Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history

Contemplating the purpose of the press after the Trump revolution.

“The Empire Destroys, The Republic Pays,” Jean-Louis Forain, c. 1918. (National Gallery of Art)

A single election can be an accident: Maybe the economic fundamentals were bad, the opposing party ran a weak candidate, a few thousand votes in a swing state swung a weird direction, the FBI announces it’s investigating your emails right before everybody starts voting. These things happen. History is built on contingencies, sometimes made by the millimeters of a deranged assassin’s bullet.

The 2024 election ended, for all time, any argument that Donald Trump is a political accident. His thunderous reelection to the presidency Tuesday night was the ratification of a revolution whose scope has yet to come into focus. Many such cases, as they say: “In all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinions, when it repeats itself,” Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of History. “Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.” No messy recount fights, dickering judges, or philosophical debates about the Electoral College this time. Last night voters graciously gave us democratic clarity to see where America stands. The people really want this, and now they’ll get it good and hard.

A few observations about media and journalism and its role in this election:

• America’s information economy is rotten from top to bottom, starting with the digital infrastructure that stands between quality journalism and the public. If you are going to tell me that the biggest problems in journalism are hedge funds and private equity destroying local news, I am going to tell you to your face that you fundamentally do not understand the epically bigger and more corrosive story happening on your own iPhone. The dominant social media platform form for news, Twitter, was purchased and turned into a right-wing mobilization engine for an emotionally unstable federal contractor. Meta, under Mark Zuckerberg, has driven its monopolistic social media platforms as far away from hard news as possible, to the point of explicit hostility. I am genuinely unsure if Google cares whether we live in a democracy or not as long as the feds let them keep spamming AI slop about glue pizza to keep OpenAI away from its Search monopoly. TikTok is a casino whose amazing success at circulating mindless content may come at the expense of “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes,” according to one of its own executives. These are gigantic companies with far larger consumer audiences than any traditional media company that was covering the election, and some of these platforms are taking on the characteristics of becoming publishers themselves in terms of shaping content decisions and producing content of their own via AI. There are too many billionaires and CEOs in charge of too few information chokepoints, which are powered by too much surveillance over too many users who have too few viable alternatives. Given that America is apparently going to be perfectly happy to elect strongman federal executives from here on out, pursuing decentralization and good-old-fashioned competition in the Brandeisian vein, rather than a corporatist monopolization and fusion with potentially fashy federal regulators, seems to be the democratically healthier path forward.

• The question of whether the leaders of legacy mainstream media outlets failed to meet the moment on a moral level — as many did — is totally separate from whether those outlets can even make much of a practical difference anymore at the electoral level. We operate in an increasingly postliterate media economy my friends, and that trend only moves in one direction from here on out. The New York Times probably has more readers, more journalists and arguably less relevance than ever when it comes to informing voters about which presidential candidate to pick. A very small minority of voters may ever encounter the carefully prepared written material that many professional journalists produce at any newsroom anywhere. I see no empirical evidence whatsoever that more tart CNN headlines were going to change voters’ minds about Trump, perhaps the single most investigated politician in human history. Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s bizarre and suspicious manipulations of their editorial boards was certainly a nasty reminder about the downfalls putting important newsrooms in the hands of billionaires with weird brains and (vastly larger) economic exposure to the federal government. But what most journalists in these newsrooms agree on is that the moral and procedural dimensions of these controversies was probably totally unrelated to whether those endorsements would have had any electoral significance whatsoever. If counterpersuasion of strongman-curious indies is what you care about, go on Rogan.

• Support media unionization. The people in charge are unreliable. See above.

• This was a death knell for the cause of the journalistic public option at the federal level, possibly for good. Public media is a public good in social democracies where civic life is marked by a degree of public-spiritedness. But media policy advocates in the U.S. now need to contemplate the very implications of media Orbánization, in which a vindictive ruling party can potentially wield federal subsidies, contracts and advertising dollars to prop up and support consolidation by crony media while punishing dissenting media. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting may soon be fighting for its life, with NPR and PBS not just facing defunding but threats to their noncommercial legal statuses. Defense at the federal level and federalism at the state and local levels in media policy is our near future, though the same risks of cronyism remain for local governments, where corrupt media policy is more likely to go uncovered.

• If you want a press that will serve as a bulwark against autocracy, shove money at anything that produces high-quality professional investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has Baumol’s cost disease: It’s incredibly costly and only gets more expensive every year. It’s long past time to dramatically boost funding of it everywhere. In the philanthrophic journalism world (which most people don’t know a thing about, but it’s going to matter more soon), you’ll hear a lot about “community information needs” not getting filled as news deserts simultaneously spread across the U.S. Some of this is basically code for funding stuff that’s more like community organizing or nonprofit PR since some progressive media policy people have given up on trying to solve the problems of essentially insolvent professional journalism. Well, here’s a brand-new problem: One of the most regular and dependable sources of critical civic information are federal agencies that now stand on the precipice of getting gutted by an archconservative administration that hates regulations on business and is sharpening its knives. Is the purpose of journalism philanthropy to act as handmaiden to the neoliberalization of public information as the Trump administration dismantles the administrative state? What is the civic endgame, here? Here is the fatal flaw in the regimes of most personalist strongmen around the world: They are absolutely rife with corruption, whether it’s stuffing the boss’ pockets or those of their plutocrat enablers and toadies. David Farenthold won a rare campaign Pulitzer in 2017 by revealing the Trump Foundation was a scam; NYT and WaPo in 2018 for covering the administration’s creepy coziness with a meddling Russia; NYT in 2019 for covering Trump the tax-dodger. This sort of investigative work fundamentally can’t be taken over or made all that much more cost-effective or productive by AI, but the good stuff tends to turn into court cases, legislative hearings, campaigns, etc. This work shouldn’t be funded out of ideological motivation, though I guess that’s bound to happen. Investigative journalism should be funded because the gap between how stuff is supposed to work and how stuff actually works is always wide with most unwatched governments and is only bound to get wider with Trump.

• Support passing the PRESS Act in the lame duck. For similar reasons, I don’t think a Trump administration, or any administration for that matter, should be in the business of jailing investigative journalists for not revealing their sources. Call your congressperson and the White House.

In the meantime, it’s time for contemplation.