No one knows what to do.
This is not a new development. No one has known what to do for quite some time. But it is nonetheless the case that no one knows what to do — what to do about distrust of traditional journalism, what to do about the crushing compost heap of biased “news” sources, how to reconcile that the latter is free and the former can’t be.
I often say that I got out of the habit of making predictions in November 2016, though that’s just a sort of tactless wink; I make predictions all the time. But I try to do so with care and caveats, less as predictions than as efforts to identify the sides of the die and, maybe, whether it’s loaded. So this will not be a presentation of predictions, as such, but instead a consideration of what must happen with journalism in 2024 — what to do at least in the microcosm.
The media must do better at defending itself.
For too long, traditional media outlets have seemingly extended the idea of observing the world from an objective distance to themselves, as though there’s something inappropriate or gauche about standing up for our own reporting. That sort of indifference, the refusal to give oxygen to criticism, was relatively effective for a long time, just as it generally worked for businesses and political actors.
That era is over. The era of letting our work speak for itself is over. We need to stand up for our work and defend our work. We need to stand up for our peers’ work and our competitors’ work. We cannot fight the battle for truth and for our own reputations through disappointed silence, any more than an army can engage its enemy with careful, detailed descriptions of weapons. We need to actually fight, to engage lies about our work and to combat efforts to depict it as dishonest or biased. This probably means rethinking core elements of what reputable news organizations do, from communications to corrections. But it needs to be done.
We need to recognize, too, that these attacks take different forms and pose different threats.
Huffy, tsking criticism is one form. There’s a market, particularly on the left, for demonstrations of how the media simply isn’t meeting the moment, as though we are all blind to the wolves in the woods. There are people — people I don’t need to name — who make careers on picking out imprecise or incomplete headlines or ledes and harrumphing about them as they promote their newsletters. This has its place, sure, but the problem with becoming a complaint salesman is that you always need to gin up new complaints, fair or not.
This erodes trust.
It is past time for us to call this game out for what it is. Those who play it rely on an audience that has been primed by years of exposure to loosely applied terms like “both-sidesism” and “access journalism” to feel intellectually included in those complaints — complaints that seem like one of few useful ways to combat a sense of social collapse.
Which brings us to the more dangerous threat.
Attacks on the media have never been bounded by politics. The two overlap, certainly, particularly in recent years. But there have always been business owners or criminals who are happy to see the media pilloried.
What has changed is that there is now an omnipresent rumble of dismissal and hatred and violence, largely from the right. This comes from the politically prominent, sure — again, I don’t need to use any names — and from those they empower directly. But it also comes from countless other people, people who feel emboldened to hate reporting that challenges them and to see those reporters as a threat.
In part because we spent so long ignoring the way in which we and our work were misrepresented, the bubble that surrounds and protects a surreal worldview has inflated and strengthened. There are now more voices reinforcing the same false ideas, making those ideas seem more true and true ideas more false. This is kindling for fury at our work.
We have to confront it. We have to confront it now. We have to recognize that our ability to defend ourselves weakens, however slightly, every day — just as we quietly recognize that it may weaken dramatically, soon.
No one knows what to do to save journalism. But, aversion to predictions notwithstanding, I can assure you that doing nothing to defend journalism from either slow erosion or violent explosion is a way to ensure that journalism collapses far more rapidly.
Philip Bump is a national columnist for The Washington Post.
