Twilight of the Media Elites

Ideology is like body odor: someone else's absolutely reeks if strong enough, but you can't even notice your own

The Washington Post may like to gravely intone Democracy Dies in Darkness (particularly when they’re trying to upsell you on a subscription), but our democracy was actually birthed in a journalism culture closer to Twitter and Substack than anything the WaPo has put out for sixty years.

Sullivan and Weiss weren’t merely the victims of some ethereal struggle between the forces of free speech and ideological censorship: they were the collateral damage of shifting media business models. And there will be lots more of them before this drama finishes.

The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back themselves in more articulate form.

Through almost the end of the 19th-century, the revenue model for most newspapers was subscriptions from party loyalists when a paper like The Press Democrat meant just that: the Democratic paper in that town giving that faction’s version of events.

The New York Times will triumph financially, dramatically so, and utterly fail as an intellectual institution, at least by its former standards. The editorial branding will be august pronouncements about ‘the paper of record’, but the business model is pure Netflix: All The News Fit To Binge.