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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
In 2016 all the most hysterical anti-Trump media outlets were owned by corporates with big investments in China. Trump had to be stopped. I’d suggest that is the basic reason why these owners allowed their young staff to trash the reputations of their media assets. It’s too late to try and fix things now.
Another reason may be that a lot of senior executives have woke daughters who scold them.
The Guardian is the perfect example of this. 8 years ago it was at least close to honest. Today it is nithing more but a lie
Guardian was close to honest 8 years ago?
Not really, it never was.
It was left wing, it just became histerically far left in the last 10 years.
It is certainly the most biased newspaper. Comparisons over time are becoming lost, as a generation at least has been raised with tainted ideas of progress. The Guardian’s acquisition and destruction of The Observer was another tragedy. Perhaps developments in America may lead to better things.
I believe its editor is the unhappiest woman I’ve ever seen. I judge her to be a five cat lady.
The Guardian close to honest? Next joke please!
Alongside the BBC, the Guardian is the principle mouthpiece of the state class in the UK. As the state itself becomes more parasitic so the need to divide and rule an increasingly fractious population becomes more pressing and the narratives become more and more extreme and implausible.
The hope must be that, eventually, social solidarity will win over the race and gender nonsense as it has in the US.
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.
Haven’t seen you comment in a while, Steve, it’s good to see you back.
The election got really toxic and I got in an argument with a family member over politics. Decided I needed a self imposed mental health break.
Who won’t get invited to Thanksgiving dinner, the winner or the loser?
Neither. Family still trumps politics (no pun intended) in our family…. for now. My father has always had a hair trigger on political matters so everyone learned to just avoid the subject. We had our own conversations among ourselves when he wasn’t around, and all of us used to be rather bland centrists who agreed on most things and thought Dad was rather loony when he went on rants about Bill Clinton and liberal media bias and identity politics.
Still, we all grow and change as time passes. Subsequent events have made some of my father’s rants in the 90’s seem almost prophetic, but they don’t get it, and perhaps they never will. The person in question went to an expensive private university while I went to a nearby state college on the cheap. They went on to become a city slicker and live in Chicago, while I settled back into rural life. From that point it’s about what you’d expect. America is divided as badly as it has been since the Civil War, a war sometimes called the brothers’ war for good reason.
I think the biggest issue with the legacy media is the far leftward lurch they took at the same time the internet was becoming a major source of information. If the major networks merely kept a level approach to news reporting, I would still be watching today. But it’s been over 8 years now since I tuned them all out. The galling level of bias was simply too painful to bear.
Well said, and thanks for putting this together; it’s an essay in its own rights, deserving kudos.
Well written
A first step is to close the schools of journalism where numbsculls who arrive from high schools knowing nothing get left-wing propaganda drummed into their heads.
Well said indeed!
I’m not sure the fractioning into echo chambers could have been avoided. “Democratization” doesn’t seem quite the right word to me, as democracy requires a certain amount of trust in common institutions. The internet is open, and thus almost inevitably has become a low-trust environment. There are bots and sockpuppet accounts, anyone can join in from anywhere anonymously. There are many outlets with uncertain origin and agenda, it’s hard to verify anything. So much is automated and ad-driven. Thus it cannot reliably answer the question, “what do the people around me really think?”
Arguably, neither could legacy media (hence, as you say, “the illusion of a political consensus”). But enough people believed it for it to effectively be real.
Totally off topic, but “sockpuppets in jackboots” would be a useful meme.
Perhaps anarchization is the more accurate term.
Great post.
I gave up on bbc after their lies during Brexit referendum campaign and on The Times (after 30 years) when they constantly published government propaganda during covid.
Till BBC is defunded in uk, little will change, I am afraid.
Why so called “Conservative” government did not do it is good question.
Woke lefties would not pay for subscription and oldies could had been given free access to bbc archives.
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 for their model. Years ago, Charles Krauthammer said that the success of Fox News, distinctly conservative and thus condemned, wasn’t surprising, in that it spoke to the 50% of the US population that didn’t agree with the Democratic Party’s direction.
But the broadcast network with the largest audience—by far—is Fox News, which is very right-wing.
I suspect some legacy mainstream media or public broadcasting with strong left wing activism will survive a little longer in countries like Australia, UK and Canada where public funding remains generous.
Others could survive if they find an aligned benefactor like Gates or Soros.
It was infuriating while it lasted.
Defund the BBC!
Too late. Usurpers with more of an eye to news will outrun them. They bet on spades – but the House called Trumps.
“What does the vision offer that reality does not offer? What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence.”
Thomas Sowell
The Legacy media fits this description to a ‘T’. There was virtually zero discussion about the pros and cons of policy, economic or otherwise. The entire run-up to the election seemed to consist of shameless promotion and fawning praise for a meaningless Joy Tour of the Righteous interrupted by snarling denunciations of the ‘fascist and the idiots that vote for him’.
Expect a flurry of “It’s not me it’s you” edicts, lectures and warnings from the Dems and the emotionally-shattered progressives about what Trump voters need to do to make them whole again.
“Emotionally shattered” says it.
https://x.com/stephenhilton23/status/1854320812272034154
There’s this assumption that newspapers make their money from their readers. Think about how social media companies became some of the biggest and most profitable in the world without charging their users at all.
They way I see it, a media outlet can receive financial benefit by way of at least three sources: 1) readers 2) advertisers 3) political influence which can be monetized (perhaps indirectly for the owner who doesn’t mind losing money because they will get investment or government subsidy, possibly elsewhere, as a result).
I don’t think it was the result of loss of (1) that cause them to finally change direction. It was the loss of (3). Without the ability to convince people, they can’t win elections. Without winning elections, they can’t exercise political power – hence loss of money.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this genius moment of realising what’s been happening by their leadership comes right after a decisive election loss.
You’re largely right, but with a fall in the numbers of 1: readers, you can’t sell advertising space at a premium rate and that’s where the real money comes from.
Sadly, Twotier-Freegear won albeit on very slender margin of voters. So the BBC has a few more years of speaking only for the metropolitan media and political class, and abusing the trust (and license fees) of most of us. But hopefully Ms Badenoch and Mr Farage will see that between them they have a majority amongst the people…agree terms…and plan it’s radical overhaul, or complete destruction…
Any critics who argue that the New York Times is too gentle in its coverage of Trump have disqualified themselves from rational discussion and should be sent to the kids’ table at Thanksgiving.
Of course whatever they do no one will trust them or support them for a long time. In fact the losses they experienced may be the beginning of the end for them unless they become something like tv game shows or reality tv,
Given that Big-Pharma advertising props up so much of legacy media – which I have a strong suspicion is mainly still watched by older generations who are less internet-savvy, to whom those adverts are mostly targeted – I should imagine that the legacy media are also terrified of Trump’s intended appointment of RF Kennedy given the comments that he has made about pharmaceutical adverts. Pivoting more to the centre may not have so much to do with a belated, Damascene conversion to standards of objective journalism, and more to do with protecting the bottom line.
Given that Big-Pharma advertising props up so much of legacy media –
Thats a really tenuous theory. It suggests that big-pharmacy advertising is the biggest spender. Is it? And that it’s targeted to the older generations. In what way do you see this happening? You think the older generations (you haven’t specified what that is) are the biggest spenders in the country, not the middle class, middle aged, and that makes big-pharma so powerful that the legacy media couldn’t survive without them. So because of that they’re scared of Kennedy so they’re repositioning themselves. If what you say is true then the older generations are going to be forbidden their medication that they depend on to survive, which will then hurt the big-pharma. There’s a difference between adulterated food and necessary medication,
Just did a bit of reading re. your assertion that “Big-Pharma advertising props up so much of legacy media”. It’s not true. I have no interest in supporting big-pharmacy but I do in facts. The biggest spenders are FMCG, Telecoms and Durables.
You may be right. However, if your findings are then reweighted by “ability to annoy,” pharma comes in first place, with whatever’s second ten furlongs behind. Every night, 30 minutes of news is chopped up and twelve minutes of ads demand our attention to bizarrely-named remedies for three-letter diseases we never heard of.
Alternately, there are drugs (also bizarrely-named) for truly dangerous diseases like AIDS, where self-diagnosis is extremely risky and self-medication worse. Are the drug companies really demanding that an AIDS sufferer march into his doctor’s office and yell, “Doc, I wanna be put on Abracadabrimab! Right now! I wanna be like those guys I see kissing on television! Gimme a prescription!”
Of course they are. There’s lots of money in AIDS treatments.
ability to annoy
Not sure how this relates to propping up the legacy media.
These news executives awakened from wokeness, rubbed their eyes and saw half the country hated their dishonest guts. The reckoning now under way will remove a host of smirking left-wing running dogs from the screen. A surprising percentage of gays occupy those chairs of disinformation.
Obama in the shadows is laying the groundwork for another sabotage of a Trump presidency. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/obama-not-going-anywhere
Why shouldn’t there be liberal, centrist and conservative media? Each one of have their audiences. I like to read publications from each one, so I can read different ideas, whether I agree with them or not. Concerning the NYT, which I read daily, it has printed three or four Articles about trans children and transitioning them. Yes, there were protests by young staffers, but most readers were thankful. My own non-scientific opinion is that about 98 percent of the center left readers (from the comments) were against transitioning children. Another unintentionally funny article about girls and their experiences with menstruation, led to angry comments—all women. The article awkwardly didn’t use the words girl, women or mother. It also used they/them pronouns. The comments were all absolutely livid. I am a Women/Mother, say it!!! See, even liberals are sick of “woke.”
Got a couple of tips for the legacy media……..
1) Start telling the truth
2) Start reporting the news impartially
3) Stop listening to noisy minorities
I know. Very tricky stuff. But worth a shot.
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Test.
Test
The cancelled subscriptions will quietly be in cancelled.