From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.

Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.

But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.

The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there.

The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs.

Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section.

Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.

I feel like I'm in a psy op reading this comments section.

As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms that replaced some biased ones.

The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.

In the words of Mon Montha from Andor:

> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.

While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.

Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to appear unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--versus one who does not.

Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.

The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.

"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.

So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.

It is now easier than ever to locate, contact, and spotlight for questioning individuals of any given movement, no matter how fringe. Yet the public still hears from the same journos, commentators, talking heads, and explainers, year after year, decade after decade. Really makes you think.

Related:

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890034

It's partly because many papers have the same stories, culled from the same few press agencies, and poor writers. Most of their original content is often on non-news topics, and the Hollywood image of the roving investigative reporter is rarely mirrored in reality.

>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires

I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.

Who coined the phrase, "legacy media?"

Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to social media bullshit.