In mass media’s death throes

The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread:

In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been criticizing him, Jay Caspian Kang shares an important insight about the falling power of the press. But I come to a different conclusion.

Kang says that media are weakened and that’s what makes it easy for Trump and now Biden alike to attack them. I say what it shows instead is that as media realize they have lost the ability to set the agenda, their response is to shout louder and more often. That is what we see every day in The New York Times.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I chronicle — nay, celebrate — the death of mass media and the insult of the idea of the mass. Kang makes me see that I next need to examine mass media’s behavior in their death throes. They are not accustomed to being talked back to, by their subjects or by the public. They respond with resentment. They dig in. 

Journalists have never been good at listening. That is why Carrie Brown and I started a program in Engagement Journalism at CUNY (now moving to Montclair State): to teach journalists to listen. In all the wagon-circling by The Times’ Kahn and Sulzberger, The Post’s Lewis, The New Yorker’s Remnick, CNN’s Zaslav, we see a failure from the top to listen to and learn from criticism.

Kang likens Trump/right-wing and Biden/liberal press criticism but they could not be more different. Trump et al want to destroy the institutions of journalism, education, and government itself. Biden and liberals wish to improve the press. We are begging for a better Times. But The Times can’t hear that over the sound of wagons circling. 

As I also write in Gutenberg, we find ourselves in a paradoxical time when the insurrectionists formerly known as “conservatives” try to destroy the institutions they once wished to conserve, putting progressives in the position not of reforming but instead of protecting those institutions. 

When I criticize The Times —and Kang quotes me doing so — it pains me terribly, for I have devoted my life to journalism and long held up The Times as our standard. No more. It is failing journalism & democracy. I fear the incumbents may be beyond reform & require replacement.

By the way, the incumbents of journalism know this. That is why they invest in lobbyists to pass legislation in New York, California, Washington (State and next DC), Canada, and Australia to benefit themselves at the expense of the media — community, nonprofit, startup, digital — that would replace them. More on that another day. 

So I am glad that Biden is finally criticizing The Times and its mass-media peers, if not yet by name. I am glad he rejects the fair-weather platformed pundits, moneyed executives (corporations), and elites (Clooney) who reject him now. In trying to dismiss him, they only make him more progressive.

The New Yorker headline over Kang’s column calls Biden’s criticism of the press “cynical.” It is anything but. It is an overdue and proper response to the cynical exercise of — as Kang makes me understand — the dying power of The Times et al. No one elected Sulzberger, Kahn, Lewis, Zaslav — or Remnick — to run the nation. Millions of us voted for Biden to do so. 

Some on the socials insist that The Times etc. want Trump to win. I’ve said that is a simplistic conspiracy theory. I’ve thought they want chaos: something for them to cover. Now Kang makes me think instead they want to recapture their lost agenda and influence: their power. 

Kang closes: “If Biden believes he is the last chance for democracy in America, perhaps he should start acting like it.” That should be said of those in charge of America’s legacy mass media: If you think you can save democracy, then start acting like it.

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