The Nut Graf #2: Traditional Journalism Is Dead
Part one of our series on the press, in which we cover the basics of what's going on with institutional journalism (emphasis on "institutional")
I. The Era of Big Media
Following the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, America entered what is commonly known as the “Gilded Age.” In the interest of being concise, I’ll let HISTORY.com explain the rest:¹
During this era, America became more prosperous and saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology. But the Gilded Age had a more sinister side: It was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class. In fact, it was wealthy tycoons, not politicians, who inconspicuously held the most political power during the Gilded Age.
Today, the Gilded Age period of American history is also referred to as the era of Big Business; of rapid economic growth and men harnessing such growth to change the course of politics.
In that vein, I propose a similar name for the present moment: the era of Big Media. An era where the mass dissemination of information and opinions through the news and social media has become ubiquitous; an era where “cancel culture” abounds and the court of public opinion has more political sway than the Supreme Court.
Just like how men such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie built towering empires out of oil, railroads, and steel in the era of Big Business, men such as Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, and Ted Turner have built the towering empires of Fox, CBS, and CNN in the era of Big Media. Just like how the terms “robber baron” and “captain of industry” were created to describe the state of the Gilded Age, “media mogul” has entered into our modern lexicon to describe the state of now.
Clearly, now—more than ever—the media influences politics (and vice versa, of course). Much has been documented about Trump’s close-knit relationship with Fox News,² and the fact that it’s household knowledge which media sources lean liberal and which media sources lean conservative is telling.
At this point in time, I think we’re long overdue for a fair assessment of the media in the United States in 2020. There’s a lot to cover—from cries of “fake news” to the collapse of many traditional forms of journalism.
Look, I get it: I’m a (student) journalist. I run a (student) newspaper. I am likely much more invested in this issue than the average American. I also gave a TEDx talk about this very topic,³ and I’m sure, if you’ve seen some of my other work, some points will be invariably rehashed. You might be wondering why you should care so much about the press.
Here’s why: we sometimes fail to understand just how much of our knowledge comes from the news. For example, the current president of the United States of America is Donald Trump. Most readers of this newsletter will have never had to chance to meet Trump in person, so the only way you know that piece of information is from reading the news. The news tells you who won that sports game last night; which plane crashed in which disaster; when another Trump administration official was fired/resigned.
But the reach of the press and media goes beyond simply delivering information; mass media influences the very way we think about our community and society. For the past few months, much of the United States has been isolated at home. In that time, the New York Times has gained 600,000 digital subscribers,⁴ and I’m pretty sure you don’t need me to tell you that social media usage has skyrocketed since the pandemic began. Even while we’re trapped in our own homes, physically cut off from the rest of the world, we’re more connected than ever—through the medium of mass media.
Simply put, the media industry is what’s making the world turn round and round right now.
Thus, it’s time to give mass media the attention it deserves. In fact, in order to make sure this newsletter doesn’t become excessively long (and so I have more time to do research), we’ll be breaking this topic down into multiple parts. This week, we’ll be taking a top-down look at the media industry—specifically, the old, crumbling institutions at the heart of this industry.
II. What’s wrong with Chuck Todd, though?
In November of last year, I attended the JEA/NSPA 2020 fall convention.
I can tell that’ll probably mean nothing to a bunch of readers, so the quick rundown: basically, the JEA/NSPA convention is a national convention for student journalists jointly hosted by the Journalism Educator’s Association (JEA) and National Student Press Association (NSPA). You fly to D.C. with other people from your campus newspaper staff, sit in on a couple days’ worth of workshops centered around improving your craft, and take a touristy bus tour of some of our national landmarks. Oh, and you—a lifelong California resident enjoying the privilege of year-round sunshine—realize just how cold the east coast is.
A really great win-win situation all around!
One of the standout moments from these conventions (which are hosted biannually) are the keynote speakers. In the case of the Fall 2020 convention, I present American journalist Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press.
For those unfamiliar with Todd, on the surface level, Todd looks to be the paragon of journalistic virtue. In 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Todd took it upon himself to question Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” in an exchange worthy of becoming a meme:⁵
CHUCK TODD:
--was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.
KELLYANNE CONWAY:
Chuck, do you think it's a fact or not that millions of people have lost their plans or health insurance and their doctors under President Obama? Do you think it's a fact that everything we heard from these women yesterday happened on the watch of President Obama? He was president for eight years. Donald Trump's been here for about eight hours.
Do you think it's a fact that millions of women, 16.1 million women, as I stand here before you today, are in poverty along with their kids? Do you think it's a fact that millions don't have health care? Do you think it's a fact that we spent billions of dollars on education in the last eight years only to have millions of kids still stuck in schools that fail them every single day? These are the facts that I want the press corps to cover--
CHUCK TODD:
I--
Apart from Todd’s disbelieving “I—” at the end, his saying that “alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods” is a resounding example of what journalistic integrity should be about. And for that, I applaud him.
Todd has also been the recipient of numerous awards; he’s won multiple Emmys for his reporting and has been nominated for many more. He’s an adjunct professor at John Hopkins University. The show he moderates, Meet the Press, has millions of viewers and is the top Sunday news show in the country.
Todd seems to be very good at what he does. But in reality? The message Todd delivered at the JEA/NSPA convention—and continued to deliver in other talks, interviews, etc—couldn’t be more out of touch with the current trends in the news industry.
I’ve said this many, many times before: right now is a crisis point for journalism, for three reasons:
More and more people are flocking to social media sites for breaking news updates instead of turning on cable news. The problem, however, is that such social media sites aren’t fact-checked. At best, they’re biased echo chambers; at worst, they promote blatantly false misinformation.
Newspapers as a financial model are no longer profitable or sustainable. It used to be commonplace for physical copies of newspapers to be delivered to households daily, but that’s obviously no longer true anymore. While the larger publications out there—New York Times, Washington Post, etc—are still staying afloat, dozens of local newspapers have declared bankruptcy from reduced circulation revenue.⁶
Since 2016, when the phrase “fake news” entered the mainstream, countless politicians have tried to spin the media for their own purposes. At the same time, this devaluation of journalism has very real consequences: in the past four years, foreign dictators have taken to leveling accusations of “fake news” in order to justify their actions.⁷
The end result of the combination of all these factors is undeniable: journalism as we know it is in freefall. Journalists, both overseas and at home, are being threatened, jailed, and killed. Local newspapers are collapsing and closing down. The truth—or, at the very least, the factual base upon which articles are written—is harder to find than ever. Let me repeat: journalism as we know it is in freefall.
Which is why it’s just a little frustrating established journalists such as Chuck Todd are acting, for the most part, as if nothing’s wrong and things are a-ok.
For far too long, Todd and other traditional, old-school journalists have failed to realize the threat being posed to the press, especially in terms of the rising threat of misinformation. In a December 2019 interview with Rolling Stone,⁸ Todd seemingly becomes aware of what exactly has been going on, at long last (bold text is the Rolling Stone interviewer, plain text is Todd):
Let me bring you back a little bit. Were you surprised by the consistency that the Trump administration was willing to spread disinformation with Sean Spicer’s initial press briefing when he lied about the crowd size at the inauguration? Were you surprised that the president and other administration officials and their allies just kept it going?
I fully admit, listening to you ask that question now, and me giving you the honest answer of, yeah, I guess I really believed they wouldn’t do this. Just so absurdly naive in hindsight. Donald Trump’s entire life has been spent using misinformation. His entire life. I’ve spent years studying him now on trying to figure out how did this guy even learn politics? Where did he learn?
…So I mean, look, if people want to read my answer to your question, “Boy, that Chuck Todd was hopelessly naive.” Yeah, it looks pretty naive. I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them.
In a moment of peak irony—and as the Rolling Stone article notes—that Toni Morrison quote is actually from Maya Angelou. Go figure.
But let’s circle back to Todd’s words: “it looks pretty naive.” Yes, Chuck. Yes, it does look pretty naive—that it took you nearly three years to realize someone with a habit of bending and ignoring the facts would be harmful to your profession.
By the way, I’m not alone in holding this view of Todd. As New York University professor of journalism Jay Rosen writes in a scathing review:⁹
What to make of this performance [in the Rolling Stone interview]?
It’s not naive of him. It’s malpractice. Chuck Todd’s entire brand is based on the claim that he understands politics. Since 2007 he has been NBC’s political director, which means he has influence over all coverage. He is literally the in-house expert on the subject. You don’t get to claim you are naive about politics when you have these kinds of positions. It would be like a chief risk officer saying, “I didn’t understand the gamble we were taking.” Well, that’s your job.
If you’re not sold on Todd’s shortcomings yet, here’s another quote of his from the same Rolling Stone interview:
I assume that when all this, in the Trump era, and this is to me how I think we in the press will get judged, it will be in about five or six years in the rearview mirror. How did we cover it in the moment? Were we honest in the moment?
It turned out that the previous generation of national reporters missed the story in the moment. I’m not saying they were dishonest in the moment. They were too trusting of their sources. They maybe were too naive. I don’t think it was active disinformation, if you will.
This interview was in December 2019. Nearly three full years after the inauguration of Donald Trump. It’s completely unacceptable that someone like Todd—a journalist supposedly representing the peak of this profession—took that long to realize a basic reality of our current situation.
I hope it becomes a bit more clear why I was (and am) so dissatisfied with Chuck Todd. After all, during that student journalism convention, he said the exact same things he later deemed “naive.” When asked about the future of journalism, he brushed the topic off. If my memory serves me correctly, his thoughts on that were roughly you guys are a bright, young generation. You’ll fix my generation’s wrongdoings. Work hard! Put yourself out there!
No, no, no! No! No!
Again, to be clear: I’m not going after Chuck Todd himself. Despite my criticisms, the man still has done valuable journalistic work, and what I say isn’t meant to be taken personally. However, Todd is emblematic of the entrenched, old-school media profession. I listed some of Todd’s achievements to show that we can’t rely on the current leaders of the journalism industry to define the future of the industry. Any criticism of Todd, by extension, is meant to reflect on this profession as a whole.
So far, we’ve established two critical points: first, that journalism is in trouble due to external factors, and second, that, internally, far too many journalists aren’t acknowledging that journalism is in trouble.
III. The Thin Ink-Black Line
In reading up on police brutality, I encountered two concepts you might be familiar with: that of a “thin blue line” and a “blue wall of silence.” Former FBI agent Phillip Hayden writes in a USA TODAY opinion column:¹⁰
Like most people in law enforcement, I was once a brick in the blue wall of silence.
You’ve probably heard about the thin blue line — the idea that police officers and the laws they’re sworn to uphold are all that stand between order and chaos.
The blue wall of silence is different.
It refers to the unofficial oath of silence within departments. Cops don’t rat on cops. That blue wall is one of many factors that further pushes the widening divide between the world as seen by law enforcement and the world experienced by the citizens whom officers are sworn to protect.
Hayden notes that cops have a strong sense of solidarity—an “us-versus-them” mindset threaded throughout their profession. An article from The Intercept continues:¹¹
The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society — and as the nation has witnessed in recent days, in video after shocking video, this well-armed population, imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty, does not take kindly to those who challenge its authority.
We’ve taken a detour into talking about the “thin blue line” because, in many ways, journalism is no different. For lack of creativity, in a spin-off of “thin blue line,” I’ll call the solidarity of the press the “thin ink-black line.”
Just like how the police form a tight-knit community, so do journalists. One of the first things I learned from a mentor of mine, a professional reporter, was that journalism is all about networking and who you know. Journalists protect each other; they offer each other help in times of need. When somebody posts in a Facebook group asking for help finding sources for an article, somebody else inevitably responds. Journalism can be a stressful, even dangerous job, and only the people doing the reporting can fully understand that.
A disclaimer: everything I’ve listed above is done with good intentions, and I don’t want to take the analogy of a “thin blue line” too far. Obviously, the press is not “well-armed”; the press is also not “imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty” (at least not directly). I fully understand there’s a distinct difference between using solidarity to justify police brutality and using solidarity to boost morale and encourage support of an industry.
However, this solidarity in the media similarly runs the risk of spiraling out of control. As a student journalist, I tend to think of myself as having one foot in the metaphorical door of this “thin ink-black line.” On one hand, I’ve toured professional newsrooms and I’ve been mentored by professional journalists and editors from The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, etc—I’ve been exposed to the culture that permeates throughout the profession. On the other hand, I’m still a student, and I realize that not having a 9-to-5 job as a journalist allows me to judge the press’ coverage as a member of the public.
Yet even so, from my position, I’ve seen just how easy it is to fall into an “us-versus-them” mindset that mirrors the “blue wall of silence.”
Journalism is often described as the “fourth estate” of the government—that is, it acts as a fourth branch of checks and balances. While I appreciate the sentiment behind the idea of a “fourth estate,” I dislike the broader implication: that journalism is a standalone institution separate from the ordinary public.
Especially in the past few years, as journalism has suffered increasingly debilitating attacks, it’s been all too easy to defensively hunker down and aggressively ignore or deflect criticism. It’s been all too easy to view the public as ungrateful or in need of educating. It’s been all too easy to think of journalists as misunderstood individuals doing what’s best for the public, whether the public wants it or not.
Maybe, once upon a time, the nature of that divide between the press and the public might’ve been fine. But now?
There’s no intellectual superiority or “insider knowledge” journalists possess that the general public lacks—at least not when each and every individual has access to social media and other, quicker methods of retrieving information. There’s no more leniency when it comes to screwing up coverage with misinformation or unethical bias; after all, the court of public opinion is very unforgiving. Like it or not, journalists can’t operate on this old, outdated system anymore.
Obviously, not all of this is journalists’ fault; the three factors I listed above that I saw as harmful to journalism were all external factors. But the media industry is absolutely to blame for failing to respond to those factors and for inching ever-closer to an “us-versus-them” mentality that speaks to the widening gap between the press and the rest of society.
Since when have journalists become cut off from the rest of America? Since when have journalists felt that they know better than the public? Since when have journalists blindly dictated their own way forward instead of listening to the people who consume and fund their reporting?
Here’s the bottom line: journalists shouldn’t have self-interests separate from those of the public. If the public is looking for a new form of consuming the media—and they clearly are—what are people like Chuck Todd doing? If the public is consistently rejecting traditional journalism, it’s not the press’ job to drag them, kicking and screaming, back into the 20th century. It’s not the press’ job to claim that they’ve got it all wrong and we know best. It’s the press’ job to adapt; to change; to transform and evolve.
The police have been allowed to hold an “us-versus-them” mentality for far too long, and we’re just now reckoning with that. I don’t want the journalism industry to go to the point where that same reckoning will repeat.
IV. What Next?
If there’s any consolation here, it’s that this isn’t the first time journalism has been subjected to great external pressure and public dissatisfaction.
I recently had the chance to read Al Neuharth’s autobiography; in the 1980s, Neuharth, the founder of USA TODAY, recognized the need for a new type of newspaper. I’ll let him tell the story:¹²
USA TODAY had to be different, in appearance and content. Wrapped in color. Four sections. Everything organized and in a fixed place. Short, easy-to-read stories. Lots of them. Heavy use of graphics and charts. Heavy emphasis on sports, TV, weather. News every day from every state.
…The response from journalists [to USA TODAY] was swift—and predictably negative. They didn’t like the way we had redefined the informational mission of a newspaper. Facts rather than endless prose. Graphics as important as words. They were resisting a new generation of readers—the television generation—as much as the new newspaper.
…The reaction of journalists was amusing to me, but not really meaningful. Obviously we never designed USA TODAY for journalists. We were after readers.
As of June 2020, USA TODAY is still the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States. At the time, the newspaper truly was revolutionary—in how it was designed, in how it was marketed, in how it was distributed. Al Neuharth was right, and his critics have been left behind in the dust.
There’s much to learn from the launch of USA TODAY, which marked a crossroads moment for the journalism industry. Neuharth hit the nail on the head with regard to two things: first, that newspapers at the time were “resisting a new generation of readers.” Second, his acknowledgement that “we never designed USA TODAY for journalists. We were after readers.”
Forty years later, we’re at a similar crossroads. Many of the so-called industry leaders of journalism are still trying to appease each other and are desperately clinging on to a model of reporting with which they are familiar—and which is soon to become extinct.
I refuse to believe that our modern society has completely eschewed the value of factually correct, well-researched media. However, it’s becoming imminently apparent that the system we have right now—newspapers, cable news, carryovers from the 20th century—are wholly insufficient to meet the public’s needs and desires.
There’s no clear path forward. I’ve heard of ideas pitched for community town halls, where local reporters sit down with local residents in order to increase engagement and transparency. I’ve heard of using more technology and code to facilitate storytelling. I’ve heard of ditching reliance on ad revenue and letting subscribers pay for what they want to read (AKA substack, the platform I’m writing on!) All of this brainstorming is in the right direction—but it’s not enough.
There’s no clear path forward, but the press needs to start listening. We (and I write this as a journalist) need to start listening to readers; to subscribers; to citizens. We need to stop widening the divide and remember that journalists, too, are members of the public.
Traditional journalism is dead. Perhaps that’s for the better.
Hey there—we made it through another long, long read! As you might have noticed, I only covered one small aspect of the media industry today. I said very little about bias in the press; next time, we’ll be going over that.
One last request: if you found this content interesting or worthwhile, please consider sharing The Nut Graf with a friend! This really is a fledgling newsletter, and I would appreciate all the help I can get—subscribe at nutgraf.substack.com. As always, thank you for your support :)
¹ https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/gilded-age
² https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house
³ Would I be petty enough to promote my own TEDx talk, especially as a footnote? You bet! Watch it here.
⁵ https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-1-22-17-n710491
⁶ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/media/mcclatchy-bankruptcy.html
⁷ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/europe/trump-fake-news-dictators.html
⁹ https://pressthink.org/2019/12/the-christmas-eve-confessions-of-chuck-todd/
¹¹ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/06/police-brutality-protests-blue-lives-matter/
¹² Confessions of an S.O.B., by Al Neuharth.
The image incorporated into the graphic at the top of this post, “Newspapers B&W (5)” by Jon S, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.