Yes, this is another post about my new essay at the Religion & Liberty journal published by the Acton Institute. The headline: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.”
Part of me wants to apologize for yet another GetReligion look at this topic. But I’m not going to do that, for at least three reasons.
(1) For me, it’s most important thing I’ve written about journalism since my 1983 essay for The Quill — “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets,” which helped spark a national debate about religion-news coverage, including a Los Angeles Times series by the late, great media-beat specialist David Shaw.
(2) It demonstrates (think “technology shapes content”) that Internet culture and commerce have either killed the American Model of the Press or are poised to do so. That’s hard for me to say, since I have spent my career defending old-school American journalism from enemies on the right and, now, the illiberal left.
(3) The Acton piece (there’s no way we could have planned this) came out just as several other important articles raised similar issues about journalism’s future and the role of niche/advocacy journalism in splintering American public discourse.
Such as? Click here for a recent GetReligion podcast-post that includes discussion of “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust,” by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. Also, see this new Bret Stephens op-ed in the New York Times: “How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility.”
As a result, GetReligion readers will not be surprised that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast focused on these themes (CLICK HERE to tune that in).
The key: My essay is not another hot-take on media bias and religion-news coverage. While I remain concerned about issues of balance, accuracy and fairness in journalism, the bottom line is the bottom line — economic and tech issues have created a business model (on left and right) that undercuts old-school journalism. The following is long, but essential. Our new debates about American journalism have:
… moved beyond the heated media-bias wars in recent decades. The ground under American journalism is moving and that affects all of American life, especially First Amendment issues tied to free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty.
This earthquake is linked to the wave of technological innovations that have forced all kinds of companies, including news organizations, to change their products in an attempt to survive in the digital age. The key is a process familiar to anyone who has surfed the internet. The goal is to convince users to click “like,” “forward,” “tweet,” “post,” or, ultimately, to pay money to receive more content of this kind.
This preaching-to-the-choir business model works with cute kittens and heroic dogs. It works with emotional videos of soldiers returning home and surprising their loved ones, as well as those of rainbow-haired teachers preaching to elementary school students about gender.
This sequence works—on different audiences—with “news” about the verbal and physical stumbles of President Joe Biden or election-denying sermons by former President Trump. It works with reports about environmental apocalypse or the potential for nuclear war in Ukraine. It works when federal agents arrest grandparents protesting at abortion clinics, as well as when there are few, if any, arrests in cases involving activists vandalizing pro-life churches or fire-bombing crisis-pregnancy centers. It works when some churches close, while others stay open, during a global pandemic. It works when some parents choose to take radical actions in response to rapid gender dysphoria symptoms in their children, while others risk clashes with state authorities while opposing treatments of this kind.
These changes provide some of the digital DNA in conflicts that are tearing America apart. Politicians, parents, pastors, and plenty of other people are struggling to understand what is happening in their lives while turning to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Parler, BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social. And there are darker corners of this world, such as 4chan and the “Dark Web.” And never forget this crucial journalism reality: Opinion writing is cheap, while hard-news content is expensive.
There is plenty of money to be made, but one reality looms over those trying to stay in business—researchers believe that two-thirds of ad dollars in the American marketplace head straight to Big Tech powerhouses such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Try operating an ordinary local or national newsroom when competing with that.
Want to see another hint at what I am talking about?
GetReligion readers are probably aware that I have opposed the political career of Donald Trump from Day 1 (and that is still my stance). This is not the same thing, however, as arguing that the concerns and fears of Americans who voted — enthusiastically or reluctantly — for Trump do not deserve fair-minded coverage from elite newsrooms.
To my shock, the deep-blue-culture Columbia Journalism Review has just published a devastating four-part series — by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, who won a Pulitzer Prize during his New York Times tenure — with this overarching headline: “The press versus the president.” The Big Idea is that elite journalists, while seeking the scalp of Trump as a candidate and president, took shortcuts leading to flawed, twisted, shallow coverage that helped destroy public trust in the mainstream press.
In the second feature in this series, Gerth underlines a key element of this tragedy — biased coverage of Trump and his supporters was, and currently still is, Just. Good. Business. Here is a key passage, focusing on criticism from Trump-world of news and commentary that many saw:
… as a “Deep State” out to get the president. In the days after Trump’s declaration, the Times surveyed its new digital subscribers, millions of whom flocked to the paper during his presidency, to better understand their motivations: the administration’s “vilification of the press,” one subscriber replied, in a typical response, according to “New Digital Subscribers Survey” data provided to me by a Times staffer.
Trump would often call the Times “failing,” including the day after the controversial story about Russia-Trump ties, but in fact the soaring digital-subscriber base throughout his presidency offset the steady fall in revenue from print subscribers and advertising.
That “soaring digital-subscriber base” knew that it wanted, one way or another, in the news that it paid to receive. As Woody Allen would say, “The heart wants what it wants.”
It was easy to see this new economic reality on Twitter, which was the cultural left’s most beloved corner (pre-libertarian Elon Musk) of cyberspace. In my Religion & Liberty piece, I noted:
This was the reality that former Times editorial-page editor Bari Weiss addressed in her much-discussed resignation letter in 2020, after she defended an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing that National Guard troops could be used to protect urban neighborhoods threatened by late-night rioters claiming to be part of the Black Lives Matters movement.
“A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else,” wrote Weiss, whose old-school First Amendment liberalism became heresy in the newsroom. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”
In this environment an ancient question has become relevant: What is truth?
I’ll give Jeff Gerth the last word (for now).
This is a poignant chunk of the afterword that he wrote for “The press versus the president.” Why is he speaking out at this moment?
My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences. ...
During this time, when the media is under extraordinary attack and widely distrusted, a transparent, unbiased, and accountable media is more needed than ever. It’s one of a journalist’s best tools to distinguish themselves from all the misinformation, gossip, and rumor that proliferates on the Web and then gets legitimized on occasion by politicians of all stripes, including Trump.
Most Americans (60 percent) say they want unbiased news sources. Yet 86 percent think the media is biased. The consequences of this mismatch are all too obvious: 83 percent of the audience for Fox News leans Republican while 91 percent of the readers of the New York Times lean Democratic.
Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me of her concerns about news silos.
“If you are only getting your news from one source, you are getting a skewed view,” which, she said, “increases polarization” and “crowds out the room for compromise, because people base their views on these siloed news sources.” She added: “People don’t have time to deal with nuance, so they settle on a position and everything else tends to become unacceptable.”
Walter Lippmann wrote about these dangers in his 1920 book Liberty and the News. Lippmann worried then that when journalists “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.”
Let us attend. Or is it already too late?
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.