BRIAN ANDERSON: The Future of Journalism: Reconciling abundance with authority.
Just 28 percent of Americans say they trust newspapers, television, or radio to report fully and fairly. Among Republicans, the figure has plummeted to just 8 percent or so. Conservatives point to years of selective legacy press outrage and narrative discipline since Donald Trump decided to run for president: the phony Russia-gate investigations; the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the 2020 election; the celebration of the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots; the authoritarianism of Covid-era public-health coverage; the pretense that President Biden was “sharp as a tack.” One can add countless other examples of elite outlets’ amplification of progressive ends, reinforced during the Biden presidency by a complicity among those outlets, social media firms, and administration officials to suppress and even de-platform controversial conservative voices—a failed effort to restore some kind of central command over the media cornucopia. The geography of journalism reinforced the political impression, with newsrooms clustered in a few coastal cities, steeped in the assumptions of their social class. The more those institutions declared themselves the guardians of “truth,” the more half the country concluded that “truth” was a partisan brand.
And yet the hunger for real reporting hasn’t vanished. People still want to know what happened—who did what, where, when, and why. Engagement with factual storytelling remains high. I can speak from our own experience at City Journal. Our reported pieces—Abigail Shrier writing about sexual trafficking, especially of minors, in California; Christopher Rufo’s whistleblower-based exposés on critical race theory and radical gender activism in academia and public schools; John Sailer describing the likely illegal methods universities are using to get around the constitutional ban on racial preferences in admissions; Heather Mac Donald’s relentless honesty about the realities of policing—have reached millions of readers and often had a significant impact on the public debate. I think this has to do with putting a face to the abstractions of policy choices, which makes them come alive, so that the stakes in human lives become clear. But it’s also about having the kind of journalists writing for us who have the receipts—by doing the hard work.
Most conventional journalists shun the hard work.