Journalism's biggest problems are now what we don't control

Journalists have a democracy problem, in addition to all our other problems.

“Khokoi in a Storm,” artist unknown, c. 1700 to 1730 (Library of Congress)

This post is the third in a series I’ve written since the Nov. 5 election about what’s wrong with journalism, starting with “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history” and “Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy.” Each of these essays have been building toward a central concept, derived from my own experiences as a longtime reporter, guild president, journalism policy advocate, and student of democracy promotion in both the political and economic arenas.

Here’s the issue: Most of the news industry’s intellectual, scholarly, managerial and labor infrastructure is focused on the things we could control — hiring better or different editors and journalists, covering the stakes of elections and not the odds, organizing unions and work stoppages against especially predatory or buffoonish newsroom operators, etc.

Whether positive change happens inside whatever news organization you’re thinking about is often a matter of power, circumstance, volition, and civic fortitude (or the lack thereof). The contingent outcome of these struggles is the foundation and focus of most contemporary media criticism.

Here’s my dissent: Journalism’s biggest problems are the things journalists can’t control. At least not right now.

My first couple of posts focused on one of the core market imbalances in the rapidly deteriorating information ecosystem in the time of Big Tech: Technological advances almost always make the production of bullshit cheaper, while Baumol’s cost disease keeps making the production of high-quality reporting more expensive. The result of which being “a growing consumer alienation from the actual sources of information, a return to a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues who promise simplicity in an increasingly complex world,” as I put it in a previous essay.

Today I’ll keep pulling out the lens, this time to focus on journalism’s democracy problems and the political and socioeconomic forces that put us in a vulnerable position amid the global rise of national conservatism:

Sometimes it isn’t the economy, stupid: Around the world, the rise of the illiberal strongmen who undermine independent media is less tied to economic reality than to the public perceptions of national crises existing under weak incumbents. A common theory of democratic backsliding is that it happens in countries experiencing economic setbacks or undergoing extreme wealth inequality — in other words, places where liberal democracy didn’t deliver the goods. But in a July article in the Journal of Democracy, Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett, studying 12 countries identified as democratic backsliders (Bangladesh, Brazil, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States), found some counterintuitive results: Growth was stable and economic inequality and poverty levels had been trending downward in most of the countries before they elected illiberal strongmen. “Perceptions rather than the realities of performance tend to matter most,” the authors wrote. “Underlining this reality, charismatic electoral challengers in recent years have often demonstrated notable skill in negatively shaping citizen perceptions about the incumbent’s performance, a phenomenon perhaps fueled by increasingly fast-moving and manipulable media environments.” Voters also frequently didn’t explicitly vote for democratic erosion, rather than change more broadly. Or as put by Larry M. Bartels, democracy erodes from the top.

One reason it’s gotten easier for autocrats to demonize journalists: Around the world, many professional journalists belong to the same professional-managerial class that right-wing parties are often explicitly rebelling against. Since World War II, voters in many Western democracies, including the U.S., have realigned in such a way that educational attainment is more associated with the egalitarian parties, while wealth has been more associated with conservative and right-wing alignment: “This separation between a ‘Merchant right’ and a ‘Brahmin left’ is visible in nearly all Western democracies, despite their major political, historical, and institutional differences,” according to a 2022 study by scholars including the French economist Thomas Piketty. Around the world, your level of education is now strongly correlated with whether you belong to a party with “positive emphases of law and order, national way of life, and traditional morality, and to negative mentions of multiculturalism,” or to a party with “positive emphases of culture, anti-growth economy, freedom and human rights, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.”

In the U.S., that means the core demographic makeup of American journalists now overlaps with the core demographic of the modern Democratic Party. My personal taxonomy of the otherwise incoherent class divides in American politics is that the Democratic Party is the coalition of public capitalism: the professional-managerial class, mainline Wall Streeters, and unions — all the old participants in the New Deal settlement between labor, corporations and regulators in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Republicans are the party of family capitalism: patrimonial plutocrats like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, small family business owners, and the blue-collar workers who see themselves as self-employed entrepreneurs in waiting, likelier to see their wealthy fellow-travelers as patrons than oppressors. Over the same period of global postwar education realignment described by Piketty and co., professional journalism in the U.S. became an increasingly credentialed profession often explicitly requiring college degrees.

The prevailing ethics of professional journalism tend toward liberal universalism, which nationalist conservative movements tend to see as a radical project that discriminates against their own supporters. Professional journalism, like liberalism itself, has had an arc of history that bends slowly toward greater inclusion and recognition: less inflammatory treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, more inclusive language in the AP Stylebook, more contextual and less sensational coverage of crime and immigration, more representative newsrooms that look more like the communities we cover, etc. The most famous set of ethical guidelines in the U.S., the nonbinding code of ethics adopted by Society of Professional Journalists, coaches journalists to "give voice to the voiceless” and to “boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear.” This drive toward universalism — which has been happening at corporate workplaces more broadly, undergirded by U.S. nondiscrimination law — is the same reason why mainstream legacy media institutions are still so sensitive to criticisms from conservatives who say their own opinions, perspectives, communities and leaders are not being fairly covered. For example, conservative activist and former journalist Christopher Rufo sees this work instead as the project of 1960 radicals who “brought their movement out of the streets and into the universities, schools, newsrooms, and bureaucracies. They developed intricate theories along the lines of culture, race, and identity, and silently rooted them into the entire range of America’s knowledge-making institutions.”

The nationalist conservative rejection of journalistic universalism gets expressed most acutely in the global right’s opposition to — or subversion of — public media. Hungary’s illiberal Viktor Orbán, whose ruling Fidesz party consolidated the private media sector and turned the country’s public media into a “propaganda factory,” laid it out plainly for American CPAC attendees in Budapest in 2022: “Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” he said. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.” Project 2025’s proposal to gut Congress’ already paltry funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — so that “leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting” — is just the American iteration of a global right-wing phenomenon. Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who is poised to topple Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in the next election, “can’t wait to defund the CBC.” Britain’s Tories, before they were recently demolished by Labour, had threatened to eliminate the BBC’s critical license-fee funding entirely under premier Boris Johnson, who’d trashed the venerable institution as the “Brexit-Bashing Corporation.” In less consolidated democracies, the picture has been even grimmer, with nationalists less interested in the libertarian defunding efforts than public media’s conversion into state media oriented toward protecting single-party rule. Since rising to power in 2015, Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party had turned the public broadcaster, TVP, into a propaganda arm that “repeated government talking points and demonized the opposition, turning the sedate channel into something akin to a taxpayer-funded Fox News”; right-wing figures conducted sit-ins in TVP offices to resist normalization after the party’s defeat by Donald Tusk.

Nonetheless, your local newspaper has been more likely to get killed by capitalism than by partisanship. Community wealth saves local newsrooms, community poverty finishes them off. Before I have to slap any liberal philanthropists’ hands, no, you’re probably not going to manufacture more Democrats if you fund more local media. Abby Youran Qin’s recent study, “Where Is Local News Dying Off?: Mechanisms Behind the Formation of Local News Deserts in the United States,” found that amid the sectoral economic failure of local journalism, the partisan alignment of a local community “does not play a role in newspaper preservation,” she wrote. “Economic growth, on the contrary, is positively associated with preservation of local newspapers. … Our intuition that blue places tend to have healthier information ecologies potentially results from the availability bias created by the handful of big metropoles such as Chicago, San Diego, and New York. In such places, both abundance of local news and liberal political leanings are likely driven by population size and economic conditions.”

Journalists are going to have to accept that we won’t know what all this means yet. But know this: Truth is the only option. The headline of the first post of this series was a reference to one of my favorite passages by my favorite philosopher, Hegel, who was talking about the experience of watching liberal and universalist ideals get smashed against the rocks over and over again: the slaughter-bench of history. For thinkers and writers, journalists and philosophers, it’s easier to report on events as they unfold. Understanding only really happens once an era is over.

Well, it’s true: Sometimes movements get depleted and the ideas wear out, stripped to uselessness like old screws. I’ve covered a few of them as a reporter. Fatigue rolls in, a stubborn fog. Apathy, when it arrives, is a movement with beige armbands. Although societies are perfectly capable of living within a lie — many have — the Czech writer and politician Vaclav Havel’s observation was that change starts with the individual effort to “live within the truth.” This is the path of the scientist, the philosopher, the dissident. Among bullshitters, be an honest broker.

And there be bullshit. Look around. Havel thought that living among immense bullshit creates a “profound crisis of human identity,” in which the person “who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person.”

But a person living within the truth as a form of revolt…

…is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility. In other words, it is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self-serving: the risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not.

I like to think of it as William S. Burroughs once told a struggling Patti Smith: Keep your name clean.