Learning the Truth

For John, BLUF:  Our news sources seem to be a bit of a mess.  While we may trust this or that source, in the end they are all a bit questionable.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Sign of the Times

Here is the sub-headline:

When the media’s credibility collapsed, the New York Times led the way

From The Spectator World, by Writer Batya Ungar-Sargon, 18 October 2021, 7:45 pm.

Here is the lede plus four:

The New York Times entered the digital era under duress.  In 2011, the Times erected a paywall in what it called a ‘subscription-first business model’.  The gamble was that readers would want to pay for quality journalism. It was a risk, and at first it didn’t seem to be paying off: after a challenging 2014, the company shed 100 people from the newsroom in buyouts and layoffs. A.G. Sulzberger, who was getting ready to replace his father as publisher, commissioned an in-house report, its title ‘Innovation’. The report made it very clear who was to blame.  A journalist’s job, the report said, no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news.  To compensate for the ‘steady decline’ in advertising revenue due to digitization, ‘the wall dividing the newsroom and business side’ had to come down. The ‘hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom’, the report said, so the Times should be ‘encouraging reporters and editors to promote their stories’.

Of course, journalists have always been aware who their readers are and have catered to them, consciously and unconsciously.  But it was something else entirely to suggest that journalists should be collaborating with their audience to produce ‘user-generated content’, as the report put it.  ‘Innovation’ presaged a new direction for the paper of record: become digital-first or perish.

The Times invested in new subscription services like NYT Cooking and NYT Games, and introduced live events, conferences and foreign trips.  The paper hired an ad agency to work in-house and began allowing brands to sponsor specific lines of reporting.  Journalists were asked to accompany advertisers to conferences and were pushed to collaborate more closely with the business side, something many of the old-school editors were loath to do.  The executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, resisted strenuously.  She was given the boot.

And then came Trump.

This is all very sad.  And, it seems, we are breaking down regionally with regard to who we trust to tell us the truth.  I am embedded in the coastal news milieu, although I have lost my deep faith in The Old Gray Lady, The Wash Post and The Boston Globe, those symbols of Coastal Elite Progressivism.  I would say Russiagate was important to this and the Hunter Biden Laptop sealed the deal.  They no longer trust me, and thus I no longer trust them.

One wonders how it will all sort out in the long run.

In the mean time, it is incumbent upon the Citizenry to review a number of news sources and to not get captured by any one of them.  We need to be testing for the truth.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff