It's Not Looking Great
The slow assassination of the free press.
I worked for a media outlet that was robbed of its credibility once. It was, at one time, called Gawker Media. It was successful because of its almost deranged commitment to editorial freedom. The company allowed writers to say anything they wanted (as long as it was true), which attracted good writers, which spawned good publications, which attracted devoted readers, which allowed the company to make money. Its social value and its economic value were both derived from its commitment to letting its journalists speak their minds.
Then, in just a few short years, the company was gutted and left as a hollow shell of itself. This did not happen because Hulk Hogan won a $140 million lawsuit that bankrupted the company; that was just the precipitating event. Gawker Media, which had always been independently owned, was sold to Univision, and then sold again to a private equity firm. Univision cared a little bit about editorial credibility, and the private equity firm cared not at all. They larded down all of the sites with ads to the point of unreadability; they shut down the left wing political site where I was working and laid us all off; they tried to tell my colleagues at Deadspin what they could and couldn’t write about, causing the entire staff to quit and reassemble elsewhere; and they incompetently meddled in the editorial operations of the company enough to cause almost all of the longtime writers to drift away. They were left with the brand names, but none of what had made Gawker Media successful or worth reading.
The private equity goons did not eviscerate the company because of their political beliefs. They did it because they only valued making money. This is the standard incentive in most industries, but in journalism, it has the effect of turning a publication into shit. Journalism is not a business that responds well to the usual American capitalist imperative to treat your customers as victims to be tricked and sucked dry. The overall health of the free press is therefore a handy barometer to tell how the balance of power between humanism and cutthroat capitalism stands at any given moment in history.
Right now, that balance is tilting in the bad direction. In the past few months, the billionaire owners of both the LA Times and the Washington Post quashed anti-Trump presidential endorsements. In LA, Patrick Soon-Shiong has made it clear he intends to meddle in, at least, the opinion section to make it more right wing. Jeff Bezos must be a bit more circumspect with the Washington Post because of its institutional heft, but it is equally clear that he has concluded that nothing about his newspaper is worth pissing off Trump, who could retaliate against Bezos’ other, real business. Yesterday the Post’s longtime editorial cartoonist Ana Telnaes resigned after a cartoon mocking Bezos and other billionaires was killed by her editor. The editor, David Shipley, claimed the cartoon was just too repetitive, but Telnaes, who has been at the paper long enough to know, said it was the first time in her career that she’d had a piece rejected “because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.”
We’re not really on the slippery slope at this point. We’re sliding. The only choice is when to jump off. What Telnaes did was heroic. Most journalists, regular people who need jobs to live, would (for good reason) think long and hard about quitting their jobs when they are unlikely to be able to land a comparable one. The important takeaway here, though, is: This is how it happens. This is how nations decline. You don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt strongman states where everything is kind of a scam and everyone is hustling to please the gangster in charge. That, my friends, is the path we are on here.
America’s basic problem is that we have an economic system that concentrates great wealth in few hands and we have a political system in which money is allowed to buy political power in a straightforward way and now, on top of that, we have a President who fully embraces—who lives for—the opportunity to make the world bow to him by exploiting those systems. It’s a bit surreal watching this all unfold right in front of us. This is the script of imperial downfall, of a mighty nation that has been teeing itself up to crumble by having no moral scruples finally jumping onto the garbage chute with both feet. Watching all of the highly respected CEOs of America’s most powerful and respectable and, according to a widespread characterization, “liberal” companies donate millions of dollars to the Trump inauguration, unalloyed bribes paid for political protection, is just—it’s not subtle. Detecting the grand direction of America has never required less insight. I mean, 40 years ago, looking at Carter and Reagan deregulate industries and cut taxes, watching union power slowly decline, watching the public’s embrace of celebrity over substance, if you looked ahead and said, “Hey, over the next few decades, this is really going to eat away our shared prosperity and cause an inequality crisis that will ultimately obliterate the very legitimacy of America’s leading institutions”—well, that would be a canny call. That would require some real analytical foresight. But analyzing what is happening right now requires nothing but the ability to describe events accurately without succumbing to delusion. We have a dozen people in this country who are worth more than $100 billion each and the richest one of all has teamed up with a gutter con man to buy the White House and now everyone who does not kiss the ring will be targeted for retaliation. This is the final form of unregulated capitalism, where fantastically rich and often childlike titans run the world’s most powerful nation for their own pleasure, and what was once thought of as “civil society” cowers in the corner in an effort to avoid provoking the beast. Here we are! Enjoy this spectacle! The past half century has been leading up to this! If you ever fantasized about recreating the “riding the bomb” scene from Dr. Strangelove, this is as close as you are going to get.
America built a system in which the free press—which is not a part of the government—plays the role of referee in our politics and society. Maybe that was a flawed system, but all the other options are flawed in their own ways too. The right wing has been steadily working to undermine public belief in the press since at least the Nixon era, and Trump is reaping the benefits of all of that undermining. The press itself, which has historically been owned by rich people who treated it as at best a business and at worst a political weapon, is not particularly admirable on an institutional level. But on an individual level, it is, because it is full of thousands and thousands of editors and reporters and cartoonists who, despite all the hollering to the contrary, take very seriously the mission to Tell The Truth In Service of the Public Good. That’s what makes the press so sanctimonious! And sanctimony, we will all soon learn, is much preferable to scams.
There were many great journalists at Gawker Media, just like there are many great journalists at the LA Times and the Washington Post. But all of those journalists are like sailors on a ship. The strongman system that we are heading into does not have to pick off each individual journalist; it only has to sink the ships. It does not have to go after each crusading journalist. It only has to break the credibility of the journalistic institutions. Once you get the owners of the publications to equivocate, to give up on that economically irrational commitment to pure editorial freedom, you can poison the public’s faith that what they are reading will be, at least most of the time, an honest effort at the truth. Once the readers lose that faith, the journalism loses its power. The politicians’ job is done. They have neutralized the referees.
Even though I have spent years writing about all the ways that the mainstream press has failed and all the reasons why the New York Times sucks, I retain my sentimentality about the press. Where else, in this scam-ridden country, can you bring down the rich and powerful and corrupt with nothing but words? Journalism, for all the flaws in the way it is practiced, is a great thing. To see high quality publications bought and broken by rich people is like watching a drunk hedge fund dickhead throwing up on a Picasso that he hung in his yacht. It’s just a fucking shame. As you watch this all accelerate over the next four years, just remember that the slow decline of the public’s belief in journalism was not an accident. It was an assassination. I hope we all make it out the other side.
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Related reading: Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; Your Opinions Can Be Bad But You Still Have to Tell the Truth; Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way; Incuriosity, Inc. I spent a couple of years writing about the Washington Post under Bezos for the Columbia Journalism Review—you can find all those pieces here.
This is where I should say, “you can’t trust the Washington Post, so subscribe to How Thing Work, instead!” The truth is that the little death by a thousand cuts of the “mainstream media” is not something to be gloated over. It is being carried out by rich and powerful people who are not journalists, and a huge amount of valuable journalism will be its casualty. I can imagine a scenario in which the scattered independent media of today coalesces into a new and improved mainstream media of tomorrow, but that is an uncertainty that will require a lot of time and money and good fortune. Fingers crossed, America! For now, I can say in good conscience that if you read a publication and you find it worthwhile, you should support it, or it will go away, and that is only going to become more true as we enter Trump Era Part 2. How Things Work is 100% funded by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. That’s how I am able to do this, and to keep it paywall-free so anyone anywhere can read it, regardless of income. If that’s something you’d like to support, take a second to become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s not too expensive. I appreciate you all, my friends. We will never stop hollering.
Oh, no. It’s not just journalism. Private equity is America’s great enshittification engine. Everything it touches withers and dies, syphoning the last valuable remains back to the parasitic host.
“To see high quality publications bought and broken by rich people is like watching a drunk hedge fund dickhead throwing up on a Picasso that he hung in his yacht. It’s just a fucking shame. “
Brilliant