians insist they have no choice but to act on the stupid lie. After all, the public demands it!”

She tracks the Springfield lie, free of context, not recognizing what is underneath it: the blood libel Bouie identifies and explains. Then, just like her colleague, her knees jerk and she, too, ends up bothsidesing: “To be clear, the idiotception cycle is not unique to Republican politicians, even if they’ve been particularly aggressive adopters.”

This is the same Post columnist who, before Harris announced her economic policies, accused her of being a communist price fixer and, when that turned out to be false, refused to correct herself and called Harris’ actual policy “silly.” 

Rampell concludes: “Dumb, baseless stories floated by randos have always had the ability to gain followers. But in today’s media environment, they can spread and strengthen astonishingly quickly, particularly when they serve the agendas of manipulative, morally malleable politicians.” And columnists.

Growl.

The Post doesn’t fact-check its columnists, but it certainly fact-checks the candidates in an exercise in over-eager and in the end useless pedantry that has lately jumped the shark. Here is resident fact-checker Glenn Kessler on J.D. Vance’s pet-eating “misinformation.”

Kessler dutifully quotes every Vance statement at length and then pulls the threads of his ugly sweater one at a time until he ends bare-chested. But once more, Kessler does not provide the context that matters. It barely matters what lie Vance and Trump use as the vector of their hate. The pets aren’t the point. It is blood libel. That is left unsaid. 

Damn. 

There are exceptions. Many a day, Jennifer Rubin is to The Post as Jamelle Bouie is to The Times: welcome relief. Ruth Marcus, too, is better than most. But even she finds herself trapped, callingSarah Sanders’ awful attack on Harris “a new low for the GOP.” Problem is, it’s hard to get lower than fascist, authoritarian, racist, misogynistic, lying, hateful insurrection.

How much better it would be to instead offer readers an ongoing narrative identifying fascism and blood libel as it occurs and pointing to all such instances as further evidence in explanation. 

That is what old journalism is doing wrong. 

Meanwhile, how are things up the Acela at The Times? As awful as ever. 

J.D. Vance’s fascism is “combative conservativism” and his blood libel against Haitians — and, by extension, all immigrants and people of color in America —is “ultra-online political rabble rousing.”

Fuck. 

As often as I am disappointed in and critical of them lately, I will not cancel my subscriptions to The New York Times or The Washington Post. They should be so lucky, for I will stay on their cases. I also wish to support the good reporting that still comes from them.

I’ve been thinking of calling together some of the papers’ ever-growing cadre of critics for an intervention of sorts, to examine the increasingly troubling performances, ask why we think this has been happening, and suggest what might be done. I want to be hopeful for these critical journalistic institutions. A few weeks ago, I was. Then came disappointment. After the presidential debate, I praised The Times’ coverage and play. Then came disappointment again.

I am one among many citizens and journalists critical of The Times et al. When, in a rare moment of disagreement with Margaret Sullivan, I argued Kamala Harris should not submit to an interview with incumbent national political media, I thought I’d get holy journalistic hell. I didn’t. Only six defensive journalists (I counted) complained; countless more agreed. I’ve suggested to fellow media critics that they are missing the story of their careers: a crush of complaint about these once-venerable institutions, not from the right (which wants to destroy them) but from the left (we only want them to be better). 

To be clear, there are many theories about these news organizations I do not subscribe to:

I do not believe that The Times or The Post want Donald Trump elected. Neither do I think they necessarily want Kamala Harris defeated.

Nor do I do believe, as I hear said on the socials, that anyone in these newsrooms is in the pay of Russians, Republicans, or other nefarious forces. Neither do I think that the owners of these publications — even the malign Rupert Murdoch — are daily dictating assignments or headlines, though at a higher level they do bear responsibility for their direction. 

Finally, though it’s true that the attention economy — born in mass media and imported online — values attention, thus conflict, I don’t think believe the quality of political coverage is purely the product of clickbait and greed: nothing so obvious. 

These are the speculations so often expressed in frustration and anger on social media in response to the latest missteps by these once-august publications. I understand that.

But it would be a mistake to fall into such pat conspiracy-theorizing, for that misses the deeper questions about the subtle and insidious effects infecting the culture of these large, national newsrooms — while giving the defensive denizens of those institutions an easy excuse to dismiss legitimate criticism of their work, for example:

The number of high-status posters who think the New York Times is out to get Kamala Harris is a bit disturbing tbh.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 2, 2024

I do wonder what the hell is happening at these newspapers, for it has been — to use Silver’s word — disturbing. I won’t try to catalog all their lapses, sins, and offenses here, for I do that every day now, lately using the hashtags #BrokenTimes, #BrokenPost, and #MurdochJournal to aid in gathering them. The symptoms are self-evident: bothsidesing asymmetry into false balance, normalizing extremism, sane-washing — or worse, ignoring —  Trump’s obvious debilitation, downplaying the imminent peril of fascism, putting themselves at the center of this story over the people most at risk, and most recently completely missing what I think could be the biggest political story in a century: the rise of a grand coalition to save democracy. I could go on. I do go on, day after day, so much that I dread opening the pages of these publications most mornings. 

Are there exceptions? Absolutely, there are. There is still excellent journalism coming out of these newsrooms (and I will try to label examples of that with the hashtags #GoodTimes and #GoodPost). That there are many experienced and caring reporters in these places is what makes this discussion worth having. 

I even see some caring journalists share public criticism of the state of news in subtle subtweets or what can appear to be hostage videos, given that they are muzzled by newsroom rules against self-criticism of their companies. Since the ombudsman has been made extinct in those newsrooms, I very much value these perspectives. 

What I do not know is why all this has been happening. I have no inside knowledge. Even so, we need to discuss possible causes to have any sense of how we got here and what — if anything — might be done about it. Either that or we decide that it is too late, that we must abandon these incumbent institutions and move to replace them. 

Theory: Independence

One theory I keep coming back to is one that Jay Rosen first posited in 2018, examining the impact of an important shift in the economics of The Times from majority support by advertising to majority support from subscribers. “The readers of the New York Times have more power now,” he observed. 

One might think that should mean The Times would not want to peeve its readers — though it incessantly does. As Jay also noted, “One of the joys of having a subscription to the Times is threatening to cancel it.” Wouldn’t management do everything to avert cancelation? Yet the opposite is occuring: The Times practically dares its readers to leave. Why? 

An old journalism trope has it that if you anger both sides of a story, you must be doing something right. (Nevermind that you might also have so screwed up the story that everyone can see it.) But that’s not what’s happening here. That, too, is too simple a thesis.

I have another interpretation: The sixth-generation Times publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, has lately replaced the often-claimed standard of journalistic “objectivity” with his call for “independence.” But independent of whom? Not advertisers anymore; neither political parties nor governments. I theorize he is trying to prove his paper’s independence from its own readers and liberals — who, as I’ve said, happen to be the same people. Pissing them off might be The Times’ way of saying: You don’t own us. 

If The Times can argue that it is not a liberal newspaper and can present voluminous bona fides (see the evidence at #BrokenTimes), then its publisher and editors think they are immunized from criticism, whether from journalism professors or MAGA politicians. 

Theory: One size fits all

Another theory holds that to be a liberal newspaper is bad for business, driving away half the market. That argument might have been valid in the day of monopoly metro newspapers, but for these national publications, it’s sophistry. We know full well that Murdoch acolytes watching Fox News are not and never will become Times readers. In this post, I quote Marty Baron’s memoirs, in which he reported that “by the fall of 2018, the percentage of our digital subscribers who considered themselves somewhat or very conservative was in the single digits, with slightly more than 80 percent ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ liberal.” He seemed to lament that he couldn’t win over conservative readers. I suggested he should have seen this data as a gift: By knowing the community one is serving, one knows how to better serve them. That does not mean pandering to their beliefs. It just means the newsroom — and especially the editorial page and its columnists — can stop trying to suck up to right-wing extremists. 

Theory: Death to the mass

I have another theory altogether, one that has been animating my work in the last decade. It’s about the death of the mass media business model, with it mass media, and with it the idea of the mass. That was the book I set out to write that became The Gutenberg Parenthesis. I had begun to write about sociological theories of the mass but decided I wasn’t ready (it became the kernel of a chapter in Gutenberg entitled “Death to the Mass”). I realized I needed to examine the origins of the mass, which meant studying the birth of print. Hello, Gutenberg. 

I next wrote Magazine a small (and fun) book about the long century of the magazine as a way to explore the arc of the long century of mass media. I’m now writing a book called Hot Type about the Linotype and the mechanization and industrialization of print it heralded — and thus the dawn of mass media.

Today we come to the dusk of mass media (that’s the next book I want to work on). Its assassin is the internet, which enables any and all to publish to the world, obliterating mass media’s control over the scarcities of voice in the culture, and robbing publishers — in their perspective — of the pricing power they held over those who wanted to reach the mass, whom publishers and broadcasters thought they could own. 

That, I think, could be one cause of what we are seeing happen in The Times, The Post, The Journal, network news, and other national news media. They cannot stop believing it is their mission, even their birthright, to serve and sell to everyone — the mass — when everyone now has more choices to go to. They hate that they no longer control access to audience, attention, authority — and advertising — and resent their replacement by digital startups, bloggers, social media, so-called influencers, the technology companies that enable them, and the masses themselves. 

Ironically, I believe that the overarching story mass media are failing to cover at all adequately — the rise of American fascism in the body of white, christian nationalism — is fueled by the Trumpists’ explicit fear of “replacement.” Trump’s insurrectionists would sooner burn the fields than share the nation’s bounty with those who have built it. 

The reaction inside journalism is not insurrection. It is the opposite: defensiveness, circled wagons, retrenchment, refusing to hear or dismissing criticism and denigrating critics, and finding others to blame for their problems — often, the internet. 

I address that in my new book out next month, The Web We Weave. I began the book intending to write a defense of internet freedoms, but it became a critique of media’s moral panic over the internet and the impact that is having on those freedoms. News institutions as companies never acknowledge their own conflict of interest in covering what they see as a new competitors on the net.

I see a much larger problem at work: Journalists and news executives — and I include myself in this critique — were never equipped with the tools of theory and history to inform self-reflection on our field and to imagine alternative means and models of serving our publics. 

This is why I hold that simply teaching the craft and skills of journalism in journalism schools is wholly inadequate to the profound challenges in our field. Journalists see themselves as producers of the commodity they call content and they define their value according to their roles in that process of manufacture. They would be better served to also learn from the disciplines of media studies, communication, history, sociology, ethics, and others — empowering them to reimagine and reform our field. 

When I started teaching journalism myself as a mere practitioner in 2006, I tried to learn from the example of my actual academic friend and mentor, Dr. Rosen, whom I often witnessed standing back from any phenomenon in our discipline to abstract: to ask what is really happening here, and then to examine the implications of the possible answers. I wanted my students to be able to do that as they embarked on careers in a field undergoing profound change, and so I wanted to teach them the theory, history, and economics of journalism (and was given an ever-shrinking timeslot to do so). Of course, that meant I needed to study that myself — thus the many books. 

That is what brings me to ask what the hell is happening at The Times, The Post, et al. I do not have an answer, only evidence to gather, abstractions to ponder, theories to explore. I wish to examine these issues with others who are puzzled, disturbed, and disappointed about what they, too, see coming from these institutions … and we are many.

Can these institutions improve? Only if they recognize the need to. Can they be replaced? Yes, but we cannot yet know with what. 

I often pull this thick book from my shelf: a directory of every American newspaper in 1900. 

The year 1900 was just a decade past the introduction of the last machine needed to complete the industrialization of media (the Linotype — thus my interest in it), and a half century past when the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the country was only 4,000. New York boasted scores of publications serving what we would now think of as market niches — e.g., Finnish sailors — but should instead see as communities. By the turn of the last century, circulations were already rising into the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions. Mass media were rising. 

The value of studying the history of media is that we can learn from alternatives in the past to which we may return: smaller publications at a human scale, serving communities rather than that imagined mass. 

That vision of post-mass media profoundly frightens large, national news organizations with their business models built on the goal of selling content to everyone. It also disturbs the proprietors of incumbent local media, now controlled by the hedge funds that are hiring lobbyists to cash in their political capital for protectionist legislation to benefit them over their new competitors. 

The Sulzbergers fashion themselves protectors of The Times and, indeed, for generations, they have been. Now The Times needs further protection from the institution’s own reflexes. The Post has been handed over to Murdoch executives and I fear for it. Murdoch himself is trying to exclude his own children from shifting his empire away from his odious, extremist mission. Sinclair stands ready to do the extremists’ bidding. Hedge funds have denuded local news. It is all ominous for the future of what was journalism. And the Financial Times just reported that Leonard Leo, who has bought our Supreme Court, is planning to buy local news media. We are warned. 

I cannot tell you what is happening to The Times, The Post, and the rest of incumbent national news media, but I know something is and it worries me. They refuse to acknowledge or reflect on this change, so others must, in the context of history, with the larger mission and role of journalism in mind, and with the hope still that something can be done. 

As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris.

This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand this moment — or whether they will continue to insist on their trope of a divided America.

It is not a divided America. Patriots are gathering together and putting past differences aside to forestall a next civil war, to support and defend the Constitution. The movement that matters is not Trump’s and the Republicans’ fascist insurrection, which is the one that gets attention in news media. The movement that matters now is this one: the movement for democracy.

In recent days, in The Times, Nick Kristof scolded liberals, telling us why we should not demean Trump voters. A few days later in The Washington Post, Matt Bai rebutted, saying he understands Trump voters but asking why he should give them empathy. I say both framings are wrong, for each centers Trump and his fascists.

A much more profound phenomenon is growing — not on the “other side” of the fascists, but instead at the new and true core of American politics and governance. The question is not whether we should demean or understand or empathize with fascists. What we should be concentrating on instead is welcoming those who will stand for democracy in a larger movement.

Lord knows, I have disagreed with Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney. I will disagree with them still. But I welcome them into this grand coalition that is forming now. MSNBC has its sane and sometimes former Republicans — Nicole Wallace, Charlie Sykes, David Jolly, and, Joe Scarborough — and I welcome them and thank them for standing up for democracy and against fascism, a word they regularly use (though The Times, The Post, et al do not). We must welcome more to this righteous and urgent cause.

For God’s sake, political reporters, stop framing these two movements — one to tear down democracy, one to build it up — as equivalent sides across your imaginary continental divide. Stop your false balance. Stop washing the insanity of the fascist party’s leader — and the insanity of his followers for following him. Stop normalizing his and their patently abnormal and abhorrent behavior. Stop trying to predict (in this unprecedented moment, all your “models” and experience and presumptions are worthless). Stop hoping for bad news. Stop making the story about yourself — yes, I am looking at you, A.G. Sulzberger — and please try to understand the threats to democracy, liberty, and life from the perspectives of those who do not share the power and privilege of your platforms. Stop ignoring the rising chorus of critics who are trying to make you and your journalism better — to save journalism from your lapses of judgment. Stop your amnesia about what Trump and company have already shown us to be. Stop making up new white-gloved euphemisms for racism, misogyny, lies, insurgency, corruption, hatred, and grift — call these things what they are, otherwise you are not doing journalism, not informing and explaining reality to your publics.

Here, right in front of your eyes, is the story of the century and perhaps of the nation’s history. This is your last test. Fail at this, and there is no hope for you. Step up to the moment. Cover the story of your lifetimes.