En liten observation som endast tangentiellt berör vårt ämne är verkligheten för de medier där mediekriget skulle bedrivas. Jag tror inte att vi kan hoppas på en tillnyktring inom rådande paradigm. Istället måste parallella institutioner etableras, av en högre kvalitet än dagens. Denna (lätt vänstervinklade) text förklarar varför WaPo och NYT har fått ökad cirkulation i Trumperan — inte beror det på objektiv rapportering.
Three leading digital outlets—BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice—announced layoffs that left many accomplished journalists unemployed. The fingers of blame quickly pointed to the great bogeymen of our media age—Facebook and Google—and warned about a threat to democracy. After all, if the most savvy and avant-garde of the new digital journalists can’t make a living, what hope is there for old-school newspapers? To many, the health of our democracy is inextricably tied to the health of our journalism: If the latter begins to die, the former must immediately follow.Den stora rubbningen för oss svenskar är vår invanda tro och fromma förhoppning att snart skall de stora, SVT, DN, TV4 osv börja rapportera objektivt om verkligheten. Vår journalistik rör sig tvärtom allt längre från saklighet och ägnar sig nästan uteslutande åt agendasättning och vinkling. Något som stör är såklart att vi svenskar tvingas finansiera detta via skattsedeln.
That’s a curious sentiment, because if you were to magically teleport the architects of our democracy—men like Ben Franklin or Samuel Adams (newspapermen, both of them)—to today, they’d find our journalistic ecosystem, with its fact-checked both-sides-ism and claims to “objectivity,” completely unrecognizable. Franklin wrote under at least a dozen pseudonyms, including such gems as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, and pioneered the placement of advertising next to content. Adams (aka Vindex the Avenger, Philo Patriae, et al.) was editor of the rabidly anti-British Boston Gazette and also helped organize the Boston Tea Party, when activists dumped tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay tax on it. Adams duly covered the big event the next day with absolute aplomb. They’d have no notion of journalistic “objectivity,” and would find the entire undertaking futile (and likely unprofitable, but more on that soon).
If, however, you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly. A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents, or a partisan vehicle built around himself like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, or an occasional columnist gig at a less partisan outlet like Politico, or a popular podcast where he’d shoot the political breeze with other Sons of Liberty, à la Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America. “Journalism dying, you say?” Ben Franklin v 2.0 might say. “It’s absolutely blooming, as it was in my day.”
What is dying, perhaps, is that flavor of “objective” journalism that purports to record an unbiased account of world events. We take journalistic objectivity to be as natural and immutable as the stars, but it’s a relatively short-lived artifact of 20th-century America.
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Trump has been a boon for digital subscriptions at outlets like the Times and The Washington Post. Last week, the Times reported a record $708 million in digital revenue for 2018, helped by a 27 percent jump in subscriptions. It’s heartwarming to think the American public rallied to support abstract principles like the free press by subscribing to the Times. In reality, they forked over their hard-earned money because they wanted to see a highly unpopular president roasted endlessly, and they got what they wanted.
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Journalists pining for a return to their golden age of advertising-supported journalism are disturbingly similar to aged Midwestern factory workers seeking a return to the time when high-school-educated labor could afford middle-class lives with total job security. Both golden ages resulted from a unique set of economic and political circumstances that are now gone and impossible to reproduce. Those who claim democracy requires the precise flavor of journalism we’ve known for a century or so will have to explain how our republic survived the century preceding.
