THAT’S GOOD, BECAUSE THE CURRENT PRODUCT STINKS: The Brits Invade US Newsrooms With a ‘Killer Instinct’ and Fleet Street Ethics.
The crisis in American news media has led to an unexpected result in a very short time: The invasion of executive news suites by British editors, who experts say bring a “killer instinct” to news gathering, while notably downgrading the diversity quotient* in news leadership.
Most recently with the appointment of Will Lewis as the publisher and CEO of the Washington Post — and his latest restructuring plan, featuring the appointment of Fleet Street-bred editor Robert Winnett as executive editor after the election — British players are gaining a significant foothold in the U.S. media industry.
These latest U.K. natives arrive just months after a growing list of others — CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson, The Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker, Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, The Daily Beast’s content chief Joanna Coles and the outlet’s new executive editor Hugh Dougherty.
“In media, everybody is floundering. As legacy media takes continual hits, everybody is looking for the magic ticket that appeals to consumers and advertisers,” said Mark Borkowski, a London-based British publicity, image and crisis consultant, told TheWrap. “It is about the perception of who is successful, and therefore doing something similar is going to lead to similar success.”
But, as UK media execs are being handed some of the biggest jobs in U.S. journalism, some question whether the choices are what America’s democracy needs. “Everybody’s screaming about how we have a crisis in local news,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at CUNY. “I say we have a crisis in national news too, at this time when fascism is at the door.
But their coverage of 2016 and 2017 and 2020 is a big part of why they’re so despised now. And their hatred of the Bad Orange Man (see also Jarvis’s f-bomb above) means there will be no apologies for going all-in on conspiracies. After the elections of 2004 and 2008, the media at least paid lip service to what they got wrong and vowed not to do it again – and of course promptly forgot those mea culpas. None are forthcoming this time around.
* Howell Raines, then of the New York Times, who said in a classic Kinsley Gaffe from 2001, their hiring campaign that brought in serial plagiarist Jayson Blair, “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse,” could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE: John Nolte: Crybaby Washington Post Staffers Melt Down over Changes.
[T]he Post has lost its credibility and customers, and the parasites killing this host remain in charge.
I love it. I don’t want the Post to turn things around. Not only that, but I want to watch the Post and all of its reprehensible staffers get what they deserve: a slow, agonizing, and humiliating death.
Plus a (partial?) list of the many hoaxes the Post and other DNC-MSM outlets have run since 2016.
Back in 2003 Virginia Postrel explored “Press Pathologies:”
Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it’s the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can’t lose. Then he’s a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.
The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn’t getting the great stories in the British press, “They’re great stories. But they aren’t true.”
The American media certainly arrived there by 2016! No wonder the Brits are making such headway in American newsrooms these days.