RUTHFULLY YOURS

When I was a cub reporter working at the Washington Post a half-century ago, being a journalist was first and foremost a craft. I once tried to slip my opinion into an article, but my editor wrote on the copy that ‘nobody gives a shit what you think’.

It was harsh, but good training. Our primary job as journalists was not to indoctrinate but to inform. Even when writing an opinion piece, you would try backing up assertions with facts and leave room for the possibility that your point of view may not be the only permissible one.

All this may seem quaint today, as the news media – television, print, magazines and online blogs – now serve increasingly as ideological provocateurs. Overall, the whole industry is losing the trust of the public. This has now reached a nadir. In 2005, 50 per cent of Americans had confidence in the mass media. Barely a third do today, notes Gallup. Trust has also been dropping among all age groups, according to Pew.

One might have thought that the internet revolution and the growth of the ‘demassified media’ would benefit the customer, as futurist Alvin Toffler optimistically predicted. But today, just a handful of companies control the information pipelines and they largely follow the same script. Nearly two-thirds of US young adults now get their news through the big social-media platforms, like Facebook, X and TikTok.

These platforms use the content of the traditional media, largely without paying for it. Meanwhile, newspaper subscriptions, online and otherwise, have dropped from over 60million to barely 20million in three decades. ‘When you look at what’s evolved’, says Alan Fisco, president of the Seattle Times, ‘and the amount of revenue that’s going to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are getting the crumbs off the table’.

Like the barbarians who conquered Rome, the oligarchs have developed a taste for the vestigial print world they helped to destroy. Since the 2010s, tech moguls and their relatives have bought the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times and the long-distressed Time magazine.

Owning publications gives the tech oligarchs enhanced entrée into literary and journalistic circles. The publications acquired in this way get an extra edge, too. They have the luxury of producing content without worrying too much about money or customers. As tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.

Social-media sites have fewer opportunities to cultivate customers in a crowded, competitive market. So dominant platforms like Facebook and YouTube take steps to ‘curate’ content on their sites instead. They often brand views they find objectionable as ‘disinformation’, demonetising or sometimes even censoring it completely. These tend to be conservative views, according to former employees. Algorithms intended to screen out ‘hate groups’ often spread very wide, notes one observer, since they have trouble distinguishing between actual hatred and views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley. One possible result of this heavy-handed approach: over 70 per cent of Americans believe that social-media platforms ‘censor political views’, according to a 2018 Pew study.

The rise of artificial intelligence could further enhance the power of the oligarchs over media and the arts. The increased use of progressive-leaning AI services like Google’s Gemini means this kind of tilt could get worse in years ahead. Some suggest government intervention could exacerbate these trends. The Biden administration is currently spending millions of dollars on AI research in order to help design tools to curb ‘misinformation’. The result of this will be yet more online censorship.

A critical element in the changing media landscape comes from who actually works in it. As late as the 1980s, many reporters, even at elite papers, were working or lower-middle class. My direct boss at the Washington Post never attended college and the guy who sat next to me in the office was a hard-drinking Italian whose brother was a Baltimore cop.

Today’s media, particularly at elite outlets, as one report puts it, ‘resemble those powerful politicians and wealthy public figures that they cover’ in terms of family background and education. It is not surprising, then, that leading reporters express disdain for rural areas and suggest that the suburbs are ‘breeding grounds for fascism’.

Journalism also reflects the elites in terms of political leaning. Today less than four per cent of journalists are conservatives. In 2018, some 97 per cent of all political donations from journalists went to Democrats. The shocking degree of groupthink and the cancelling of discordant thoughts have come distressingly often from usually left-of-centre liberal veterans at places like the New York Times, NPR and the BBC. Even the Wall Street Journal, the last holdover of old-fashioned journalism, may be headed in this direction.

This has changed the fundamental nature of media. Today, journalism schools seem to see the idea of even-handedness and objectivity as unfashionable as Bermuda shorts. As veteran journalist Jeff Gerth points out, with healthy scepticism, bogus stories like ‘Russiagate’ would never have been as widely promoted by the mainstream media of the recent past. Similarly, a 2019 Rand study suggests that facts and analysis play an ever-diminishing role in our increasingly ideologically driven media – a phenomenon Rand calls ‘truth decay’.

This homogeneity can also be seen throughout the breadth of the media and culture industries. Once divided between conservatives and liberals, Hollywood now tilts heavily to the left. Practically all entertainment executives give their donations to the Democrats and big stars are currently lining up, almost uniformly, behind President Biden.

Similar patterns of orthodoxy can be seen in book publishing. Here radicalised editors reject books not because they won’t sell, but because they violate the favoured woke narratives or are written by straight, white males. Even books from beloved authors such as Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss are banned or bowdlerised to meet the tastes of progressives.

One thing these shifts has not done is improve the bottom line. Roughly a quarter of newspapers in the US have gone out of business in the past 15 years. Last year, some 22,000 media jobs were lost, the worst in a generation since 2009. Industry boosters (yes, they still exist) cling to the profitability of the two elite papers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which for now still appear viable.

The wreckage has all but destroyed some of the US’s other great papers. The Washington Post, emerging as the most strident and often irresponsible voice of America’s woke clerisy, has lost roughly half its online circulation since 2020 and lost $77million last year. The Los Angeles Times, once a great newspaper but now largely a mouthpiece for California-style progressivism, has reached record lows in print circulation. It has even suffered a decline in online subscribers.

Much the same can be seen in the other media controlled by the woke oligarchs. Just look at CNN, which was once arguably the most objective cable channel until the arrival of Donald Trump. In recent years it has started to broadcast anti-Trump agitprop practically 24 hours per day. It suffers rankings well below its prime rival, Fox, and in some months its ratings have crashed to a 33-year low.

Hollywood, too, is losing jobs and viewers. Typically, academics at places like UCLA trace this decline to a ‘lack of diversity’. But it seems fairly clear that imposing race and gender orthodoxy on audiences is not exactly a winning strategy. Already gender, race and other identitarian obsessions appear to have weakened once strong franchises like Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe and the Disney classics. One top Disney executive blamed a misogynist public for declining viewership figures. A lack of customer interest in these terrible, agenda-driven movies may be more to blame. ‘The audience’, as one film historian told the Los Angeles Times, ‘has moved on’.

Is there a way out? Marketplace dynamics may save us. Huge losses may be getting too much, even for the likes of Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, or Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times. Massive cutbacks have been imposed at both places, to the consternation of woke journalists. There’s even a move to bring in profit-oriented managers, many from the UK, who come from more competitive media culture. There’s the usual complaint that most of these new bosses are white, and in many cases male. Some fear they could presage what New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg calls ‘a furious reversal’ of woke policies.

In the end, the issue lies with the viability of these businesses. As the Washington Post’s new CEO, Will Lewis, puts it, indelicately:

‘We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it… We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.’

A similar thinking is even lighting up some of Hollywood’s perennially dull lightbulbs. Recent movies that have embraced traditional themes like Top Gun: Maverick and the recently released Bad Boys: Ride or Die have done far better than the politically correct programming that has recently dominated Hollywood.

At least Netflix, long bleeding subscribers, knows it can’t use political correctness to reverse the situation. In 2022, it pushed back against employees who railed against comedian Dave Chappelle, who is wildly popular but anathema to woke critics for his jokes about trans. As Netflix told its employees, ‘if you find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you’. That same year, Netflix cancelled a host of its woke offerings, including a movie from ‘anti-racist’ nabob Ibram X Kendi, a lesbian vampire series and Q-Force, a gay-oriented adult animated comedy. Similar cutbacks on woke programming are occurring at other large platforms.

Such shifts are already raising hackles in places like the New York Times, which fears that Hollywood might be ‘regressing’ towards cop movies and war films praising military heroes. Perhaps this is one case where ‘greed is good’, as owners of media properties begin to wonder if they might prefer financial rewards instead of progressive approval. As one good Hollywood friend and long-time liberal told me: ‘It’s kind of bad to spend $50million on something that doesn’t sell.’

Let’s hope that reason, and the profit motive, can save the media from their own dogmatism. In media, like any business, the customer may not always be right. But she is ultimately the one who fills the coffers.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.