In a better world, there would be a period of quiet, of licking wounds, of taking stock, after the shock suffered by both Democrats and legacy media in the presidential election. But in this world, the world we’ve created, the demand for content — always fresh, yet always familiar — is unrelenting. Thus we are subjected to opinions without supporting facts, recriminations without self-reflection, certainty where none exists - and simple explanations for the collective decision of more than 153 million people.
“Devastated Democrats play the blame game,” reads a New York Times headline.
“Where Harris’ campaign went wrong,” CNN was prepared to tell us — on Nov. 6, the day after the election.
“This is all Biden’s fault,” the headline reads on a New York Times op-ed piece by the journalist Josh Barro, who at least took till Nov. 9 to have it all figured out.
Talking heads gonna talk. Pontificators gotta pontificate. Our content-generation enterprises had airtime and screens to fill. And for members of the media, the Democratic defeat was a target-rich environment.
Pundits also scratched their heads at the failure of the public to heed their warnings about Donald Trump, but that didn’t seem to open the floodgates of self-reflection in the most influential newsrooms.
New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller had a thoughtful piece about the way the flow of information had changed, a change that the Trump campaign understood and Harris’ didn’t. He concluded: “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors.
“This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows — and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that conclusion. Here’s what jumps out at me: While Heller poses “ambient information” as a puzzle for Democrats to solve, he makes no mention of journalists.
But aren’t we all living in an age of babel? The clash of ideas in the public sphere — for which journalism provides a stage — is no longer an intellectual contest. The truth may set you free, but if it can’t garner market share, it’s not winning the day. Election coverage with a primary goal of serving citizens would look very different from coverage with a need to make as much money as possible off the election.
Also, I wonder: How is any of this considered new? Newsrooms have been coping — unsuccessfully — with ambient information for years. A lot of news is now free. Journalism enterprises are struggling against free.
Poynter reporter Angela Fu wrote last December:
“The U.S. has lost more than 130 newspapers — or 2.5 a week — this year, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Since 2005, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists.
“ ‘A lot of news consumption is happening on social media and even from search,’ said Pew Research Center senior researcher Elisa Shearer. ‘You’re less likely to be getting something directly from a news outlet when you’re getting it in that way.’”
As we’ve discussed repeatedly, the business model on which newspapers were based for more than a century has collapsed, newsrooms have contracted, quality plummeted. News is everywhere in the air, plenty for the average consumer, and it doesn’t cost a thing.
Newsrooms have had a tendency to view the business model as a thing apart - someone else’s problem to solve - while they stayed focused on the important thing: their journalism, writing and editing narratives about the world.
But it’s not enough to believe that news is important. The product no longer meets the consumer need. Whatever else it was, the 2024 election was yet another reminder for legacy media that “they’re just not that into you.”