Journalism died this week at the age of however old you think it was. The cause was listed as “complications from metrics-driven editorial strategy,” though those who knew it well suspect the underlying condition was a decades-long refusal to distinguish between information and entertainment while insisting both deserved a Pulitzer. It is survived by several hundred podcasters who call themselves journalists because they own microphones, a cable news industry that has not noticed the passing, and approximately twelve local newspaper reporters who are too busy covering city council meetings to attend the funeral.
The species is not extinct. But locating one requires patience, a willingness to look past the algorithmic feed, and an acceptance that what you find will probably be working at a publication you have never heard of, earning a salary that qualifies them for public assistance. This guide is intended for the amateur journalist-watcher who wishes to distinguish genuine specimens from the more common varieties that have adapted to survive on click metrics alone. Warning: sightings are rare and should be reported to someone who will believe you.
Let us examine the patient. Cause of death: the invention of a format that requires the human nervous system to remain in a state of perpetual emergency in order to sustain advertising revenue. The mechanism was elegant in its cruelty. Take something called “breaking news”; once reserved for events that actually broke something; and apply it to everything. The weather. A celebrity’s lunch. The President’s commute. A tweet about the President’s commute. The response to the tweet about the President’s commute. Every hour, a new emergency. Every emergency, a new reason not to look away. The patient did not die from lack of information. It died from being force-fed information until it forgot what information was.
There was a time, dimly remembered if at all, when a headline was a summary. It told you what the article contained so you could decide whether to read it. Then someone discovered that a headline could also be a weapon. Specifically, a weapon aimed at the part of your brain that feels an emotion before it can name it. The headline stopped summarizing. It started provoking. The article; once the point of the enterprise; became an afterthought, a CYA paragraph buried beneath the fold that technically contained the facts the headline had stretched past recognition. You shared the headline. You felt something because of the headline. You did not read the article. The headline did not need you to.
Somewhere along the line, the profession confused having no position with having a principled position. The result is a kind of journalism that treats every claim as equally weighty regardless of its relationship to evidence, not because the journalist believes this, but because taking a side might alienate a demographic that the advertising department has identified as valuable. This is not neutrality. Neutrality would require weighing the claims and reporting which one the evidence supports. What we have instead is a performance of neutrality; a costume worn to avoid having to make a judgment that might cost money. The spine is not missing. It has been surgically removed and billed to the marketing budget.
If one person says two plus two equals four and another says it equals seventeen, the journalistic obligation is not to report that “opinions differ on basic arithmetic” and let the audience decide. But this is exactly what the both-sides doctrine demands: that every claim be granted an equally-weighted counterclaim, regardless of the distribution of evidence, because balance; defined as equal time, not proportional accuracy; is the highest journalistic virtue. The problem is that not all claims distribute evenly across the evidence landscape. Some claims are standing on a mountain of data. Others are standing on a tweet their cousin sent them. Treating both as though they occupy the same epistemological elevation is not fairness. It is a category error wearing a press pass.
At some point between Woodward and Bernstein and whatever this is, the profession forgot its job description. Not the lofty parts; the parts about speaking truth to power and comforting the afflicted; those it remembered well enough to put on coffee mugs. It forgot the tedious parts. The parts about showing up. About staying in the room after the cameras leave. About verifying something before publishing it. About being boring in service of being correct. The assignment was never to be interesting. Interesting is a byproduct of good reporting. The assignment was to find out what happened and tell people, accurately, in a way they could verify if they wanted to. Everything else; the brands, the personalities, the hot takes, the sponsored content disguised as journalism; everything else is just the funeral arrangements.
