The year 2024 began with grim news for the news. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 staffers in January, triggering doomsday conclusions about journalism’s future. Media experts who had worked hard to save the industry seemed ready to admit that the end was near. As one longtime observer noted, “It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry. . . . The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors—from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionaires—has failed them.”
That generalization is correct. The Los Angeles Times layoffs represent the failure of the billionaire business model, one of the media industry’s last great hopes. When billionaire and biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the West Coast newspaper in 2018, hoping to preserve it, he joined Jeff Bezos (who bought the Washington Post in 2013) and Marc Benioff (Time in 2018) as would-be benevolent stewards, happy to write off modest losses to keep the public informed. But Time also recently announced staff cuts, while the Post laid off 240 people last year. The L.A. layoffs just confirmed the failure of the model.
For the news business, it is the latest, and perhaps the last, sign of systemic collapse. Earlier strategies—paywalls, merging with e-commerce, membership models, digital platforms, foundation and philanthropic funding—all failed to rescue individual publications, much less the entire industry. Those few investors or donors who do remain tend to care more about their special agendas than about journalism per se. Hopes for maintaining the press as it once existed have vanished.
“The media is melting down, and neither billionaires nor journalists can seem to stop it,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Journalism may never again make money,” states the Washington Post. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asks The Atlantic. Indeed, an obituary for the American press is overdue. And it turns out that the death of journalistic objectivity has been both cause and effect.
Most observers blame the Internet, broadly construed, for killing journalism—and not without reason. Following the digital migration of people, news and advertising transitioned onto digital platforms. Yet New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen acknowledges that the news industry has managed neither to find a “stable business model” nor to “reestablish the connection” that it once had with its audience. The “ad industry doesn’t need the news industry when there are so many other ways to purchase attention, and so many better ways to target users,” says Rosen. Thus did a significant revenue source dry up, in a mere decade.
The media also have contributed to their own decline. How? “Some of the wounds are self-inflicted,” writes Rosen. In particular, he refers to the struggle of the newsrooms to increase diversity while maintaining the “view from nowhere.” “See the contradiction?” asks Rosen. “Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it—in order to prove their objectivity,” he complains. While tendentious, Rosen’s argument is interesting for what it reveals about the industry.
Journalists once considered objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality as cardinal virtues. Now professors at top journalism schools treat these as false standards. The flip happened during Donald Trump’s first presidency, when top editors concurred with rank-and-file journalists that they must not give equal consideration to views that clashed with “democratic” values. For example, there could be no legitimate opposing perspective, they argued, on matters of sexual abuse. There could be no “other side,” they insisted, when fascism loomed. Journalists must not seek false balance in their coverage.
The command to disregard the “wrong side” soon extended to politics and social issues. Objective reporting, on this view, demonstrated a false “view from nowhere,” while stories that tried to reflect competing views indulged in “bothsidesism.” Each term carried a pejorative connotation.
Behind this change of labels is an epistemological shift in discourse production. For most of the twentieth century—from the muckrakers of the Progressive Era and pioneering investigator Ida Tarbell to Walter Cronkite’s Vietnam War coverage—journalism’s theorists and practitioners fought for their duty to report the news. Today, journalists often get criticized when they cover, investigate, and discuss certain events. Indeed, media critics and journalism professors often urge that journalists not report certain events.
Journalism theorists justify their redefinition of objectivity with an argument from history. Objectivity, they observe, dates back to the practices of twentieth-century corporate capitalism. In contemporary discourse production, affiliation with capitalism is sufficient to discredit anything, including objectivity.
The historical claim is technically true. Before American culture became consumerist, the media were funded either by political patrons and parties or by the crowd, through cheap retail on the street. From these funding models emerged the party press and the yellow press, respectively. But advertising for consumer goods—paid for by industrial magnates in need of demand to match their increased production—generated a plentiful cash flow for newspapers, starting in the beginning of the twentieth century. To increase their value for all advertisers, and to protect themselves from the encroachments of some of them, newspapers set forth professional standards organized around objectivity. Ad money freed the press from the dictates of both political sponsors and the crowd. Thus did capitalism beget the freedom of the press, with objectivity as a tool to maintain it.
But objectivity’s critics draw a false inference from this history. Twentieth-century objectivity was not peculiar to scribblers; it was also considered a virtue of science and rational thinking generally. Capitalism might have introduced the standard of objectivity to the media, but objectivity itself was a product of an earlier innovation. Objectivity relates to capitalism as much as it relates to science and rationality through their common progenitor: the printing press. To reject objectivity is to reject rationality.
Has trust in the media really declined because journalists were hesitant or slow to abandon “bothsidesism” and the “view from nowhere”—what Rosen calls “self-inflicted wounds”? Or have the media lost trust precisely because they openly abandoned objectivity and started taking sides?
If the media wounded themselves, they did so not by sticking to objectivity during the first Trump presidency but by rejecting it. In fact, declining objectivity arguably helped usher in the Trump era itself. But the revision of standards of objectivity was not a deliberate choice of journalists; it resulted significantly from the media’s desperate struggle for digital subscriptions in the early 2010s.
At that time, a tectonic shift in the media business was occurring around the world. Throughout the twentieth century, advertising predominantly funded the media. But between 2012 and 2014, ad revenue plummeted below subscriber revenue. Coverage shifted as publications sought to appeal to the audience that was expected to sustain them. (See “How the Media Polarized Us,” Summer 2022.)
Editors at many publications believed that they simply needed to adjust their practices to the new carrier, the Internet, as it offered amazing new capacities for news production and delivery. “Digital first!” proclaimed publisher-innovator John Paton in 2011. The media rushed onto digital platforms and started wooing the audience there, seeking to convert it into subscribers. In the early years of social media, that audience consisted disproportionately of young, urban, educated, white progressives. It was not hard to adjust the news coverage to the values of this audience—for journalists themselves disproportionately belonged to the same demographic.
The turn to the digital audience radically changed journalism. The news media started building their alliance with digital progressives. The process was inevitably accompanied by the rapid increase in social-justice agendas and language, later labeled as “wokeism.” Manhattan Institute fellow Zach Goldberg has documented how the use of such terms as “racism,” “white privilege,” “whiteness,” “marginalized,” “victimhood,” “diversity and inclusion,” “identity,” “people of color,” and others exploded in news articles in the mid-2010s, before Trump. The media’s mission changed from depicting reality, as under the advertising model, to emphasizing social injustice. No surprise that this portrait reflected the views of the new target audience. Judging by press coverage, racism in the U.S. had dramatically grown in importance by the end of the second term of the nation’s first black president.
In part, the growth of anxiety in the media coverage also can be explained by the so-called Tocqueville effect, which holds that, as social conditions improve, social frustration grows more quickly; a better life yields greater demands. As well-being and social standards improve, people get more sensitive to the issues that would have been hard even to recognize in harsher conditions. Special academic disciplines and nonprofit sectors have emerged to detect and identify signs of social injustice and racism. Bureaucracies validate the findings, funding, and very existence of this apparatus. The public is thus presented with evidence of increasing injustice precisely due to the heightened investigation of these issues.
Or consider in this context Joseph Stalin’s 1929 thesis about the “intensification of the class struggle in the process of socialist upbuilding.” Stalin’s idea was that as Soviet society progressed in building socialism, class enemies, too, were becoming increasingly active—even though no real class enemies remained by that time. The “intensification of the class struggle” in conditions where any class struggle was effectively over was necessary, of course, to justify further ideological purges, aimed at solidifying authoritarian power.
“The turn to the digital audience radically changed journalism. The news media started building their alliance with digital progressives.”
In the early 2010s, the Tocqueville effect overlapped with the rise of digital media and created perfect conditions for the “intensification of the class struggle.” First, social media empowered the heirs of the “class struggle,” leading to such movements as Occupy Wall Street. Second, legacy media aligned with digital progressives and thereby promoted them from activist marginalia to the establishment, integrating their agenda into the mainstream of discourse production.
The trend proved global. Media everywhere turned to the digital for the subscriptions and found the same social demographics there, with similar values and agendas. “Digital First!” turned “Progressive First!”
Digital audiences were progressive indeed: they did not consume the news from traditional media. They always already know the news from their digital immersion. Paton, the evangelist of “Digital First!,” eventually admitted: “Print dollars are becoming digital dimes.”
As a result, the digital rush of the early 2010s brought a dramatic outcome. Digital progressives became the referential group for most of the news media, but they rarely bought subscriptions, while demanding greater loyalty from their new allies in the media industry. The situation was akin to the negative feedback loop of an abusive relationship: hoping to grow subscriptions, the media tried to please its object of desire; accustomed to being courted, digital progressives took for granted this ideological service and insisted on more.
Since digital users did not pay for news but expected it to be appropriately covered, the media developed a hope to monetize at least the demand for appropriate coverage. News coverage was turned into ideological affirmation: post-journalism.
This reproduced the condition of the nineteenth century, before advertising freed the media from political patronage and the demands of the crowd. Post-journalism returned the media into the state of the party press, but with simultaneous dependence on the digital crowd. The media traded objectivity for loyalty to their new and narrow referential group with no actual subscription growth. They switched from news supply to news validation for no gain, except for a short “Trump bump” for a few publications.
The rejection of objectivity did not come at once. Old journalism tried to grab hold of old professional standards. This led to a weird outcome in 2016: the media treated Donald Trump as infotainment while scrutinizing Hillary Clinton as a traditional political candidate, weighing the pros and cons. This dynamic might have helped Trump, but after the shocking result, old-fashioned impartiality was seen as harmful not just for Clinton but for democracy itself. Motives for rejecting the standard of objectivity strengthened.
Some initially reacted to Trumpism by pursuing more, not less, objectivity. Acknowledging the newspaper’s failure to recognize public moods behind Trump’s victory, New York Times brass hired some centrist and conservative authors not long after the 2016 election. According to one, Bari Weiss, this meant that the Gray Lady factually admitted that it “didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers” but still wanted to understand “other Americans.”
Things didn’t work out that way. In 2020, Weiss resigned. Op-ed editor James Bennet, found guilty of allowing a range of opinions, including those no longer deemed appropriate, followed. Since then, any attempts of objectivity, neutrality, or balanced views from both sides have become practically impossible. Yet the Times’s core audience of well-educated white progressives constantly berates it for “bothsidesism” and for clinging to the “view from nowhere.” Journalism’s influential figures regularly tell the onetime newspaper of record what not to report.
While the media flirted with (or submitted to) the digitized in the early 2010s, the rest of the population was largely ignored and sometimes villainized. These “other Americans” reached a critical mass of self-awareness on social media around the time that Donald Trump emerged in 2016. This was not someone’s evil plan. Rather, social media simply took longer to permeate deeply among older, less urban, less educated, and less progressive Americans. Their social-media awakening revealed to these forgotten folks how significantly their views differed from the mainstream agenda, and the extent to which that agenda was already predominantly shaped by the media and digital progressives, who extended their influence also into corporate decision-making and academia—institutions that had rushed to be “Digital First!” in the early 2010s.
Naturally politically passive, these “late digitals” were clearly anxious about their underrepresentation—and vilification—in the mainstream. It didn’t take them long to gravitate toward Trump, who sensed the need and used it.
Conservatives were the latest to arrive at the digital rush, but their numbers happened to be massive enough to fuel a significant wave of resentment. This wave has eventually established a dynamic, fragile, and likely temporary political balance. The balance rests not in the center but on the margins: even a small push can disturb the equilibrium.
So, yes, the decline of journalism came, in part, from “self-inflicted wounds.” But it could not have happened otherwise. The historical logic is flawless: as media and other institutions moved online, the digital space was initially dominated by society’s most elite segments. Unable to sell ads or news effectively to this audience, media organizations attempted to monetize by catering ideologically to their new reference group. The transition failed; it brought no new business, succeeding only at eroding the remnants of reputation.
The decline of trust in the media didn’t occur because journalists adhered to the “view from nowhere” for too long, but rather because they enthusiastically abandoned any attempts even to simulate objectivity, hoping to profit from moral stances. It is a crowded market now, and one in which journalists may still retain some influence: in a world where digital denizens are still learning how to manipulate their audiences, journalists are ahead of the curve. But institutional journalism as we knew it, with its twentieth-century professional standards and codes, is dead.
What will replace it? Trendsetters are pursuing business solutions for independent journalism, focusing not on commercial objectives but on “community-based” and “mission-driven” journalism. A cynic might speculate that stories will be based on, and driven by, people who know what to report—and, crucially, what not to. Whatever form post-journalism takes, it mostly will be supported not by those who want to read it but by those who want others to read it.
