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At some point, round about 2013-14, a loud faction of the press discovered that what remained of its dwindling power was narrative authority, at least among the People Who Matter. It has seemed at times since that it’s been flexed just to show it, even when provably false. https://twitter.com/meghan_daum/status/1360630373747744771
What was shocking, disorienting, and ultimately disillusioning for me was how quickly the old guard all but collapsed in the face of that challenge.
My guess is that the evisceration of the business model over the preceding 5-10 years and the technological forces that did it rotted the institutional defenses (the objectivity ideal, truth, fairness, and uh, tenure, by which I mean old journalists not bought out/shitcanned)
That were so quickly overrun by what @wesyang calls the successor ideology.
those high principles of journalism had been under heavy attack at least since the Iraq War (including by me, and often justifiably so) but they had kept the 90+% ideological monoculture of newsrooms at least relatively in check. Chesterton’s Fence, I suppose.
Or maybe these defenses weren’t a Maginot Line and that was the way it was all along—it just got easier to notice and/or accelerated thanks to technological forces. That’s the one that really bugs me.
And of course, maybe the problem is just mine and that of a likeminded minority
