Harper's runs a piece about why people don't trust the media any more and fails to mention the infamous Harper's letter of 2020.
The whole piece is not bad. Jelani Cobb at CJR has good insights, as does the oft-curmudgeonly Jack Shafer. Taylor Lorenz focuses too much early on, on Gaza, though we've seen how fair chunks of the MSM, although they've moderated giving blank checks to Zionist Israel, still have not officially retracted old stories. Max Tani of Semafor cites COVID coverage as a big issue. He's right to fair degree, though Cobb pushes back on some of that with this:
I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them. The reason is that, 99 percent of the time, when someone says, “The media won’t tell you this,” it’s because the thing they’re talking about is either not true or is not true in the way they conceive it to be. Or they have a pet conspiracy theory that no one else shares, and the media won’t validate their viewpoint.
He goes on to connect that with declines in the trust in institutions in general.
Shafer notes that capitalist owners have led to a retreat in pushback against Trump, although he adds exceptions like the New York Times.
At the same time, Lorenz and Cobb note the financial costs in fighting Trump for smaller outlets.
Next, Harper's facilitator asks the four about AI. Lorenz, especially, notes that, by cutting entry-level journalism jobs, it may raise the barrier to entry even higher, even as the type of people Cobb references will double down on AI slop.
Then, we get to the future. Shafer rightly, in line with what I have long thought, calls out print media for fucking up for decades:
The newspaper industry, again and again, has flubbed its chance to propel itself into the future. This started in the years following World War II, when newspaper readers increasingly turned to television. In the mid-Seventies, the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, wrote a big page-one story about how the thing that you’re holding in your hands is an endangered species. Newspaper publishers and editors were all aware that papers were losing their moxie.
In one of his shareholder letters in the early Nineties, Warren Buffett said something to the effect of: “I love the newspaper business. I’ve been a great investor in Buffalo News and the Washington Post. But these properties are not delivering the return on investment they once did.” This was before the web. He’s not saying newspapers are dying because of the web. He’s saying that other transformations, including greater consumer choice, were already taking place.
The newspaper industry has had warning for seventy-five-plus years that an end is coming and that it either needs to create, innovate, and discover or step aside. When you look at what happened to newspapers in the web era, just about all of them got it wrong.
The incumbent media is not always the best vehicle to propel journalism into the future. The future is going to require innovation and ideas that we’re not privy to in this conversation. It’s going to require people finding the ability to attract audiences, hold on to them, and give them some value that they didn’t have before.
Amen.
The other three? They strike me as way too optimistic about new media in forms such as Substack. Frankly, I think they're engaging in some form of availability bias or similar. They see people they know, who have abandoned legacy or semi-legacy, print media, or who have like them, started new outlets on their own, but only after they built up credibility and audience at a legacy or semi-legacy site, and think, "that's easy."
It is true that new media for targeted audiences, mentioned especially by Cobb, is growing. But, general-audience new media that's trustworthy? Not really.
