Long Read by NyMag: The Case Against the Media-by the Media
NyMag: THE CASE AGAINST THE MEDIA. BY THE MEDIA.
As the media anxiety around media anxiety began to crescendo this spring, we at New York decided to turn our journalistic operation in on itself to investigate just how bad the media really is. We were less interested in bad actors — the Jayson Blairs and such — than in the structural dilemmas of the media trade: What keeps media people up at night when they’re thinking about what they do for a living? We began by asking ourselves and our peers what they think the media’s greatest faults are. The response was overwhelming but probably shouldn’t have been too surprising (the media loves to criticize the media). In interviews with more than 40 journalists and media figures and in a survey of 113 of our peers, we heard much about deals cut with anonymous sources, the pressure for speed and easy hits that squeezes the nuance out of complicated stories, editors who knowingly simplified stories past the point of accuracy and publishers who spent resources on subjects they believed were trivial rather than those they felt were important. At times, the survey’s answers read like the minutes from an anonymous group-therapy session.
The interviews that follow make the media look pretty bad — really bad, in fact. But as it happens, we’ve engaged in our own form of media distortion in this project. We’ve dwelled mostly on the negative, because that’s what we considered the “news.” Yet many we spoke to gave reasons for optimism, too. Some hailed the rise of the internet and social media for bringing new voices to the fore and for connecting established ones to new audiences. Several observed that the Trump effect was salutary for media credibility, as journalists learned to become more aggressive in fact-checking falsehoods mid-quote or mid-chyron. Some pointed to the rise of nonprofit investigative shops like ProPublica or the Intercept as happy developments, and others highlighted a new generation of benevolent media owners, like Jeff Bezos, as a sign that good journalism will still be produced. We’ve included links below to longer transcripts of our interviews; that’s so you can see for yourselves how we’ve cherry-picked the quotes — and also because reading each of the commentators at length makes for almost an entirely different (and much deeper) exploration of the subject.
Most strikingly, the journalists we spoke to responded to the biggest criticism by embracing it: Yes, the media imposes what might be called its own bias, but that’s its job. It’s supposed to function as a filter, making complex events intelligible, and maybe even supposed to entertain, too. And it’s also true that while it’s easy for people to loathe the media as an abstraction, “if you ask them how they feel about their own particular media niche, you often find out that they are very loyal to it,” pointed out Bill Keller, who used to run the New York Times and now runs the excellent Marshall Project. “The people who read the Times might be the same people who would tell a pollster that the media is unreliable, but they’re deeply devoted to the New York Times.”
It’s not just the Times. The same seems true across media — or true-ish, in an era of shrinking TV ratings and rabid competition among print outlets. In the media market, like any market, that loyalty is earned, one presumes, by giving an audience what it wants. But what does it want? Is the media there to excite or to inform? To challenge or to reassure? To be objective or partisan? To try to parse the media-hate, as we have over the last few months, is to sense that the media still does at least one job very well: reflecting the contradictory desires of the audience it serves.