The collapse of the news industry

The decline of the media is taking a crucial tool that was once its calling card, its soul, down with it

COMMMENT | JACK SHAFER | Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger.

Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend. It causes some people to subscribe and others to cancel their subscriptions, and gives journalists the necessary courage and direction to do their best work. Swagger was once journalism’s calling card, but in recent decades it’s been sidelined. In some venues, reporters now do their work with all the passion of an accountant, and it shows in their guarded, couched and equivocating copy. Instead of relishing controversy, today’s newsrooms shy away from publishing true stories that someone might claim cause “harm”  that modern term that covers all emotional distress  or even worse, which could offend powerful interests.

Every aging generation of journalists must have complained, at one point or another, about swagger’s demise. But this time, the fall is demonstrable. A recent piece by Max Tani in Semafor attributed the new timidity to legal threats from subjects of news stories. “In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America,” Tani writes, citing the risk of lawsuits and increased insurance premiums. The new equation “has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.” Tani cited several examples of publications backing down, including Esquire and the Hollywood Reporter backing off from a critical story about podcaster Jay Shetty, the surrender by Reuters and other outlets to India’s legal demands about an exposé, and the unpublishing of a biting Formula 1 story in Hearst’s Road & Track.

Perhaps the clearest marker of swagger going AWOL is the fact that nobody has risen to replace the late Christopher Hitchens on the lecture circuit, on cable news, in books and in the pages of our best publications. If he were resurrected today, who would hire him? And if they did, how long would it take for the staff to petition the bosses to fire him?

The loss of journalistic swagger can be measured partly in numbers. A generation ago, the profession summoned cultural power from employing almost a half-million people in the newspaper business alone. Now, more than two-thirds of newspaper journalist jobs have vanished since 2005, and it is widely accepted that the trend will continue in the coming decades as additional newspapers and magazines falter and slip into the publications graveyard.

But the loss is about more than just head count. The psychological approach journalists bring to their jobs has shifted. At one time, big city newspaper editors typified by the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee strode their properties like colossuses, barking orders and winning deference from all corners. Today’s newspaper editor comes clothed in the drab and accommodating aura of a bureaucrat, often indistinguishable from the publishers for whom they work. These top editors, who once ruled their staffs with tyrannical confidence, now flinch and cringe at the prospect of newsroom uprisings like the ones we’ve seen at NBC News, the New York Times, CNN and elsewhere. You could call these uprisings markers of swagger, but you’d be wrong. True swagger is found in works of journalism, not protests over hirings or the publication of a controversial piece.

Treading softly so as not to rile anybody, these editors impose that style on their journalists, many of whom do their work in a defensive crouch instead of the traditional offensive stance. Often throttled by their top editors, today’s journalists also find themselves fighting a second front against politicians who now direct their campaigns at reporters as much as they do their opponents. The public appears to hate them too, according to polls that claim they’re not trustworthy. Inside the newsroom, they face standards editors who have steadily expanded their stylebook of banned words in a crusade to reduce to zero the chances that readers might take umbrage at news copy.

Thanks to technological trends, cultural shifts, business and advertising changes, and legal rumblings, journalism and journalists have lost the centrality in America that was theirs for almost a century and a half. The press has become no weakling. Obviously, good work is still done but with blunted rather than sharpened teeth compared with previous decades. Nor will the craft vaporize upon some near future event horizon. But like its other sister institutions of influence  Hollywood, religion, the novel, the courts, public schools, et al.  it no longer strides with its former confidence. Ask any journalist about their depleted esprit de corps and you will hear a litany of lamentations.

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Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer. He has written commentary about the media industry and politics for decades and was previously a columnist for Reuters and Slate.

Source: Politico