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November 14, 2024 - 7:00pm
Liberal legacy media outlets are attempting to pivot to the political centre amid declining public trust, shrinking audiences, and tightening margins.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it is forming a new editorial board in an effort to win back trust. “When the President has won the vote of the majority of Americans then ALL voices must be heard,” Pat Soon-Shiong, the outlet’s owner, wrote. “I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard and we can respectfully exchange every American’s view, from left to right to the center.”
It marks a significant change for the paper. The Los Angeles Times has previously published articles arguing in favour of mocking anti-vaxxers’ deaths and calling an African American Republican candidate “the black face of white supremacy”. But after years of endorsing Democratic candidates for president, the outlet announced last month that it would no longer make presidential endorsements, including in 2024.
The Washington Post made a similar announcement the same week, citing an interest in letting readers “make up their own minds”. Owner Jeff Bezos has reportedly been pushing to add more conservative writers to the publication.
The one exception to the sinking performance of legacy media has been the New York Times, which has been outperforming its peers, thanks in part to the popularity of its forays into games, sports coverage, and product reviews. But the outlet has also resisted pressure from activist groups, most notably by publishing reports critical of child gender transitions — a decision that resulted in protests from its own contributors and readers.
These changes come amid a challenging period for legacy media. On election night, Fox News and MSNBC had about 30% fewer viewers compared to 2020, while CNN saw a decline of roughly 50%. At the same time, Comcast is considering spinning off its cable networks, including MSNBC, while CNN is reportedly planning massive layoffs and Time magazine may be sold for a $40 million loss.
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SubscribeLegacy media was lost the moment it conceded to the demand of activists that feelings be prioritised over facts. You simply cannot report accurately or impartially if “sensitivity” prevents you from pursuing truth.
In a world where almost everything is online it gets noticed and trust disappears.
There is a distinct lack of fans of the Völkischer Beobachter
The unhinged, partisan coverage of politics is the result of a broken business model. It is not the cause of the broken business model.
That model made them big bucks even before 2016. For many years, major papers and broadcasters were little more than an extension of the Democratic Party. Finally, it became so gross, obvious, and impactful on folks just wanting to live their lives in peace that they are paying a price.
Too late. Usurpers with more of an eye to news will outrun them. They bet on spades – but the House called Trumps.
At the end of the day, the owners of these media outlets want to make money, both now and in the future. There are basically two ways to do that. The first way and the more difficult path is to hew closely to the facts, avoid editorializing or offering opinions save in the editorial section, avoid taking any collective stance on controversial issues, refrain from political endorsements, addressing the positions of multiple political parties and actors evenly and without favoring one or the other, and so on so that you will have credibility among all the people and people will look to your outlet for an unbiased, fair reading of the known facts and you will get a few readers/viewers from all political sides with a concentration at the moderate center, where most people usually are. This is a very difficult task, because people are people, and in any given workplace, or city, or profession there will be a tendency towards establishing social norms and enforcing conformity, subconsciously if not overtly. If the norms and practices of these groups diverge too much from the political center, or if the political center becomes contested, or if the axis of political factions changes, it’s difficult to find a neutral course.
The second way is to be as carve out a niche of particular readers/viewers and shamelessly pander to them, slanting coverage to fit whatever their political leanings are. Just about all the major news websites are some flavor of this. Most favor one side, or one faction on one side, or even one demographic group on one side. Unlike the first path, this is trivially easy. Most people seek out others who share similarities in values, personalities, culture and appearance. In-group and out-group behaviors are instinctive and unavoidable.
The legacy media’s real problem came with the Internet’s democratization of information. Literally anyone could be a journalist so long as they could afford the minimal cost of a website and get people to listen to them, and as I’ve already mentioned, the easier path by far is to carve out a niche of the like minded. Most of the early bloggers never did this on any conscious level. They just wrote their own viewpoint and people who agreed gravitated to it. Once this trend of people getting news from the Internet was noticed as a social trend, it didn’t take long before the financiers and entrepreneurs of the world started making entire news sites that were simply larger versions of the blogs, favoring a particular point of view.
The legacy media had a problem. Whether they realized it or not (I suspect some did), the limited number of news outlets effectively allowed the norms and values of the newsrooms to shape the political narrative and exercise subtle influence. They in effect moved the perceived political center towards themselves, whether that was indicative of the actual public opinion or not. It’s debatable how much the mainstream media reflected the range of public opinion even in the days of three TV channels and the town newspaper, but if they did not reflect the true range of popular opinion, there was no real way for people to know it. To what extent they truly influenced political opinions and to what extent they merely created the illusion of a political consensus is hard to know, though I tend to favor the latter explanation.
Either way, the Internet broke that influence. When people could get their news from literally any of hundreds of websites and blogs, the politics of information became democratized. The legacy media handled this very poorly. Rather than recognize that the political media environment was now something organic that formed from the overall opinions of the people, something they couldn’t control, they attempted to preserve their influence and ability to define the political center. They doubled down on monitoring and regulating their own language. They covered only those viewpoints they deemed legitimate. They even attempted to discredit other viewpoints as ‘fake news’. They went so far as to coordinate with each other and with the largest social media players to censor certain viewpoints. That, predictably, backfired. It did nothing to remove any of the blatantly false nonsense circulating on the internet and within the society, but it did alienate large swaths of the population, ruin their credibility, and created a justifiable perception that they were arguing for censorship and against free speech. Few things are more sacred to Americans than free speech. The perception of bias was inescapable, and the media started to bifurcate and fracture into the echo chambers they are today. The legacy media lost their credibility and were reduced to the same niche markets as the websites and bloggers who were and are better at playing that game.
From this article, it seems some of the outlets are finally and belatedly realizing that the game has changed and they need to adapt to the political environment rather than try to influence it. Unfortunately trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. It will be a long hard road back to credibility for these outlets, but they’re taking the right steps. Ridding themselves of the fiercest partisans within their newsrooms and letting go of a portion of their readership in the short term is necessary if they want to regain trust and credibility in the long term. It remains to be seen whether they have the discipline and resolve to follow through. Complicating matters is that over the same period, the political axis itself was shifting, through the Tea Party and MAGA movements, shifting from a liberalism/socialism right/left dynamic to a nationalism/globalism dynamic. Finding the new center of this new axis will be part of the challenge. We shall see how well they fare.