Serious American Journalism is Slowly Bleeding Out

Today the Washington Post’s senior editor David Shipley resigned in apparent protest over owner Jeff Bezos’ directive that Post editorials henceforth would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics. The only reasonable interpretation is that criticism of America’s oligarchs is now verboten and that America’s second most important newspaper was undergoing a rightward change of direction.

This isn’t the first time Bezos has weighed in to quash Post editorials. He famously axed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, an action which cost the Post thousands of subscribers. Then Bezos nixed an editorial cartoon that showed him, along with other recognizable oligarchs, kneeling before an imperial Trump and holding up bags of money. And those are only the ones we know about.

This past Sunday, MSNBC abruptly announced the firing of Joy Reid, whose 7 pm weekday show has been a platform for her sharp and insightful analysis of TrumpWorld, with a particular emphasis on black voices. The reason given for firing her was “declining ratings” (something that has affected the entire MSNBC lineup, not just The Reid Out, as liberals have increasing tuned out on the news). This frankly smells like bullshit, particularly when her announced replacements were former Democratic strategist Symone Sanders Townsend, former RNC chairman Michael Steel, and Alicia Menendez—none of whom, individually or collectively, possess anything like the star power or analytical brilliance of Joy Reid. Moreover, the announcement came the day after Trump went on a rant against MSNBC directing most of his vitriol on its star, Rachel Maddow. My working hypothesis is that the suits decided that someone needed to be sacrificed to appease Dear Leader, but removing Maddow entirely would be a bridge too far, so they cut her on-air presence from five days a week to one, and they threw Joy Reid overboard, knowing that removing a charismatic anchor who fearlessly calls out racism would go over well with the MAGA white nationalists now running the ship of state.

The announcement also revealed that MSNBC is being separated from NBCUniversal and will join most of Comcast’s other cable channels, including CNBC and USA Network, in a new company dubbed SpinCo (!) led by the veteran NBCUniversal executive Mark Lazarus, who comes from the sports world, not news. What is also unclear is whether the connection between MSNBC and NBC News will be severed. I’m betting the answer is yes. This would make sense to the corporate suits at a time when major news organizations are being systematically excluded from White House access, because it would remove the “taint” of MSNBC’s political point of view and show that NBC News is firmly back in the “impartial” blandness of network news broadcasts.

Other news organizations are clearly scrambling to secure, if not favor, at least access to the Trump White House. At the end of January, the NYT revealed that Paramount (the parent company of CBS) was prepared to pay a substantial settlement to Trump to resolve an apparently frivolous lawsuit involving a pre-election 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. This was a month after ABC News paid $15 million to resolve Mr. Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who had imprecisely said that the president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York. (Trump had been found liable for “sexual abuse.”) Also in January, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it had agreed to a $25 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed after the social networks suspended his accounts in 2021. Mind you, this is all money to be paid directly to Trump.

Even the New York Times has started to seem a little squishy at times when it comes to Trump, and has beefed up its roster of conservative columnists in an obvious effort to appear more “balanced” and seems to be publishing a lot more soft news “lifestyle” stories than previously.

The fact is that there are very few organizations in America that actually practice serious investigative journalism and do more than dutifully parrot news releases that are spoonfed to them. Vast sections of the country are basically “news deserts” where MAGA disinformation is disseminated—essentially uncontested—by Fox News, or Sinclair, or iHeartMedia (formerly ClearChannel) in addition to the denizens of the murkier depths of the Internet.

What happens if we lose the few organizations that still practice journalism as opposed to propaganda? Where do we go to keep informed?

The degradation of the once-great Washington Post hits me hard personally because for decades it was my hometown newspaper. When Bezos bought the paper, it was in dire financial straits. The purchase kept it alive at a time when newspapers all over the country were dying, and for a time he left it alone to pursue its traditional journalistic values. And then came Trump’s second coming.

So what do we do now?

I think it’s important to recognize that news organizations like the Post still do important work when operating under intrusive or even oppressive management. Even in its currently reduced state, the Post is still putting out real journalism, so I’m not ready to give up on it yet. Even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal still produces important news stories, despite its Trumpian editorial board and loathsome owners. Regional newspapers like the Miami Herald are still doing important investigative stories even though they are only shells of their former selves, and they need our support. We can’t just depend on Internet websites, because so often the stories they post are a direct result of the work done by larger organizations like the Times and the Post that have the resources to do the research and fact-checking required and the ability to withstand the legal challenges that often result. But they need our support in terms of subscriptions and eyeballs.

These are dark times, and it’s probably going to get a lot worse. But this is no time to tune out!