Why the End of the Legacy Media Would Be Really, Really Bad

 

Since Donald Trump won the election, Elon Musk has been exalting the the legacy media are finished, that they are out of touch and in a bubble and that social media is the journalism of the future.  Needless to say, Musk does not see anything out of touch or in a bubble about promoting or believing blatant lies about Hurricane Helene.  Presumably he saw those lies as authentic, making the little matter of factual accuracy irrelevant.

And plenty of people on our side are also dismissing the legacy media as irrelevant -- too afraid of being accused of liberal bias to call Trump out pre-election and now too intimidated by him to do hard-hitting reporting.  Instead, our side is setting up its own podcasts and Substrack accounts to do what the legacy media is too timid to do.

In effect, it is the return of the blogosphere.  Well, as one who never left blogging in favor of tweeting, I am happy to see it make a comeback.  However, blogging was never the same as real journalism and it is not a substitute for real journalism.  If the legacy media dies and social media/Substrack/podcasts take its place, we will have lost something immensely valuable.

The chart above is revealing in more ways than one.  Most obviously, it shows that objective journalism is more reliable than advocacy journalism.  But the vertical axis is noteworthy.  At the very top, it places "Fact Reporting."  Next comes "Mix of fact reporting and analysis," followed by pure analysis, then opinion, and then unreliable sources.  The point here is not so much that there is anything wrong with analysis or even opinion, but that a focus on analysis and opinion means that someone else is actually gathering the facts.  Gathering the facts, after all, is what journalism is all about.

Furthermore true journalism is labor-intensive.  It means more than just seeing a factlet on line or hearing a rumor and repeating it.  True journalism means in-depth investigation, thorough-going fact checking, and pursuing multiple sources.  Doing that it a lot of work.  It is generally more work than one person can do.  Quality journalism calls for reporting, checking, and editing.  It is a team effort.  This contrasts with, say, a typical blog/Substract, which is usually analysis of other people's reporting, or a podcast, which is the same, or an interview of someone with actual knowledge.

I will concede that advocacy journalism (left or right, at least in theory) can produce boutique publications that do through, in-depth factual investigation of specific topics.  In fact, boutique publications are almost always advocacy journalism, whereas objective journalism tends more toward "middle brow" publications, i.e., reporting daily news, rather than in-depth investigation of a narrow topic.  But good investigative journalism by boutique publications best serves as a supplement to daily news rather than a substitute.  The in-depth nature of boutique publications comes at a serious cost to the breadth of middle-brow, daily news publications.  This breadth is necessary for an informed citizenry.

In short, what you get on social media is not real journalism.  It is parasitic on real journalism.  If the host dies, even the minimal value of news from social media will die with it.  Boutique journalism can offer valuable in-depth information on a narrow topic, but without broad-based, reliable reporting of the daily news, boutique journalism lacks the context to give it meaning.  

Elon Musk wants to kill real journalism.  We shouldn't be helping him.