You know that it's been awhile since you last blogged when the back-end interface of the platform has changed since you've last checked in. I've been working on my first book, leaving me less time and inclination to write here. But since this seems likely to be a historic 12-month period, it would be a shame not to write a bit more about it as it happens.
My last entry was a dispatch from the early days of the pandemic. In it, I lamented the news outlets' over-reliance on speculative headlines (on a recent New Yorker podcast, David Remnick put it best when he said that "prediction is a low form of journalism"). Nearly ten months later, some of the predictions about the impact of the pandemic have, inevitably, turned out to be correct while many more have turned out to be wrong. I'll admit that I vastly underestimated the drawn-out nature of the pandemic, how gradual the accretion of suffering would be. Still, there is one set of predictions that I'm happy to see proven wrong: predicted timelines for vaccine developments. Journalists did the best they could in crafting their predictions, deferring to the experts, but the experts were wrong. Anyone (even experts) trying to predict some phenomenon that unfolds over a long period of time and involves billions of people is bound to be correct only by chance.
Since then, the news cycle has shifted, focusing on the ascendance of the Far Right in America, an ascendance that dramatically culminated in the storming of the Capitol. The storming was a media event if there ever was one, but one that illustrated live television's inadequacies. I tuned in to cable news around 2pm that day to watch the Congress debate the counting of electoral votes, and watched, live, as the protests escalated and transformed. The camera, the reporter, and the anchor all had a kind of distance or detachment from the event. They noted how unusual and upsetting the event was, but did so in a measured way, acknowledging the incompleteness of their facts, repeating only what they could confirm.
Access is a funny thing in the news environment of 2021. When things are calm, established news agencies still have the edge over citizen journalists and bloggers when it comes to access. They can get interviews with powerful politicians and business leaders that others can't. But when it comes to spontaneous "breaking" news like the storming of the Capitol, the roles reverse. Traditional journalists, with their obligation to verification and their brittle reputation for delivering truth, must vet information before disseminating it. Also, there are only so many of them, and if they happen to be stationed somewhere outside the center of the action, then they cede the spotlight to citizen journalists on social media.
And so as I watched an incomplete picture of the storming on TV, my wife, sitting on the couch next to me, kept me apprised of what citizen journalists were reporting on Twitter. TV did relay most of what was on Twitter, just on a bit of a delay. By the next day, traditional print news sources like The New York Times would be able to pull it all together and craft a kind of coherent narrative, something that live TV and citizen journalists can't really do in the moment.
As a media scholar who finds himself writing a chapter about the internet and journalism, I've been focused on the news landscape and the role of news not just in covering events like the storming of the Capitol, but also in causing them. The basic argument is that fringe news outlets foment the kind of aggrievement and detachment from reality that were necessary pre-conditions for the storming and other acts of politically-motivated terrorism.
We know that there are more news outlets to choose from than there were before the popularization of the internet, and that some of those news options espouse extreme and politically polarized views of the world. These views likely reflected and catered to existing differences in worldview, but also likely reinforced the beliefs of these news consumers and probably made them more extreme. There's something that seems to be almost inevitable about this: if you have a means by which to widely disseminate a larger number of well-produced accounts of the day's events and there are pre-existing differences in worldviews and interests, people will use the internet to serve those worldviews and interests regardless of whether there's any money in it for them or not.
And yet mainstream news outlets such as CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, AP News, NYTimes, and the Washington Post continue to exist. Even after the first wave of disruptors like Buzzfeed and Vice tried to displace them, the legacy news outlets are quite far ahead of them in terms of reach. As far as I can tell, mainstream news has not been killed off by disruptive outsiders. Their audiences are diminished, sure, but they're still the leaders in terms of audience. They've just been joined by these other, younger news organizations that tend to espouse more extreme worldviews. They adapted, adopting some of the disrupters' journalistic practices and probably drifting further from the political center in the process, but still don't seem, at least to me, to be wildly different than what they always were.
I guess what I'd like to know is how news consumption habits have actually changed over the last 20 years. In most analyses that I've read, the more partisan, extreme news sources get all the attention while mainstream news outlets like NBC, ABC, and CNN, all of which are far more popular, go unremarked upon. Did some of the audience for these mainstream outlets switch to non-mainstream outlets, or did non-mainstream outlets pull non-news-consumers off the sidelines? Did the number of news-avoiders grow or shrink?
I'll also be curious to see what impact the storming of the Capitol has on all of this. Right now, it seems like such a spectacularly vivid illustration of...something. Like any event, I'm sure it will be interpreted in many different ways, but one possible interpretation is that it is the end result of a partisan information environment. Might this be a kind of breaking point, and might some force - either through legislation, tech self-regulation, or news consumer demand from the proverbial average American - finally stem the tide of polarization? Will the market share for hyperpartisan news outlets plateau or possibly decrease, leaving an ever-evolving ecosystem of iconoclastic bloggers and podcasters to fight over that share? Those who decry partisanship at least have something convenient to point to, even if others don't buy their argument or if the passion of the moment wears off.
But there I go, predicting again. In my defense, that's the whole point of this blog: to speculate about the future of media. I certainly wouldn't call it "news."
