On the eve of the president-elect’s inauguration, major media outlets announced their intention to withdraw from politics.
Donald Trump reacts to a newspaper during the 68th annual National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 6, 2020.
(Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
If the de facto slogan of mainstream journalism under the first Trump administration was The Washington Post’is serious and bugle cry observed irregularly “Democracy dies in darkness,” the rallying cry of media companies during Trump’s second term seems to be “you deserve a break today.” After journalists documented a long series of unprecedented abuses of executive power under a Roy Cohn protégé, establishing policy based on a vast, Mafia-style calculus of tribal punishment and exclusion , media executives are weighing the prospect of a resurgence of MAGA’s seat of power. with the pale shrug of experienced brand managers.
“One of the things we recognize is that no one cares just about politics and nothing else,” Katie Palmer, editor of the liberal resistance journal. HuffPost, said the media marketing job description Digiday. “You can follow politics very closely, but you also need advice on your marriage. We try to recognize that people need a little bit of everything. SO HuffPost will address the existential challenge to democracy presented by an unfettered Trump White House by strengthening the site’s lifestyle coverage, Digiday reports, including an increased focus on “the American family.”
Palmer’s complacent click-seeking strategy is far from an exception. Josh Awtry, Head of Audience Development at News weekexplained that its mission for the coming year is to achieve “more interactivity with our readership”. And that, in turn, means watering down news and political coverage. “Often the majority of our audience comes from Google Discover,” Awtry said, which “favors increasingly soft, lifestyle, consumer-focused types of content.” Certainly, the aggressive agenda that Trump and his supporters have pledged to implement from his first days in office will drive traffic with a constant series of scandals and breaking news, but the recent swoon of the once-previous property market marked by resistance as The Washington Post and MSNBC — whose CEO Rashida Jones resigned at the dawn of the new Trump presidency — are making media marketers hesitant to adopt a politics-first coverage model. “I think the general feeling in the market (sic) is that a news site that exists solely around a breaking news desk will not be able to continue to create long-term renewable (direct) advertising partnerships. term,” says Blair Tapper, another commitment. maven for UK Independentwhich recently expanded its operations in the United States and plans to, wait for it, “grow lifestyle coverage in travel, personal finance and culture this year.” Digiday reports.
The quest for maximum and practical “interactive” engagement in the world of digital media is something I have experienced at depressing close delete during my tenure as chief news officer for Yahoo. The basic formula has changed little since then: Digital producers launch brand partnerships, video clips and interactive gadgets in a fuzzy mission to deliver bland and sometimes titillating content to distracted digital users. You then keep them waiting in line to learn more via email newsletters, glorified product reviews, games, and other lifestyle articles. The strategy may magnify the results when it comes to engagement, but it is a far cry from journalism as a civic social practice, which works primarily by telling readers precisely what they want. don’t do it I want to hear: news about corruption, self-dealing, bigoted lies, brutal economic privilege and other unfortunately chronic aspects of our public life.
One anecdote stands out among countless others from my tenure at Yahoo’s market and prostate news store: after the Obama administration released the president’s lengthy birth certificate in response to the absurd campaign of With Donald Trump aiming to question Obama’s citizenship, one of my bosses told me we should “get the Birther’s perspective” on this latest development. When I explained that there was in fact no empirically consistent “birther view” – that it was all racialized panic stoked by ideological bad actors and that we would cover the topic precisely that way – I realized that my role as an information manager in Silicon Valley was numbered; The fluff-first model of digital engagement left extremely little room for traditional news judgment, and all sorts of opportunities for malicious ideologues, liars, and scammers of all kinds to wreak havoc.
And now, more than a dozen years later, the dominant model of digital information in our struggling republic has, against all expectations, significantly deteriorated. That’s the unequivocal message behind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA makeover on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House: Meta, Facebook’s dystopian parent company, suspends content moderation controls for posts on Instagram and Facebook, Zuckerberg announced, and will instead rely on the user-generated “community ratings” system that has turned Elon Musk’s Platform X into a paranoid right-wing shitshow.
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As Siva Vaidyanathan observesZuckerberg’s far-right rebranding is an extension of the billionaire brother’s world-conquering megalomania; in this respect, it follows the basic arc that saw Musk transformed into an apostle of “dark gothic MAGA.” And Zuckerberg visited all the stations of the cross for an enthusiastic MAGA billionaire recruit: a seven-figure donation at Trump’s inauguration, the ritual sacrifice of Meta’s DEI programa kissing getaway to Mar-a-Lago and a star lit Joe Rogan’s podcast attacking the “cultural elites” who create media discourse and calling for their “repopulation” by “a new class of creators” – i.e. endlessly indulgent plutocratic assholes like Zuckerberg and Musk.
You don’t need much effort to see where this formula leads. As wildfires rage in Los Angeles, X, Facebook and other sites opposed to moderation are stifled by delusional right-wing conspiracy theories about what triggered them and what prevented their immediate watering. The culprits include DEI initiatives, military support from Ukraine, Chinese subversion and – yes – Jews. President-elect Donald Trump has offered slightly sanitized variations on the same basic themes, falsely claiming that the Biden administration has failed to fund emergency disaster relief efforts and fabricating a program of conservation of the smelt which, as he fondly imagines, diverted water from Angelenos in the path of the fires. Reliable on-the-ground reporting on the disaster comes overwhelmingly from local journalists and nonprofit organizations, as the Los Angeles-based journalist and labor activist points out. Notes by Matt Pearce:
Our local news broadcasters produced incomparable programming visuals And news interviews on the latest news on the ground. Our local news photographers produced stellar work show the tragedy and heroism of civilians and firefighters on the front lines; it’s not them damaging firefighting aircraft with unauthorized amateur drones in closed disaster areas. When Patrick Soon-Shiong became a source of disinformation on Elon Musk’s App extremely complex budget issue. The traditional press will continue to play a central role in deciphering the knotty the policies and policy questions going on around what went wrong in these fires that policy makers we must face.
The contrast produces an invigorating split-screen effect for anyone seeking reliable information about the crisis, Pearce writes: “While my colleagues in the Los Angeles local news industry put their lives on hold and even their lives on the line to cover the Altadena and Palisades fires, the for-profit tech platforms where many of us now get news were left behind as conspiracy theories and hate speech about the suffering of our neighbors proliferated.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that this acute disparity in honest reporting is a preview of what’s to come. Indeed, one revealing local news initiative involved a firefighter’s viral montage of a livestream of the fires, showing Musk berating a Los Angeles fire official for nonexistent water shortages. As the official patiently explained that the Los Angeles system was not short of water at all – that the scale of the fires was straining an urban firefighting regime that was not designed to fight wildfires of forest – Musk abruptly interrupted his livestreamlooking like the chastised ignoramus that he is. Meanwhile, our mainstream political press is already organize debates on Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland as if there was a sensible political discussion buried within it, The Washington Post suggests a phone call scorecard approval of most of Trump’s cabinet nominees, cluttered and incompetent, and the new emboldened Trump White House is swear an oath of loyalty to officials working on national security issues. Don’t worry, though, each new week will bring a new stream of how-tos, lists, weird tips, and celebrity gossip, as the MAGA right continues to pillage, intimidate, and lie.