Why Doesn't Anyone Trust the Media?

The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster than jobs in coal mining: since 2005, the United States has lost more than one third of its newspapers and nearly three quarters of its newspaper journalism positions. Furthermore, recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams.

Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December, ABC News agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit he had filed against the network. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, later settled its own Trump lawsuit, also for $16 million, three weeks before securing Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump has since filed a host of additional suits against media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and threatened the broadcast licenses of major networks.

All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? What essential functions does professional journalism serve that cannot be replaced by other forms of information gathering and dissemination? And why, finally, do Americans view the media with such skepticism?

Harper’s Magazine invited four leading media observers to grapple with these questions and to consider how we got here in the first place, seeking neither to defend nor condemn wholesale, but to examine honestly what—if anything—we lose if traditional media continues on its current trajectory.

The following Harper’s Forum is based on a conversation that took place at the NoMo SoHo hotel, in New York City, on July 23, 2025. Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll served as moderator.

Participants:

JELANI COBB

Jelani Cobb is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.

TAYLOR LORENZ

Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist and the founder of User Mag, a Substack publication. She is the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

JACK SHAFER

Jack Shafer is a media critic who has written for Politico, Reuters, and Slate.
He previously edited Washington City Paper and SF Weekly.

MAX TANI

Max Tani is a reporter at Semafor covering media, politics, and technology.
He previously covered the White House for Politico.

i. conspiracy, culpability, covid, and collapse

christopher carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?

taylor lorenz: Well, I think there’s a lot of culpability on the media side. Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. These media outlets do not center the lives of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, or the working class. The civil-rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has done an excellent job reporting on how legacy news outlets push pro-police messaging. He looks at coverage of issues like crime surges or shoplifting epidemics—for instance, the widely reported but unsubstantiated claim that shoplifting forced Walgreens to close stores.

I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.

jelani cobb: I agree that the media has made a lot of mistakes. As you suggest, Taylor, there are some obvious ones, such as the credulous coverage that facilitated the Iraq War or, I would add, the self-interested coverage of the 2016 election.

But I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them. The reason is that, 99 percent of the time, when someone says, “The media won’t tell you this,” it’s because the thing they’re talking about is either not true or is not true in the way they conceive it to be. Or they have a pet conspiracy theory that no one else shares, and the media won’t validate their viewpoint.

I also think that it’s part of a broader institutional mistrust. If you look at the decline of trust in American institutions, it is overwhelmingly connected to the dynamics of local relationships.

Local news remains the most trusted segment, yet it has also eroded the most precipitously in the past twenty years. When we were in the midst of COVID, one of the interesting things Joe Biden said was to listen to your personal physician. That’s fine, except we live in a country where more than one hundred million people don’t have a primary-care physician—the medical establishment’s version of local news, the most trusted messenger.

The editor of the local newspaper, the reporter people are familiar with, the family physician who has taken care of you and your siblings—these figures have credibility in a way that large national institutions do not. Americans have never trusted large national institutions: in the nineteenth century, we didn’t trust the railroad monopolies; in the early twentieth century, we didn’t trust the newly corporatized banks. Today, when people think of a large, faceless, national institution, it’s more often than not the news media.

The crisis is that the collapse of the news business—brought on by the destruction of its three-legged stool of revenue from classified ads; retail advertising (captured by Google and Facebook); and subscriptions, the only leg still standing but one that has never covered journalism’s costs—has most severely damaged local outlets. Like the one hundred million Americans without a primary-care physician, we’ve lost the proximate, familiar institutions people actually trusted, leaving only the large, remote institutions that Americans have distrusted throughout our history.

lorenz: But I don’t think you can lay all the blame on Americans’ general distrust of remote institutions. I think of a story like Gaza: the mainstream media is so incredibly out of step with the public because people can get real-time, direct information about what’s actually going on. I believe that has a measurable effect on trust.

cobb: I’d put it slightly differently. Certainly there have been media failures in Gaza coverage—including the muted coverage of, for instance, the targeted killings of journalists in Gaza as part of the bigger story on civilian deaths. But, to me, Gaza is a classic example of split-screen coverage. By that I mean that outlets abroad and independent U.S. outlets have generally covered what’s happening there in far more detail than large U.S. outlets have—certainly more than American broadcast news has. At the very least, large U.S. outlets should be hammering home the fact that independent reporting has been prohibited by Israel, save for sanctioned embedded journalists working for a handful of outlets that obviously cannot be relied on for actual news gathering. You either have to tell the story or tell the public why you cannot tell the story.

max tani: You can certainly criticize how some media outlets have approached their coverage of the war—I’ve written about this quite a bit. But Taylor, I don’t know if I agree with the blanket statement that the mainstream media is out of step with the American public on Gaza. First, the public’s opinion has varied. Young people have been skeptical of Israel’s actions from the outset, but the public at large has really shifted on the war over the past year. And I think the coverage has mirrored that shift. There was an analysis done that showed that, during the first few months of the war, CNN took a very pro-Israel line. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published stories early on that relied largely on Israeli military claims. But I think it’s hard to say that the Times’ on-the-ground coverage over the past year has been pro-Israel. In fact, you hear this from the Israelis themselves: Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to sue the Times for defamation over its reporting on Gaza, and the paper has really taken heat from pro-Israel groups over their reporting on the hunger crisis there.

jack shafer: I would add that complaints that the mainstream press is out of step with the public do not automatically show that the mainstream press—a vast collective—is botching the story. The war began in 2023, and the quality of coverage since then, as Max suggests, has varied over time and across outlets. This is something that happens with big, evolving stories, making the various coverage miscues, flubs, and neglect less of a crisis of declining trust than evidence of how tangled and hairy it is to report from the battlefront.

carroll: So if the issue, Jack, isn’t necessarily one of coverage quality or being out of step with the public, what do you think actually explains the decline in trust?

shafer: I think we’re overlooking some important context here, which is that trust was the highest when the media really couldn’t be trusted. Gallup data on media trust goes back only to the early Seventies. Yet we know that in the Sixties, trust in the media was incredibly high.

And we know from history that in the Fifties and the early Sixties, newspapers were not telling the whole story. You would not find stories about race, for instance. Stories about race, sex, class, and inequality were not part of the editorial package. But people trusted those newspapers much more precisely because they gave them an inaccurate view of the world.

My friend Matthew Pressman wrote a book a few years ago called On Press: The Liberal Values that Shaped the News. He went back and looked at the New York Times of 1960 and compared it with the Times of 1980. Almost all the stories on page one in 1960 were about what the government said that it had done yesterday.

Flash forward to 1980. Pressman did the same analysis of page one. And the stories were still mostly about what the government had done. But now they included the Times’ interpretation of what the government had done and what it had said. And that interpretation wasn’t always something readers agreed with.

I’m of the belief that part of the decline of trust has been caused by the subject material that the newspaper of today—or, say, that of 1980 onward—presents to its readers. The sociologist Herbert J. Gans used to talk about how this evolution included stories about social and moral disorder.

You never read about suburban drug problems, things like that, on page one in the Sixties. But when newspapers shifted from reinforcing social order to documenting disorder in readers’ own communities, audiences responded by distrusting the institution that shattered their comforting myths. So I actually think that the decline of trust has to do with newspapers’ becoming more responsible, more accurate. Nobody I know would trade today’s newspaper for one from 1960.

carroll: But even if it’s true that a major factor in declining trust is journalism’s getting better at exposing uncomfortable truths, don’t we still have clear cases where the media got things demonstrably wrong? What about something like COVID coverage—was that a failure that eroded trust, or not?

tani: Well, look, I think these things are really messy and complicated. Obviously, we’re still learning a lot about the effects of COVID itself. It was an incredibly challenging topic to cover because the information kept changing, and the people providing that information often had agendas. I think the mistakes that the legacy media made when it projected certainty were the same ones that public-health officials made. The legacy media was, in some cases, afraid to break with the public-health officials and others who occupied the highest ranks of our government.

In many cases, we just didn’t know—and we should have admitted we didn’t really know. Most of the media, though not all, wrote off the lab-leak theory, for instance. In retrospect, reporters should have been more open-minded about that possibility and should not have been deterred by those who rejected the theory because they feared a rise in anti-Asian discrimination and violence, which happened anyway. It’s not the media’s job to protect the public from information that very well could be true. Certainty about how the virus spread, about the lack of a need for masks, about the vaccine’s ability to reduce transmission—I think many journalists should have hedged a bit more or informed audiences that we did not always have the full picture.

lorenz: Look at the difference between COVID coverage under Trump versus Biden: the media basically stopped covering COVID as a pandemic after Biden took office. It was appalling. Most people don’t know that more people died from COVID under Biden than under Trump, because Biden essentially came in and said, “COVID’s over. Everybody get back to work.” After all the moralizing from the media in the early days of COVID, under Biden everything was suddenly fine. “Actually, ignore everything that we just told you last year.” The mainstream media was, in my view, actively pushing dangerous misinformation, misleading people into believing COVID had disappeared, even though doctors treating patients warned that we were still in a raging pandemic with fewer available treatments. I think that broke a lot of people. The media should have held Biden more accountable—it’s too soft on the Democrats.

shafer: I would add that people have unreasonable expectations about science ever being settled. Obama sometimes used to cite something and say, “The debate is settled,” when, in fact, there’s no such thing as settled science. Karl Popper said that science is about conjecture and refutation.

So many beliefs that you have about medical care or health today are going to be blown out the window twenty years from now. You can talk to dentists or doctors about the sort of therapies that they subscribed to just ten or fifteen years ago. They seem barbaric because there’s a constant turnover in what is considered proper science.

It had been one hundred years since we’d had a pandemic like COVID. I have some sympathy for the public-health officials, but they didn’t self-correct as quickly as they could have.

cobb: And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, you have the very particular and complicated history of medical mandates in this country. I did a discussion with a journalist and medical ethicist named Harriet Washington. She wrote a fascinating book called Carte Blanche, about the patient’s right to consent and how it’s been systematically eroded.

One example she gave was the military’s anthrax-vaccination program. Leaders decided to have soldiers take what they believed to be inoculations that would prevent anthrax from making them as sick as it might otherwise—except it was an experimental, undertested vaccine that soldiers couldn’t refuse without facing discharge or court-martial. And, when a soldier refused, she ended up receiving a “less-than-honorable” discharge, as Washington put it.

There are plenty of other instances in which people were subjected to medical experiments under the guise of scientific necessity—without their knowledge or consent. It’s difficult to reconcile the history of these abusive medical mandates with those that came during COVID, which I actually thought were important. But try talking to someone who’s read Harriet Washington’s book, or who has a friend who’s read that book—or a friend of a friend, more likely—and saying, “Yes. Yes. Yes. All those things were terrible. But this time, it really is useful.” That might well be true, but it is definitely not convincing.

ii. “they smell blood in the water”

carroll: Let’s talk about what’s happening with press freedom—and how this might be related to the broader question of trust. ABC News paid Trump $16 million to settle his defamation suit over its anchor George Stephanopoulos’s remark that Trump was found “liable for rape” rather than sexual abuse. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, settled for $16 million over Trump’s lawsuit claiming that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to bolster her campaign—without admitting wrongdoing. The Wall Street Journal is now being sued for $10 billion over its report about a suggestive birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein that was apparently signed by Trump but that he denies writing. Trump has refiled his suit against the Des Moines Register, Gannett, the pollster J. Ann Selzer, and her company, alleging fraud over her pre-election poll showing Harris ahead in Iowa by three points before Trump won by thirteen. A billion dollars has been clawed back from public broadcasting. And Trump is now suggesting that the FCC revoke the licenses of NBC and ABC. How concerned should we be about the chilling effect this might have on journalism?

cobb: I think we should be exceedingly worried for all the reasons that you mentioned. Not only are those things real problems, but we don’t have a counterstrategy that would disincentivize any of it.

tani: Not to diminish the threats to press freedom that you describe here, but what worries me more is the lack of outrage, the lack of interest, and the lack of pushback by the general public. I think this reinforces what we already know: that we, in the media, don’t really have very many friends and allies out there.

cobb: Even among ourselves. When the Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool, no other news organization should have shown up for press briefings. There was a qualitatively higher degree of pushback when the Obama Administration excluded Fox News from pool coverage. We’ve seen nothing of the sort under Trump—no unified action that would demonstrate how seriously we take the issue of press freedom.

shafer: I think a lot of the weakness we see in media comes from corporate owners who bow to Trump for political reasons because they’re in a highly regulated industry. We saw it with the CBS case: Paramount needed FCC approval for its merger with Skydance, even if they deny any link between the lawsuit and the merger. The FCC is run by Trump’s appointee Brendan Carr, who has pretty enthusiastically embraced the president’s mission to combat what they call media bias. Paramount then settled for $16 million shortly before the FCC approved the merger, with Skydance also promising to eliminate DEI programs and install an ombudsman to monitor CBS for bias. I can’t imagine the CBS of old capitulating like this.

But I would also point out that, since the Twenties, we have generally seen expansions of First Amendment protections. Before then, the First Amendment was basically the weak sister among constitutional protections—courts rarely enforced it and regularly upheld convictions for political speech. But over the decades, through landmark cases, newspapers and broadcasters triumphed in court to expand these protections—look at New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, in 1964, which effectively protected criticism of public officials, or Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, in 1974, which protected editorial independence from compelled-speech requirements. Courts have expanded First Amendment protections far beyond what existed before World War I.

We still have stalwarts out there. David McCraw, the lead newsroom lawyer at the New York Times, responded to Trump Administration threats with the same answer that General Anthony McAuliffe gave at the Battle of the Bulge when the Nazis demanded surrender. He said, “Nuts!”

Even the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, is actually a very strong First Amendment body. So like everybody here at this table, I’m worried. But I think that what people don’t understand is that real journalists—real journalism organizations—fight the good fight.

cobb: In theory, that’s true. But in practice, the Trump Administration has been pitching a shutout. They’ve gotten away with virtually everything. And I think the legal attacks happen in the first place because people smell blood in the water. They sense that news organizations are not in a position to defend themselves given their waning influence, their enfeebled business model.

The other part of it is the mere expense of defense. Alberto Ibargüen, the former head of the Knight Foundation, talks about when, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Senate special counsel investigating the disclosure of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations demanded that NPR and Newsday identify where the information had come from.

They refused, and it escalated into a full legal battle that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this was more than thirty years ago. You can just bleed an organization. You can lose any number of lawsuits but still make news organizations incapable of defending themselves, even against frivolous lawsuits.

lorenz: And this is even more true of independent journalists. If I have a tough story, I freelance for a major outlet because I know that I need that legal protection. If it’s anything dicey, I’m going to publish it in the mainstream media and not in a newsletter, because of the liability.

I would like to see stronger protection. I would love to see national anti-SLAPP laws to protect independent creators who are doing journalistic work. Without protections, independent journalists are incredibly vulnerable to these kinds of lawsuits.

shafer: But libel law exists for a reason. If you’ve ever run a publication or been an editor, you realize that, if not for libel laws, journalists—some journalists—would not be as scrupulous, accurate, or fair, and as intelligent as you’d want them to be. What the Trump Administration is doing is deplorable. But in the case of ABC News, I think he had a case. It wasn’t open and shut, but he had a case. Stephanopoulos made a mistake.

What you need are news organizations like the New York Times, which fights back consistently. Yes, the First Amendment is in trouble and has opponents. But in terms of press freedom, we are probably freer than ever.

cobb: I’m not sure that’s the way to look at it. If you’re right, it’s not certain to be the case for very long, because of the chilling factor.

tani: And there’s no question that there’s an effect already. Just look at the amounts that news organizations are paying for libel insurance. I’ve talked to a number of people at major news organizations, and they’ve all said the same thing, which is that defamation insurance is much more expensive than it used to be. That’s telling you all you need to know.

The other important point when thinking about the capitulation of corporate media ownership is that, in the past, these organizations were important in terms of their ability to influence public debate and public sentiment. Now a lot of these organizations we’re talking about—CBS, ABC—have lost a significant amount of influence. It’s not worth it for their owners to defend them anymore.

That’s not to say that I don’t think that those organizations do important work. They do amazing work and amazing journalism. But there’s a question about whether people in power are scared of those organizations—of the power that they can wield.

iii. “it’s not great for the typesetter”

carroll: So we have an industry facing multiple crises: it isn’t widely trusted, it’s perceived as too weak to defend itself, and even its own backers are wavering. And now it must contend with another disruption: artificial intelligence. Publications are already using AI for transcription, research, and even writing some stories. Is this only going to deepen the crisis?

tani: Well, the obvious take is that the growing prevalence of AI will widen the gap between largely educated, skeptical audiences that value information direct from vetted sources versus those who fall for AI-generated slop on social media or fall down rabbit holes of what right now is a buggy technology prone to troubling hallucinations.

The other view, and the one that makes me more optimistic, is that the rise of AI creates an opportunity for trusted media institutions. AI needs reliable, accurate information to function. When it comes to breaking news, AI companies desperately need news outlets that provide accurate, vetted information. We already see that the biggest LLMs rely very heavily on information from traditional news organizations to answer queries about current events. If people who don’t normally consume accurate information are turning to AI, and AI is spitting back information from vetted news sources, that’s ultimately a good thing—so long as the tech platforms fairly compensate news outlets and publishers for that information.

carroll: But how likely are those platforms to offer fair compensation? This also raises the question of how the incorporation of AI is going to affect jobs in the industry—what’s at risk?

shafer: It’s not great for the typesetter. It’s not great for the person who just wants to write a flat story about a lawsuit or a hearing. But who at this table laments the loss of typesetter jobs, or the kid who ran through the newsroom at the command “copy” to move the copy? Personally, I think it presents an advantage for people trying to write now. It would have blown my mind to have come out of college or be stumbling around in my twenties and have the kind of research you can get out of ChatGPT’s premium tier—the same kind of shock that Jelani and I experienced when we first got our hands on the web. All of a sudden, the New York Times doesn’t have a leg up on you as a lesser-known writer. This is great. This is a wonderful development.

tani: I do think, though, that there’s obviously something that’s journalistically different between someone who is doing whatever job you were referring to—that didn’t exist when I was growing up—and writing up a hearing, which involves some actual mental processing. You’re getting the clips, you’re making an extra call as part of that story.

lorenz: And you’re getting knowledge of your beat. I used to write up tech earnings reports, and I learned a lot doing that. As we see AI eliminating jobs like this, entry-level jobs, I worry that the bar for entry is just getting higher and higher.

cobb: First, let me say that I don’t think our credibility will rise or fall with the fortunes of AI in the newsroom. I suspect that these disruptions will become commonplace fairly quickly—that is, we will develop new protocols that operate with AI as a presumption. But I actually disagree about the jobs. Entry-level work will exist; it will just look a lot different from how it does now. I do think that we are almost destined to see careless, sloppy usage of AI that will embarrass an individual reporter or a news organization because, as with lawyers, doctors, electricians, and any other line of work, there are good, diligent journalists and there are sloppy, lazy ones. The best-case scenario is that we have a public that is willing to note the difference between the two.

iv. five hundred thousand followers vs. a journalism degree

carroll: Let’s talk about where people are actually getting their news. Recent research shows that nearly 40 percent of adults under thirty get news from TikTok. About a third of all U.S. adults regularly get news on Facebook and YouTube, while 20 percent use Instagram. Among those getting news on TikTok, as many rely on influencers and celebrities as on actual journalists—and 84 percent of these news influencers have no background or affiliation with a news organization. In many cases, people aren’t seeking news; it arrives mixed with entertainment. Given this shift in how people—and especially young people—consume news, what should legacy media be doing?

tani: A really interesting thing to look at is the Nelk Boys’ interview with Benjamin Netanyahu. The Nelk Boys started out as viral pranksters on YouTube and have slowly evolved into conservative political activists. They were literally getting out the vote for Trump and even went onstage with him at a rally. They’re conservative-bro podcasters who are incredibly successful on YouTube. And they sat down with Benjamin Netanyahu to ask him about Gaza. Obviously, he just ran circles around them. And then, after they posted it, the interview backfired—they lost ten thousand subscribers in a day and ultimately livestreamed an apology.

And so I think it is incumbent on those of us who consider ourselves to be journalists not to just cede new platforms to people like that, not to think, Well, I’m good at writing a newsletter and so that’s the way I’m going to do things. We have to meet people where they are, which is on social media and on video, and try our best to get good at communicating with people in the spaces where they are engaged.

carroll: So who’s someone who’s good at this while not sacrificing journalistic rigor?

tani: Somebody like Pablo Torre, who recently has been doing investigative sports journalism on his independent podcast. He’s digging into stories that places like ESPN are staying away from because they are more concerned about their broadcasting agreements with the NFL, NBA, etc. And Torre is finding an audience because he’s filling that gap. His work is incredible, so much so that The Athletic, owned by the Times, recently signed him for a seven-figure deal. But Torre, of course, came up through traditional journalism. He worked at Sports Illustrated.

The challenge going forward is: Where are young journalists going to learn the craft that they can then take and use to invent something new on YouTube or on TikTok?

cobb: That question, Max, is a major challenge for journalism schools. Influencers are acting in a journalistic capacity whether they want to admit it or not. They are certainly exposing themselves to the liabilities that come with journalism. So for people who don’t see the need to spend a year in journalism school, where can we meet them? Do we put together a micro package of courses in journalism law and history and business that could teach best practices, how to protect yourself, how to report in hostile environments? Or maybe it’s a certificate program or a weeklong institute for influencers.

carroll: I wonder if the Nelk Boys would attend a weeklong journalism institute.

lorenz: Well, I think that many creators would probably love something like that. I get a lot of messages from content creators, and a common question has to do with getting cease-and-desist letters: Do I have to ask for information? What should I do? How should I say that? What is the protection? Three Twitch streamers are currently facing copyright-infringement lawsuits from a popular YouTuber. Would it help them to argue that they’re journalists? Would this afford them stronger protections under the law related to fair use and free speech? Content creators who don’t follow traditional journalistic practices are charting new territory.

I came up as a blogger. A lot of the questions that are being asked about content creators were previously asked about bloggers. Then many bloggers were eventually subsumed into traditional media because they couldn’t monetize effectively on their own. Now I think people can. I think that traditional media has actually grown hostile to their journalists’ building up audiences online and reaching people, because it shifts the power balance. The New York Times wants reporters to create these TikTok-style videos on their institutional channel, not just on their personal ones.

cobb: At the same time, though, my students are constantly thinking about the fact that they have to build up a following when they’re going out into the job market. You could graduate from an excellent journalism school, have great letters of recommendation, have amazing clips, but if some other person has five hundred thousand followers, who is in the stronger position?

lorenz: A few years ago, I got a lot of backlash on Twitter when I said that journalists have to have brands—which is not something I love, by the way. But the simple reality is that legacy media organizations are struggling, and they want readership, especially when they’re looking at younger journalists. They want people who can bring in younger audiences. This is how I’ve gotten every job. In some ways, I was lucky. My generation could work at these digital-media companies that would let us build our brand while still having the benefits (the training, some amount of financial stability) of working at Mic or Mashable. Now that level doesn’t exist. Those outlets—BuzzFeed News, Vice, Mic—have either shut down entirely or gutted their newsrooms.

tani: Yeah, we were both at Business Insider, where we still got the opportunities to learn the traditional craft of journalism—there was still the expectation, say, that you’re calling for comments. If you make an error, you are going to issue a correction, someone’s going to get mad at you about it. So I agree—I’m concerned that there are many fewer of those opportunities.

carroll: So, given everything we’ve discussed—the economic collapse, the rise of independent media, these new models emerging—should we be mourning what’s happening to journalism or celebrating it?

shafer: I don’t know that there’s much to mourn here. The newspaper industry, again and again, has flubbed its chance to propel itself into the future. This started in the years following World War II, when newspaper readers increasingly turned to television. In the mid-Seventies, the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, wrote a big page-one story about how the thing that you’re holding in your hands is an endangered species. Newspaper publishers and editors were all aware that papers were losing their moxie.

In one of his shareholder letters in the early Nineties, Warren Buffett said something to the effect of: “I love the newspaper business. I’ve been a great investor in Buffalo News and the Washington Post. But these properties are not delivering the return on investment they once did.” This was before the web. He’s not saying newspapers are dying because of the web. He’s saying that other transformations, including greater consumer choice, were already taking place.

The newspaper industry has had warning for seventy-five-plus years that an end is coming and that it either needs to create, innovate, and discover or step aside. When you look at what happened to newspapers in the web era, just about all of them got it wrong.

The incumbent media is not always the best vehicle to propel journalism into the future. The future is going to require innovation and ideas that we’re not privy to in this conversation. It’s going to require people finding the ability to attract audiences, hold on to them, and give them some value that they didn’t have before.

tani: To take a slightly less optimistic view of innovation for a moment: the move toward small, niche journalism creators and Substacks of course has its drawbacks. I think that individual journalists who are beholden to audiences that expect them to cover a certain topic through a certain lens can lead to audience capture, which can discourage those journalists from sharing information that may upset their viewers, listeners, or readers. This is a problem that applies to bigger media organizations as well—the Murdochs have wanted to break with Trump repeatedly, but ultimately their audience won’t let them.

But the fact remains that if you’re a young, smart journalist, if you put out something that’s good, that’s original, you can reach way more people than you could have twenty years ago. You can find an audience on Substack or on social media. I don’t know how to square that with all the bad stuff that’s happening.

cobb: Despite all the challenges we’ve discussed, there is genuine innovation happening in news media. We have nonprofit news organizations meeting specific community needs in creative ways—generating revenue through memberships, events, and other novel approaches. Take Documented, which serves immigrant communities in New York City. It disseminates news via WhatsApp, WeChat, and Nextdoor because that’s how its audience—often undocumented immigrants who may distrust traditional media—actually communicates. Documented meets people where they are rather than expecting them to come to a website or buy a newspaper. It’s a brilliant adaptation to serve communities that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Then you have niche organizations like The Trace, where I was a board member and which focuses exclusively on gun violence. They cover it with granular expertise that general-assignment reporters could never match. This kind of specialized nonprofit journalism fills gaps that traditional media can’t or won’t address. There’s also been a breakdown of old silos. Journalists aren’t confined to one medium anymore. Someone might do a podcast on Tuesday, write a long-form piece on Thursday, and shoot photography over the weekend. The story dictates the format rather than the journalist’s job title dictating what they can produce. People are experimenting with data visualization, audio, video—whatever best serves the story. This experimentation is happening precisely because the old models collapsed. The crisis forced innovation. The question isn’t whether new approaches are emerging, but whether they’re emerging fast enough and at sufficient scale to preserve journalism’s democratic function.

lorenz: I’m really excited by the rise of independent media. As somebody who started as a blogger, my dream was always to disrupt legacy media, to see its downfall, sort of. So that news would be democratized. Obviously, it’s played out in a more dystopian way. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems with the old system. There were many unmet audiences.

I think about the kind of innovation Jelani is talking about. What YouTube and these social platforms have done is allow people to create entire media groups speaking to very particular communities—to South Asian women or, say, gay fathers over forty. Traditional media often abdicated those communities. So that’s exciting to me. But there are so many downsides to our new media landscape, and I think that one of the biggest ones, to pick up on what Max was saying, is this issue of audience capture. Good journalists tell people uncomfortable truths. It’s true, as he says, that this applies to big and small organizations alike. The old-school business models used to support this sort of antagonistic reporting because the papers were subsidized by classified ads and lifestyle coverage. As an independent journalist, if you tell people news they don’t want to hear or if you present them with news that challenges their preconceived worldview, they will not only not pay you and not support you, but they will also punish you. This is sadly something that journalists have to deal with now, and it’s the reason why most independent journalists, in my view, don’t challenge their audiences.

cobb: That’s right. One thing that large media institutions figured out was how to generally protect their talent—and that was and is an expensive proposition.

None of our systems is perfect—neither corporate media nor media owned by a single wealthy individual. This has become painfully obvious of late, but nonprofit, public, and trust-owned models have their own vulnerabilities, too. What we need is a dynamic landscape with lots of different types of media ownership to offset the shortcomings of any one particular system. A healthy media ecosystem, like a healthy democracy, requires diversity.