Boiling Frogs

Around a year ago, I tried, in this newsletter, to zoom out and take stock of what sort of media moment we were then in, roughly halfway through a hugely consequential year. I concluded that the moment felt muddled. At the time, a variety of right-wing media grifters and conspiracy theorists appeared to be facing long-awaited accountability for blatant lies, leading some observers to conclude that it was a good moment for the truth. And yet mainstream news organizations often seen as guarantors of the truth appeared to be in a state of malaise, too, at least compared with the energy and purpose they exhibited in the early part of Donald Trump’s first term. At a high level, and some excellent work aside, journalists seemed to be fatigued, and to be having a hard time establishing what various huge stories—Trump’s conviction in the New York hush-money case, for instance—actually meant. And Semafor’s Ben Smith had just observed that the media-proprietor class—not least Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post—seemed to have lost their appetite for confronting the powerful, making slogans like the Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” look, in hindsight, more like marketing ploys than unshakable commitments.