Art and Culture
Purity, Profit, and Politics
How journalism exchanged the duty to inform for an ethic of customer satisfaction.

A full audio version of this article can be found below the paywall.
The Balkanisation of Mass Media
After I stumbled into a writing career in late 1981, placing an unsolicited piece in Harper’s, I had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of Lewis Lapham and Michael Kinsley, then two of the titans of the magazine world. I was privy to story meetings where the staple question was, “What do our readers need to know in order to be well-rounded, intellectually confident individuals who can compete in the marketplace of ideas?” However, that noble ethic was already under assault in magazines and the wider world of media.
Earlier that same year, the venerable Walter Cronkite had retired from two decades at the helm of CBS News’ nightly broadcast. By the midpoint of his tenure, the phrase “the most trusted man in America” was used to describe Cronkite so often that it had almost become part of his name. (Query the phrase; you’ll be besieged with pages of references to Cronkite.) He did for television news what Edward R. Murrow’s “just the facts” approach had done for radio beginning in the 1930s. Other news anchors of the era—NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report and Nightline’s Ted Koppel a bit later—were held in similar esteem.
Cronkite’s laconic sign-off said it all: “And that’s the way it is.” Like Lapham and Kinsley (and editors at other top general-interest publications), Cronkite saw himself as something of an oracle, distilling America’s multifarious milestones and mishaps down to the most significant events that could be crammed into thirty minutes’ worth of commercial air-time. Cronkite’s retirement was not just the loss of an institution in American journalism, it also presaged the loss of the institution of American journalism as it was then understood.
Historically, the imparting of news was a one-way, top-down process. The keepers of this loose-knit kingdom were vested with the right and responsibility to curate a consensus trove of necessary information to be communicated to the masses. Today, the ethic that drove such men and their media organisations is all but gone. Publications and networks alike now set aside tidy sums for focus groups, marketing consultants, and algorithmic formulas designed to ascertain what readers want to know so that it can be provided to them. This attitude is very different in its implications from the one that prevailed at those long-ago story meetings and it is apt to yield wholly different content. (Light fare about the Royals, fodder for vehement Trump supporters or opponents, service pieces about successful loft living or—on the same day in The New York Times—storing your winter clothes and how to avoid looking like a MAGA woman).
A byproduct of this intense focus on customer demand is that the world of media has splintered. Pew may be understating the case when it describes a “fragmented media environment with seemingly endless sources of information to choose from.” Pew, which focuses chiefly on established alternative media, lists 105 digital news sites boasting some 27 million unique monthly visitors. Media watchdog Ad Fontes is more comprehensive, tallying 3,600 news sources, 700 informational podcasts, and 474 video/TV programs. This gibes with American University’s database of some 4,500 such outlets. These highly nichified offerings encompass myriad mission statements and takes on the news of the day.
Further, with 86 percent of Americans getting at least some of their news from sources available on hand-held devices (including, God help us, TikTok), modern media lean more heavily on their online arms and let the algorithms supplant news judgment. This not only exposes more of us to the social-media clickbait outrage machine—which widens all schisms—but it also has the effect of nudging important but anodyne news (say, a major mortgage lender changing its system of credit scoring) aside to make room for the latest Taylor Swift break-up or #MeToo allegation. And for the record, even the most reputable news sources are resorting to clickbait nowadays. (See also here.)
As a result of media variety, contemporary America may lead the Western world in producing one-dimensional adults who haven’t a clue what’s going on.
The micro-targeting of consumer interests has also led to a proliferation of compartmentalised magazines and online journals that cater to interests and “identity” in all its permutations—a far cry from the heyday of the heralded general-interest magazines that kick-started water-cooler conversations for the next week. A reader who cares only about equestrian matters can read Equus or Horse Illustrated and never need ponder whether academic freedom has gone too far. If you desire nothing but content that’s of interest to blacks (or at least that’s bracketed as such) you can read Ebony or Black Enterprise or Jet or The Crisis or The Source or Vibe or... If you are a dark-skinned black woman or girl, you can enjoy DDS (Divine Dark Skin), which published a few print issues in 2019 and is now online-only. If you are a dwarf, there’s LPA Today, the official publication of “little people of America.” The Cord is for paraplegics. There’s no major magazine for non-neurotypical lesbians, but there’s a book, Queerly Autistic. As Chris Cuomo informed his NewsNation audience on 2 June, “Our media doesn’t play to the majority, it plays to the pockets of fringe interests. It plays small-ball.”

As a result of all this variety, contemporary America may lead the Western world in producing one-dimensional adults who haven’t a clue what’s going on—or, at least, who don’t know many of the things they should know. Here’s a Ted Talk and a sampling of articles (mostly in publications that would be considered fairly literate by today’s standards) lamenting the basic ignorance of everyday Americans:
- Public Square: “Knowing Less than We Think”
- Huffington Post: “The Price America Pays for Ignorant Americans”
- Current: “Public Media Is Failing in its Mission to Inform and Educate”
- Business Insider: “Survey Reveals 12 Things People Don’t Know About Their Own Country”
- Johns Hopkins report: “Americans Don’t Know Much About State Government, Survey Shows”
- Forbes: “The Ignorant Voter”
- Saturday Evening Post: “Should the Uninformed Be Allowed to Vote?”
- Mother Jones: “America is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country”
- Investigative Post: “Americans Are Horribly Informed on the Economy”
- Seattle Times: “We’re at the Mercy of an Uninformed Electorate”
Perhaps even more troubling than the informational balkanisation is the sociopolitical skew that so many forms of modern media embrace when they court (or pander to?) their audiences. This approach prevents certain topics, or key nuances thereof, from being covered. During Cronkite’s reign, the criteria undergirding news judgment were more or less objective and universal: The lead story on a given day was the most important thing that happened that day. (There is always some subjectivity involved, but it tells us something that most days, the so-called Big Three network newscasts had the same two stories in first or second position.) Today, the lead story is the most important event that serves another goal as well—ensuring audience loyalty.
All of which reinforces silo thinking and today’s reflexive and uncompromising tribalism. Fragmented journalism competing for consumer eyeballs breeds fragmented thinking and a fragmented view of life in America. As freelance journalist Matt Yglesias has written, “One consequence of this competition is that it’s now much harder to manufacture consent.” If there are no consensus buckets of information—no news or background knowledge that we expect everyone to know and trust—there is no consensus reality. We are left with a world of competing personal truths, where Americans cannot fathom why other segments of media are serving up something different to their own. This may explain why trust in journalism is now at an all-time low.
The story of how we got to this state of affairs is a tragicomedy in three acts.