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While we’re waiting around to see who wins the US elections, we already know who’s lost: the legacy media. It is no longer the proud fourth estate where campaign agendas are fought out and political narratives formed.
It’s not a failure of journalists — their work is as good as, or better than, ever. But news media? The loss of relevance has rotted the power of the core of traditional US media: the major mastheads, the three TV network news programmers and cable’s 24-hour news channels, now buttressed by Washington insider digital players like Axios and Politico.
It’s not that these institutions have been particularly bad, or even unusually feckless, this time around. It’s that suddenly, shockingly, they’ve simply stopped mattering as audiences walk away from the media’s embrace of a clickbait sensibility that outsources news decision making to bad-faith political actors and the viral hit of the social media algorithms shaped by bots and trolls.
No wonder this year’s Reuters Digital News Report found that news avoidance is up (11% since 2019) while remaining news consumers mourn a gap between the news they’re getting and news that helps them make sense of what’s happening. Digital audiences (measured by page views) are down across the board and the media’s latest stalled rescue plan (subscriptions and paywalls) teeters on the edge.
It doesn’t take much squinting to see these same trends playing out in Australia.
The lurch to irrelevance has been sudden. In 2016, The New York Times’ relentless front-paging of Hillary Clinton’s emails kept the story so centred in the nation’s campaign narrative that it panicked FBI boss James Comey into his election-shifting “October surprise” of a reopened investigation into the Democratic candidate.
Last week, the Times and The Washington Post tested out their agenda-setting power once again, shaping up to favourite punching bag, outgoing President Joe Biden, with a front page tsk-tsking over his stumbling reference to the Trump campaign’s “garbage” slurs. It was an attempted reprise of the media takedown of Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” moment. The rest of the mainstream institutions head nodded into line (all the way through to David Speers on Sunday’s pre-election Insiders).
Trump parlayed the story into a made-for-TV stunt by jumping — or, rather, stumbling — into the front seat of a garbage truck.
It was, said media critic Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian, “reflexive false equivalence” to the attack on Puerto Ricans at Trump’s disastrous Madison Square Garden revivalist rally. And it backfired, both on Trump and the media establishment. “Make this make sense,” pleaded Trump spokesperson turned The Rest is Politics podcaster (and this week’s Q+A guest) Anthony Scaramucci.
The traditional media’s news judgment gene determines what stories get the front page high rotation treatment that feeds into op-ed talking points that once shaped shared news narratives. Why has it suddenly turned so malignity cancerous?
How long you got? Here’s one list from The New Republic’s Greg Sargent: Both-sidesing (even of issues like democracy), reporting norm-breaking (even criminal) as “just politics”, disproportional treatment of Democrat “gaffes”, treating the most bad faith of attacks as themselves newsworthy, and the embrace of euphemisms to share responsibility for political dysfunction.
Or here’s another, overlapping, from Jeff Jarvis in the Columbia Journalism Review: both-sidesing, false equivalence, sane-washing, an obsession with polls and an out-of-context nitpicking masquerading as fact-checking. Sound familiar?
The perennial runners-up to The New York Times in the US news media status stakes — The Washington Post and the LA Times — have all but ‘fessed up to their own irrelevance, joining the three out of every four major US mastheads (most owned by private equity chains) in a shared institutional cowardice of declining to recommend who to vote for.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” pontificated WaPo owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos in his “view from nowhere” philippic against media influence. Maybe, but when your business model is based on a “democracy dies in darkness” solidarity, appearing to breach Timothy Snyder’s first lesson on tyranny (“do not obey in advance”) doesn’t seem very cautious.
After a Trump-bump in the late teens, newspaper subscriptions have been flat for the past couple of years (here in Australia, too). The decision not to endorse seems to have sent subs at both WaPo and the LA Times sliding an influence-shredding 10%. For WaPo, that’s 250,000 paying subs gone.
Poor news decision-making by traditional media is sending readers elsewhere. Rather than relying on the news feed delivered by the big players, news consumers are understanding news narratives by curating their own feeds out of a diverse pool — yes, legacy media, but also the country’s still strong magazine market, independent digital players, not-for-profit media like the country’s third-oldest newspaper the The Philadelphia Inquirer, podcasts (the boom medium of the 2020s, including in Australia), and individual journalists and writers with Substack newsletters.
According to the Reuters report, only 22% of global readers now head direct to media home pages for news. The rest come to their news through search, aggregators and social media — still Facebook, but increasingly YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok (and less and less through the platform formerly known as Twitter).
The rise of the self-curated feed has shattered legacy media control over news narratives. But turn on Australian TV (yes, even the ABC) and you’ll find there’s still the smallest of groups taking the US legacy media narrative choices seriously: our own broadcast news editors making their daily news lists.