decentralizing media cultures

harper's, bari weiss, and the return of the dishheads

The past few decades have seen the precipitous decline of American media outlets. According to a Brookings Institute study conducted in 2015, there were 1,200 newspapers per hundred million people in 1945 compared with just 400 in 2014. Three of the largest newspaper publishers—Gannett, McClatchy, and Tribune Publishing—own thousands of newspapers across all fifty states. Some papers close, others merge, many are purchased by these large media conglomerates. Journals like Commentary, National Review, Mother Jones, and ProPublica are registered non-profits. There are fewer journalists in America now than in decades past, and even online outlets like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox battle constant lay-offs.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the failure of these institutions comes at a time when American progressives disdain institutions.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Democratic candidates for president call for the abolition of the Electoral College and court packing, we’ve seen progressive policy groups make the case that the Senate is an “irredeemable institution,” and we’re now witnessing the toppling of monuments to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Fredreick Douglass. It’s no surprise, then, that legacy media institutions have also earned the ire of progressives—but not in the way you might imagine.

To my knowledge, none of the progressive journalists who disdain institutions like the United States Senate is calling for a boycott of the New York Times or the Washington Post. After all, many progressives like Karen Attiah, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Sarah Jeong, and Paul Krugman, work for these legacy media outlets. But they don’t exactly work for them in the way that people have traditionally approached legacy media jobs. It was once the case that working for outlets of national record like the Times or the Post was a prestige job in and of itself. Publishing in these venues guaranteed a national audience. The masthead carred an imprimatur of importance, relevance, rigor, and integrity.

That’s still the case, though it’s hard to see exactly how these venues will continue to command such respect for long. These media outlets trade not on the content of their pages, but on who is allowed to write (or, more often, tweet) with the legacy brand. In other words, writers like Nikole Hannah-Jones use the Times handle in their Twitter bios to bolster their own audiences, which I’m sure is a happy marriage for the writers and the Times. But Hannah-Jones isn’t a journalist, she’s an activist. Her writings range from Pulitzer-winning conspiracy theories about the American founding to less celebrated conspiracy theories arguing that kids playing with fireworks late at night were part of a government psy-op to harm Black people in Brooklyn.

Progressive writers are less interested in legacy media as an institution in the classical sense than they are in using the brands (and their audiences) to push their own ideologies. Wesley Lowery, a columnist for the New York Times, recently called on journalists to abandon the “obfuscatory” strictures of neutrality and instead reform the newspaper industry by writing with an eye toward “moral clarity.” Coming as it did on the heels of the Harper’s letter and Bari Weiss’s public resignation from the Times, Lowery’s argument reveals the illiberality at the center of progressive thought, and it indicates the problem with the fact that our increasingly centralized media is more and more in the hands of progressives.

If progressive journalists see the New York Times not as an organ of the press but as a brand to help build their social media audiences, then the outlets they write for are less a part of the “public square” and more suspectible to the doctrines of brand continuity. Bari Weiss, a milquetoast centrist brought on board to enliven debate in the Times’s editorial page, was a threat to the progressive brand because she invited editorials from conservative thinkers. Publishing an op-ed from a sitting U.S. senator is verboten because that senator does not abide by the tenets of progressivism. The Times doesn’t want free-range discussion; it doesn’t want an opposing view. What it wants are pieces of writing that conform to the brand. The idea that media institutions should have as their core value a commitment to free expression has been robustly criticized all over the internet for the past few weeks, but especially in conjunction with Weiss’s departure, the Cotton op-ed, and the reaction at Vox to Matt Yglesias’s signing the Harper’s letter. (He was accused of making his workplace unsafe for a trans coworker.) Free expression is not the order of the day; adherence to the doctrine is.

Just as legacy media institutions have become endangered species, they have also been overtaken by ideologues forcing a homogenous political consensus among their own writers. It’s hard not to ask: if Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias are too heterodox for progressive media establishments, where does that leave the rest of us?

It leaves us on blogs and substacks (but not Twitter—it’s certainly time for #twexit, but that’s a blog for another day). One of the greatest things the internet offered some years ago was the blog. I was fortunate to be in college and writing during the heyday of blogging in the 90s and 00s. But social media, especially Twitter, made blogging seem redundant, like a thing of the past. The toxicity of Twitter and the increasingly homogenous world of legacy media should lead us to disaggregate our media consumption and should herald a return to these decentralized platforms from the earlier days of the internet. Another casualty last week of legacy media, Andrew Sullivan, who had been writing a column at the New Yorker, had this to say in his farewell letter:

If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, or puts the “moral clarity” of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting, if it treats writers as mere avatars for their race and gender or gender identity, rather than as unique individuals whose identity is largely irrelevant, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack. What I hope to do at the Weekly Dish is to champion those younger writers who are increasingly shut out of the Establishment, to promote their blogs, articles, and podcasts, to link to them, and encourage them. I want to show them that they have a future in the American discourse. Instead of merely diagnosing the problem of illiberalism, I want to try to be part of the solution.

Whatever you think of Sullivan, his charge is timely. If legacy media is to function under heuristic of some kind of “ministry of Truth,” a good many of us should begin thinking about where we consume media and how. Decentralizing our media ecosystems will not only make content more interesting and democratic, it will enable a return to the virtual public square that’s so desperately needed in American life.