A needier media

The ongoing lament of the out-of-touch political class

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking with people in various branches of the media—journalists, editors and the like—about the state of the industry and I’ve also been reading recent research on news consumption. I have been following closely the debates around the way in which the Presidential candidates in the United States are using legacy and non-traditional media as part of their campaigns, and what those arguments are telling us about the state of play.

The very idea of what “media” and “journalism” even are these days is what I have been trying to get my head around, and I am increasingly convinced that 99% of the headline discussions about these matters are misleading, mired in a fundamental misunderstanding of how media today actually function.

This was brought home to me when I read this article about regulating AI, which makes the point that ‘“AI” is an unscientific, over-simplified label for evolving applications of computing. The applications we call AI are so numerous, so diverse, and so indistinguishable from computing as to render the concept of “AI governance” meaningless.’¹

I think something similar could be said for our understanding of media and journalism, that our labels and our thinking are oversimplified, and, in fact, I began this discussion in my 2018 book The Future of Everything (from which this newsletter takes its name). Back then, I posed the idea of “fusion media” as an alternative frame:

We are still in the habit of talking about new media and old media, but I think it is time we broke that habit. ‘Old media’ was the period of centralised control of the news and the dominance of a number of big newspapers, television and radio stations. It is over. ‘New media’ describes the transformation that occurred when traditional newsgathering services began to digitise their content and make it available online. It describes the period of disaggregation, of an explosion of new forms – everything from the blog to the meme, to the podcast, to the listicle – and the rise of the audience. But the era of new media is over too. We have now entered a period I call ‘fusion media’, in which new media platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter coexist with the old media of television, radio and newspapers. Journalism happens in a hybridised environment, where traditional reporting mingles online with the actions and habits of an audience able themselves to shape, distribute and create content. This new space brings together amateurs and professionals in a way that wasn’t previously possible and creates new and different relationships of power between the media and its audience and, most importantly, between the media and politics.

Dunlop, Tim . The Future of Everything : Big, audacious ideas for a better world (pp. 79-80). NewSouth. Kindle Edition.

So much discussion of what is wrong with the media acts as if the main problem is getting the “mainstream” to do a better job, and we are regaled with endless pieces—from essays to social media posts—suggesting that everything would be all right if we could just get journalists to do a better job. And look, I’m not saying these legacy organisations shouldn’t be held to certain standards, or that people shouldn’t pick them up on their many failings. But I am saying that getting the NYTimes, or whoever, to write better headlines or to stop “sanewashing” Donald Trump isn’t going to save us. Not by itself.

Despite the ongoing criticism of legacy media, there is still a tendency to hold up what they do as “proper” journalism, while everything else that happens online—from blogs, to podcasts, to newsletters like this—are dismissed as lesser or somehow illegitimate. Social media is so demonised that governments like the one Anthony Albanese runs can be convinced to ban children from using it when there is almost no rigorous evidence to support the claims of harm that are being used to justify such regulation.

The endless discussion of who is and who isn’t a journalist, about the role of influencers versus “proper journalists” (it used to be bloggers versus journalists) is also a distraction. So, while I think that journalism is a noble and legitimate profession that has a skillset that can be studied and learned and practiced, the reality is that the lines between it and other forms of research and writing blur to such an extent that we must allow some flexibility in the categories, which in turn forces us to think beyond the usual parameters of journalism as being a fourth estate, a watchdog on power or any of the other standard defences.

You can complain all you want that Kamala Harris went on the Call Her Daddy podcast and you can complain that by traditional standards it wasn’t hard-hitting enough, but the truth is it was an excellent interview that was more informative than 90% of so-called mainstream interviews by so-called proper journalists. As analyst and critic Dan Barrett noted on his Substack newsletter: “There is no way that I ever would have seen a presidential candidate interviewed for 40 minutes without interruption on women’s bodily autonomy on broadcast TV.”

Let that sink in.

The fact is, proper journalists are really bad at some things and the structures of traditional media openly mitigates, in too many instances, against honest reporting. In clinging to their shallow version of objectivity, they paint a picture of politics that often ignores objective reality. Whether it is the appalling coverage of the Iraq War and the misinformation about Saddam’s WMD; the free run given to Donald Trump in 2016 that continues to this day despite all we now know about him; or the disgraceful, one-sided coverage of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon, our legacy media is just as likely to be an apologist for power as it is to hold it to account.

In her recent YouTube clip about the launch of her new Substack newsletter, UserMag, journalist Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz)—who has written about tech and the online space for the Washington Post and the New York Times, amongst other legacy outlets—completely nailed the problems that arise in this particular beat of journalism; and what she says about tech speaks to bigger industry problems. While acknowledging the many great journalist who work in the area—and Australia, mainly through The Guardian and Crikey is blessed with quite of few of them—she lays out clearly the ways in which traditional media fail to properly understand the topic. It is one of the best summaries of the current malaise that I’ve heard.

Lorenz explains that she is leaving legacy media because “I was so frustrated by the way traditional media was covering the internet. Traditional media smeared bloggers. They dismissed online fandoms; they ignored the now nearly half a trillion-dollar content creator industry. They mocked the communities that women were building online, and they just basically, fundamentally were unable to grasp how the Internet was upending our culture economy and entire political system.”

“The traditional press struggle to cover this story,” she goes onto say, “not because they didn't have the resources, but because they fundamentally failed to understand online culture, and I would argue they still don't.”

I would further argue that they have a huge conflict of interest, that what is happening is a case of it being difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it, but Lorenz’s basic point remains.²

She points out that “we now live in this world where politicians can post their way into office, where memes fuel the stock market, where the boundaries between mainstream culture and internet culture are so deeply intertwined that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The internet isn't just another beat. It's a living, breathing ecosystem that transforms rapidly and unpredictably. The pace the culture, the very nature of how information spreads online is so fundamentally different than anything that ever came before.”

Encouragingly, she also addresses the issue of objectivity versus transparency and I think the approach she articulates around transparency is much healthier than the traditional media’s approach.³ I agree with her when she says that “To me, this transparency is the essence of trust in journalism.”

Where I am a little more concerned with what Lorenz says is about the ability of the individual journalist to hold power to account. She says, “By going independent, I hope to do more of what I love, helping people understand the world around them, inspiring them to build a better internet, exposing online radicalization, holding power to account,” and I wonder how realistic that is as general rule, across the full range of beats that cover institutional power.

As journalist and creator David Simon told Congress back in 2009:

[H]igh-end journalism — that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place — is a profession; it requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. … I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.

Dunlop, Tim. The New Front Page: new media and the rise of the audience. Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. Kindle Edition.

As you can see, I quoted that in my 2013 book about “new media” and I think the basic premise still holds. Powerful institutions need other powerful institutions to hold them to account, and I am still not convinced that individual journalists can fulfil that role in the way that Lorenz is suggesting.

Nonetheless, since Simon gave that testimony, the nature of the alternative media world has changed drastically, especially in its ability to generate income, and sites as various as Unmade Media, Zeteo and Michael West Media show that the space is capable of achieving an institutional clout well beyond what seemed possible in the early days of blogging.⁴

In arguing all this, I am not saying they we still don’t need a strong and vibrant fourth estate, only that what we mean by that has to be expanded beyond the walls of the legacy media. And to the extent legacy media remains the cornerstone institution of that watchdog role, then they have to reinvent themselves from the ground up, and as I have said many times before, they show no evidence of being able to do that.

Recently journalist and author Rick Perlstein spoke to journalism students and made these points: one, that Trump-like authoritarians will not hesitate to close down critical media, and two, that this “[new] generation of journalists faces the staggering burden of reconceptualizing their profession’s inherited rules for delivering fairness and accuracy. Not to do journalism in a way that helps Trump lose, but to do it in a way that lets news consumers accurately grasp this election’s stakes.”

I would suggest that a key feature of this reinvention is to embrace fusion media and work with, not against your audience in order to shore-up the whole idea of journalism as a watchdog on power. That approach will lighten the “staggering burden” Perlstein mentions, and this is precisely what I think the likes Taylor Lorenz are trying to do, and more power to them.

The fact is, the mainstream media has been hugely influential in shaping everything we know about politics—for most of us, our relationship to politics is completely mediated—and it has been far from a benign influence. The new tools of communication, from email to social media to the Substack newsletter, have challenged the primacy the legacy media’s role and in so doing they have unpicked the settled nature of our politics more generally. This is obviously a threat to those who have benefitted from the traditional dispensation, and they know it, and this, too, distorts the discussion in a way that the traditional media—one of the beneficiaries of the status quo—just can’t respond to honestly.

Former Secretary of State, John Kerry, for instance, recently lamented at the World Economic Forum (WEF) that “It’s really hard to govern today” because of social media, which makes it almost impossible “in terms of building consensus around any issue.” He then goes on to paint social media in entirely negative terms, and while only an idiot would deny the misinformation possibilities inherent in the new platforms, the default presumption (actually overt in Kerry’s comments) that legacy media is somehow free of these problems is just as idiotic.

You can’t help but feel that what people like Kerry are really lamenting is not just misinformation and the difficulty of building a consensus but alternative voices in general. It is the lament of a ruling class from whom people are increasingly turning away, the blinkered and privileged view of a status quo that has lost touch with those on whose behalf they are meant to govern.

And make no mistake, audiences are appalled at the way in which the legacy media does its job and increasingly, they are not paying attention.⁵

I repeat: we are now in the space of fusion media and it doesn’t make sense—it is positively dangerous—to think about media or politics in outdated ways. To not recognise the failings of legacy media. To pretend that “social media” is the source of all our ills. It certainly doesn’t make sense for the political class to dismiss these new spaces as nothing more than sites of mis/disinformation and try and ban children from accessing them, though, of course, this is the exactly sort of knee-jerk, anti-democratic behaviour they are engaging in.

This tendency extends well beyond the mediasphere and into the way in which politicians increasingly pursue defamation claims or seek to close down public expressions of dissent with draconian anti-protest laws. Once they lose control of the distribution and content of public knowledge, the political class inevitably find more authoritarian ways to “control the narrative”.⁶

Where does all this leave us?

As we continue to watch the controlled demolition of traditional Australian politics, as the two-party systems collapses in on itself, spreading a confusing cloud of dust and debris, the mainstream media struggles to describe what is in front of their eyes. The old is dying and the new is struggling to be born, but bugger me, it is being born.

The community independents that emerged so strongly at the 2022 election, for example, are both cause and effect of this changing media environment. They are a way for people to engage with politics in a more unmediated way, to go around the usual gatekeepers and tastemakers of the political sphere and find meaning in potentially new sorts of politics. But they only become possible in this new media environment. There is, in other words, a fundamental link between the way we organise public knowledge in our societies and the sort of politics we end up getting.

What is happening with the community independents and the changing media environment is far from a perfect undertaking—tending to favour, at this stage, wealthy electorates and interest groups—but we should recognise the change for what it is, a loud cry for something better.

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1. The link comes from Peter Lewis’s latest newsletter.

2. I am paraphrasing the famous quote by journalist and novelist, Upton Sinclair.

3. James Livingston has a great discussion of this issue here and here. In fact, there are a bunch of articles at his site that get into this.

4. To give you some idea of what is possible, The Financial Times reported recently on the media startup owned by former NYTimes columnist (and rightwng ratbag), Barri Weiss:

Weiss is one of the best connected media executives in the US and has quickly grown a devoted audience for her website and newsletter in an increasingly crowded US digital media market.

The Free Press raised about $15mn in its most recent fundraising, according to two people close to the process, valuing it at about $100mn.

The fundraise was backed by multiple wealthy individuals, according to one of these people. Weiss has previously raised money from investors such as venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks.

5. Note that this is not the same thing as saying people are disengaged: it is more complicated than that. They are disengaged from business-as-usual politics and the way in which the mainstream media chooses to cover it.

6. Antisemitism and Islamophobia envoys, as deployed by the Albanese Government, are part of the same power play, a way of fobbing off complaints and isolating them. As Daniel Hurst reported in the Guardian: ‘According to the terms of reference for both positions, obtained under freedom of information laws, the Department of Home Affairs will provide “strategic communications and policy support” but not back their public commentary.

‘“All communications of the Special Envoy will be attributed to the Special Envoy and not the Department of Home Affairs, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs or the Australian Government as a whole,” both documents state.’