News is just true information about the world. The act of producing that information—investigating it, uncovering it, observing it, reporting it, analyzing it, considering it, drawing conclusions from it—is journalism. There is and will always be a demand for journalism for the same reason that there is a demand for information itself. In order to live, in order to do stuff, you need to know stuff.
The basic activity of finding out and publishing true things has always sat uneasily in the context of business. Separate and apart from journalism is a business that we will call Media, which makes money by attracting audiences. These audiences pay money to see the media, and they also pay attention, which the media companies sell to others.
Media is a truth-agnostic business. If you can get an audience by publishing true information about the world, great. If you can get an audience by publishing fairy tales, fiction, or propaganda, also great. Journalism is one sliver of the media business, and not the most lucrative one.
From the perspective of journalists and their audiences, protecting the integrity of the news is very important. From the perspective of the media business, it is only important to the extent that it makes money. And sitting above the media business is a layer that we can call Powerful Interests, for whom the media business itself is only important to the extent that it can be used to influence people in service of the powerful interests. For those who make up this top layer of society, the integrity of news—the truth of it—can be a liability.
Thus the news, which is a social good that must exist in order to have any semblance of a healthy and functional society, is at all times at risk of being squashed, polluted, manipulated, or wiped out by various forces. The Founding Fathers said a lot of nice things about the importance of journalism, and they even made a nice First Amendment to protect it, but in practice, history has shown us that these protections constantly waver and sometimes break under the pressure of those who want to fuck with journalism to make money, or fuck with journalism to trick people.
Journalists, as a group, have many flaws. Underpaid, bad dressers, sleep-deprived, obsessive, often surprisingly antisocial. But they do want to do real journalism. It’s fine to think of that as their only good characteristic. The general public generally comprehends that the media business is torn by competing demands and can therefore be untrustworthy, but they often assume that journalists themselves are the root of the problem. No. Their bosses and their bosses’ bosses are the problem. The journalists would love to have a stable place to make a living wage writing true things. Alas. That is hard to find. A career in journalism requires either great luck or nonstop nimbleness, to leap to any place that is temporarily well funded and doing quality work, before it runs out of money or is broken by some dumb or evil person bent on using it for their own ends.
“Ready for some football” was the title of an editorial published in the prestigious Washington Post on Sunday. “Football blends grit and grace. The elegance of a perfect spiral. The strategy of a two-minute drill. The guts of going for it on fourth down,” the editorial said, along with other equally asinine things. Let me tell you why I was alarmed by this bit of fluff. The Washington Post is one of the most respected publications in America. Evil billionaire Jeff Bezos has owned it for more than a decade, and mostly left it alone. But with Trump’s ascent, he has said that he wants to make the paper into a mouthpiece for his own political interests, which has already caused an exodus of many though not most of the paper’s journalists. This “Football is Fun” editorial, this kindergarten-level piece of shit that would cause a high school newspaper editor to blush at its utter inanity, is an indicator that the editorial board of the paper has already sunk to USA Today depths of obsequiousness to conventional wisdom, and may be headed even lower. It matters because the Washington Post of a few years ago, though it published lots of awful editorials, would not have published that. The real Washington Post would have been embarrassed to do so. The fact that the editorial page has reached this level of eye-glazed willingness to toss red meat to the yokels is a bad sign. It indicates to me an attitude among the paper’s top editors that the only thing that really matters is running a handful of pro-business things to show to Jeff each month, and as for the rest of it, who cares?
CBS News is also a prestigious news organization with a rich history. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and all that. Not any more. With stunning swiftness, the network was bought by the son of the second-richest person in America, and, in order to win the Trump administration’s blessing for the deal, the kid has forced the network’s news division into a humiliating series of shit-eating, unjournalistic actions that have undermined all of its credibility. They paid Trump $16 million to settle a bullshit lawsuit, as a bribe; they have announced they will not edit(!) interviews with lawmakers, to forestall whining from administration liars; they are hiring, haha, Bari Weiss to, I don’t know, suggest dreary mediocre right wing news ideas; and they are installing a right wing think tank guy as ombudsman(???). I do not want to exaggerate here, but: CBS News has, in a matter of months, put itself on par with Fox News on the Journalism-to-Propaganda scale of credibility.
The speed with which both of these robust news organizations have had their reputations sacrificed on the altar of strongman politics is shocking. Thousands and thousands of journalists spent decades, entire generations of careers, painstakingly doing the work that built the reputations of those companies. And two billionaires have bought them and thrown those reputations in the trash in order to protect their own unrelated business interests. Kind of a shit thing to watch! There are still many fine journalists at both of these organizations. But they are on borrowed time now.
Even when plutocrats or other assorted bootlickers sell out the credibility of existing publications, however, the underlying demand for news does not disappear. The same powerful people who are destroying these organizations actually want high quality information themselves. (This is why the Wall Street Journal has an excellent news section, even though its editorial page is insane. People are moving money based on that news. It has to be correct.) Every time one news publication is broken by billionaires, an opportunity opens for another to take its place. The people who run the world—and millions more of us who don’t—need and want journalism, every day. The need for it is as ineradicable as its actual operation is fragile.
One way to think about Donald Trump’s chaotic political career is “What happens when one of the people who is supposed to be reading the real news instead only pays attention to the bullshit propaganda news for idiots.” Hey man, you’re not supposed to be watching Fox News! That’s for the rubes! Wait, don’t make a policy based on that! Ahhhhh!!
Like other journalists, I think often about how to Make Journalism Exist. The real answer to this is “Public funding of journalism, because it is a social good and should not be subject to the harmful predations of capital.” But you could also say that about health care, and neither of those things are likely to get fixed soon. So, how else?
For now, the best path forward, I think, is: For people to pay for journalism. This sounds simple, yes. But for decades, news was subsidized by advertising, and that model was broken by big tech platforms, and tons of journalists got laid off, and that is why me and many of my colleagues are out there starting our own publications. For readers, it is as if you grew up your entire life being able to get a nice healthy meal for a nickel. And then suddenly, you can only get Doritos for a nickel, and the healthy meal costs a normal price. Many people will simply eat the Doritos. Cheap! But not not healthy. It will take a while to convince people to make room in their budgets for the healthy food. “Argh, I hate paying for this, it used to be so cheap!” Yes. I feel your pain. It’s worth it, though. Otherwise you’re just eating Doritos all day. Or, you know, watching Fox News and Tik Tok.
Not the most subtle metaphor, I know. The point is that if we all get used to making journalism a small part of our normal life budgets, there will be a pool of money that can fund all types of quality publications. Society needs that. In the same way that we all pay for Netflix and movies and new shoes and restaurant meals, let’s pay for a few good publications that we like to read. Multiply that by everyone, and you have something approaching a new workable economic model for journalism.
I have been running this publication, How Things Work, for more than two years. A happy fact I will tell you is this: If just ten percent of the people who subscribe to this publication choose to pay for it, this whole place should be sustainable indefinitely. That’s it. All I really want is the ten percent of you who have disposable income, for whom paying is not a burden, to chip in and become a paid subscriber, and this entire enterprise works. That math, to me, should not be insurmountable. It indicates to me that direct reader funding of a whole universe of good new publications is possible.
Currently, less than 7% of readers here are paid. If you would like to help me hit that ten percent mark, my friends, now would be a great time to take a second to become a paid subscriber. (“Hamilton, is it your birthday this weekend?” Why yes it is. Thank you.) I, of course, want to survive and thrive in this industry, like all of my hungry peers. But I also want to encourage you to get in the habit of paying for, if not my publication, then at least a few other publications that you like and want to exist. Let’s do it! I want to read the truth! Billionaire fuckos aren’t going to serve that up to us. We have to make it happen with our own dollars. Then we can be free to write about how we should confiscate their money.
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Related reading: It’s Not Looking Great; Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way; Free Advice for Rich Idiots Who Have Some Bright Ideas About Media Ventures; The Utopian Future Scenario of Media.
You can also buy a How Things Work t-shirt. It looks great. You can also buy my book, “The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.” Fun to read. You can also come see me speak in Atlanta or New York City this month. If you’d like to invite me to speak to your group about labor, inequality, media, or class war, email me.
Lots of fucked up shit happening in the world. In addition to supporting journalism, you can unionize your workplace, join DSA, plug into an upcoming protest in your area, give to a worthy charity, or just relentlessly mock ICE agents in the streets. All these things make ya feel good.
this is the line that pushed me to paid subscriber - This “Football is Fun” editorial, this kindergarten-level piece of shit that would cause a high school newspaper editor to blush at its utter inanity, is an indicator that the editorial board of the paper has already sunk to USA Today depths of obsequiousness to conventional wisdom, and may be headed even lower
(should've done it sooner - the irony isn't lost on me)
The "Football is Fun!!" dross makes a little more sense when you consider that another venture of Bezos' is the sole televisor of Thursday Night Football. It's a crass bit of cross promotion masquerading as journalism. And that obviously makes it worse than if it were just some kindergarten-level fluff tossed off by the WaPo editorial board.
Great piece, as always, Hamilton.