This is the text of a talk delivered by James Bennet at the University of Chicago on February 26th, followed by a Q&A with Point editor Jon Baskin. The event was part of the Public Thinking Lecture Series, co-organized by the Point Program for Public Thinking and the Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse. A recording of the lecture can be viewed here. Want to keep up with the Public Thinking initiative and its future events? Sign up for the Public Thinking newsletter.
The title of this talk is framed as a question: Is there a mainstream media? And at the risk of having you all get up and leave right away, I’m going to skip straight to the answer, which is: of course there isn’t. And I suspect most of you already know that.
What was once the mainstream media—the networks, the newspapers, certain magazines—years ago lost the command that it had of the nation’s attention and with it the ability to create a shared national understanding of what was going on in the world of reality. We get our information now by finding our way through a bewildering, ever-splintering media landscape. The proportion of people who say they turn to a news site or an app as their main source of news these days is continuing to drop. It’s down to about 22 percent globally. That’s a drop of ten points in just seven or eight years, according to the annual survey that Reuters does with Oxford. Even the big online platforms themselves are continuing to splinter the audience. A matter of a decade ago, two of them commanded plurality of users, and now there are six platforms that each draw about 10 percent.
In the early years of the internet—and there are a number of people in this room who probably were not present for those years, but those of us who were, I think, will agree with me—it was a time of tremendous optimism and excitement about the possibilities of this new technology. It was going to enable new forms of citizen journalism to flourish and promote truth and greater understanding. I shared those hopes, certainly, and those expectations, even. And it’s maybe forgivable because it’s part of an old pattern.
It’s true throughout history that we tend to get very excited and even a little Panglossian about the arrival of any new revolutionary communications technology. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikola Tesla predicted that his new telegraph was going to abolish war. And then a few years later, the inventor of the radio said the same thing—it would make war impossible. That was just a couple of years before World War I broke out.
In the case of the internet, being able to communicate with one another so much more easily is making it harder for us to understand each other. Users’ experience, confirmed by social science, has shown this to be the case, in a media landscape in which the mainstream media has left the scene. Social media promotes lies and antipathy much more effectively than it does truth or empathy. According to that same Oxford survey, we now rely upon so-called influencers to guide our path through this landscape, far more than we do any brand or even any journalist, and they tend to be partisan. Number one on the survey’s list was Tucker Carlson, followed by Joe Rogan. The only conventional TV anchor or journalist to make the top ten was Anderson Cooper, and he came in number seven after Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones.
So, what was once called the mainstream media is now more commonly called the “legacy media,” but I don’t think that term is quite right either, because it leaves out newish digital brands that share many of the values that we associate with the legacy media. For the purposes of this talk, I’m going to refer to it as the “institutional media,” because I think what properly distinguishes these organizations is that they aspire to have an institutional identity that’s greater than any individual voice and that they’re attempting, or at least aspiring, to cultivate values that will endure beyond any one generation. And among those values is that they want to reach an audience that crosses partisan and demographic lines, an audience that itself represents the American mainstream. And if the American mainstream media no longer exists, I do believe that an American mainstream is still out there, eager to be communicated with.
I want to back up and talk about how we got here. It’s not a story about bad faith and much less about bad people. It’s mostly about changes in technology and related changes in commercial incentives—big, giant forces that have transformed journalism—and along the way some bad decisions got made. These two forces have always shaped our understanding of what counts as news, and therefore, our sense of what’s real beyond our doorstep, what we can actually apprehend with our own senses.
But I also think—in what has been a very confusing and even frightening time in the industry I grew up in—some organizations in the “mainstream media” have made mistakes that accelerated the institutional slide toward irrelevance. I am mindful about voicing criticisms like this right now, because this is, I think, the most challenging moment in my lifetime for serious journalism. Arguably, on the plus side, it’s actually a great time for journalism because there’s no shortage of news that’s important, because huge ideas are under debate—or ought to be.
Institutions are cracking apart domestically and globally. There’s just no shortage of big questions that need to be asked and investigated. The American government, its effectiveness at home and abroad, is either being torn apart or possibly being rejuvenated before our eyes. And either way, it’s a hell of a story, from a journalist’s perspective. As morally despicable as that point of view might seem, it’s actually the proper journalistic one.
The downside for the legacy or “institutional” press is that it’s under assault. I can’t laugh it off when someone is powerful as Elon Musk, who presents himself as an advocate of free speech, says a journalist from 60 Minutes deserves to be jailed. Likewise, it alarms me to see Donald Trump banning reporters from the Associated Press from covering White House events because the AP won’t call the Gulf of Mexico by his preferred name, the Gulf of America—won’t only call it by his preferred name. (They want to use both.) It may seem like a silly or frivolous thing, but it’s not. I don’t care who the president is: it’s a basic matter of press freedom that the president does not get to dictate what words a media organization uses. Like a lot of people, this president seems to love free speech only as long as he likes what he hears.
A few days ago, at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), Elon Musk sat for an interview, and he talked about how through his work at DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—he had discovered that “a massive amount of your tax dollars is going to legacy media companies.” That was a reference to the fact that the government was buying some subscriptions, including to the publication I work for, The Economist. For my own part, I’d say that’s probably a good investment, if it was helping government workers do their jobs better, but we can have an argument about that.
What’s more striking is what Musk went on to claim that this government spending—and he didn’t say how much it was—explained “why the legacy media all says the same thing at the same time.” He was arguing that because of this government spending, the legacy media had become a mouthpiece for the state. That’s a particularly silly claim coming from him. Even back in the 1970s, in the heyday of the mainstream media, when the network newscasts reached about one in three American viewers every night, that mainstream media didn’t celebrate or promote any one president’s priorities the way Elon Musk promotes Donald Trump on X.
Elon Musk is an employee of the state. He’s a giant contractor of the state. And he owns X and controls its algorithm. Through his own feed, he reaches 200 million people with dozens of posts a day, many of them extolling the priorities of Donald Trump. And that may not actually even be the starkest example of our new statist media, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Donald Trump, as you know, has his own mighty X feed, with more than 100 million followers. But he also controls Truth Social, and that’s where he makes a lot of his most important pronouncements as president of the United States. For the first time in our history, the president himself is the largest shareholder in his own influential media company. That’s what a mouthpiece for the state looks like. And it’s a far more partisan and, in my view, less trustworthy means of understanding the world than the legacy media ever was.
I don’t think we’ve yet really reckoned with how profound this change is and what its consequences may prove to be. That’s why I’m mindful at this moment for piling on and voicing some criticisms of the legacy media. But I’m doing it in hopes of being constructive. And because I think the institutional press needs to recommit itself to certain basic journalistic principles and attitudes, if we have any hope of recovering some shared national sense of what’s true and what’s not.
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Let me start, if I may, begging your indulgence, back in the beginning—with the first paper that was published in America, before the United States existed. It appeared in Boston in September 1690, and it was called Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. The editor said the paper would appear just once a month, unless “any Glut of Occurrences” should happen.
Just think about that. Imagine a reality and an understanding of news, of the pace of events and of the distribution of information, in which publishing once a month would seem like more than often enough to take note of anything that actually mattered. By the way, it only published for one month in the end. It was suppressed almost immediately because the editor also said he looked forward to exposing lies by the colonial government at the time.
That idea of news, that it was something quite occasional, and often providentially determined, endured for generations—until the nineteenth century, when the technology of the industry started to change. The rotary press was able to print on both sides and churn out many more papers. All of a sudden there was more space to fill. Then came the telegraph, the radio, the television, which could reach far more people. And that meant even more space, more need to come up with fresh news to replace all the old news that was turning stale.
Where did it all come from? Some of it was made up, some of it was sensationalism, but a lot of it came from more reporters dispatched to more places, covering a broader array of subjects. And the world also obliged the need to fill all this space by speeding up and becoming ever more complicated.
This new technology changed the definition of news, and it also changed the business and the ethos of journalism as it was practiced in the United States. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, news was distributed largely in small-circulation newspapers, which were generally quite partisan, and the reason they were quite partisan is commercial one: it was an easy way to cultivate a loyal audience. But now, with this expansion and scale, publishers and broadcasters saw a chance to reach a mass audience and make money by selling advertising instead. Attracting as many eyeballs as possible to ads meant alienating as few people as possible. And that helped give rise in America to the ideal of objectivity in reporting. It just made good business sense to strive for a straighter, just-the-facts presentation of reality.
It was during this period, in 1895, that a publisher from Tennessee named Adolph Ochs gained control of the New York Times. And like some other publishers, he saw an opportunity to stand out by producing more trustworthy journalism. He published an announcement promising that under his leadership, the Times would report the news impartially, “without fear or favor.” He also didn’t declare fidelity to any political party or ideology but instead wanted the paper to be a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance. And so it would invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion, presenting a wide range of views to best serve the curious and open-minded reader. This was another way to establish the newspaper’s impartiality and credibility.
These sorts of ideas about objectivity and openness to debate spread unevenly throughout the news business. And then after World War I, really, the industry recognized a need to build trust, and it set out to professionalize itself. The American Society for Newspaper Editors was created in 1922, and the first principle it enunciated was that news organizations owed it to their readers to clearly separate news and opinion. Over the following decades, opinion writing flourished in the United States, and so did newsgathering. And the idea prevailed that these roles were both important but needed to be kept distinct in order for Americans to be able to trust the media and to help them get at the truth.
Then came the biggest shock to publishing and the concept of news since the invention of the printing press itself. Even for those of us who lived through the arrival of the internet, it can be hard to realize how profound its consequences have been. I worry a lot that I sound like the old man that I am, growling about this kind of stuff when I start to criticize it. So let me say quickly that I believe a lot of those consequences, including for journalism, have been good.
I spent fifteen years as a reporter at the New York Times and ten years at the Atlantic as the editor. And the ten years I was there was a period when the internet radically changed American journalism. Those were great years for the Atlantic, fun years. We were able to publish a wider range of voices than we ever had before, many more ideas, identify promising new journalists, and make the magazine profitable for the first time in memory. It was when I came back to the Times in 2016 that I really confronted some of the less pleasant consequences for journalism, in my view, of this new technology.
I was brought in to do a version at the Times of what we’d done at the Atlantic: digitize the opinion operation and widen the range of views to better reflect the breadth and richness of American debate. People at the paper were perfectly happy with most of that. I never got an objection from inside the Times to new voices I brought in from the left, but almost every time we hired or even published a conservative, it upset at least some of the staff, starting actually from near the beginning, when I hired Bret Stephens, who was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and at the time, one of the most eloquent critics of Donald Trump. But some of his views were just seen as beyond the pale by some of our colleagues, and they felt free to go after him on Twitter.
I lasted four years in that job until we published the Tom Cotton piece. It’s a funny thing to work for an institution you really believed in for nineteen years, and what you’re known for is getting fired from it. But that’s where I am. And you can challenge my view of what happened. But that episode was just one of the more extreme of many clashes within the Times and other newsrooms, which continue to this day, between the old institutional values and the new ascendant ones.
These sorts of fights didn’t play out only in opinion columns. The news reporters came under heavy criticism for writing empathetically about Donald Trump or Americans who supported him. At one point in my career, I was the bureau chief in Jerusalem. It was during the Second Intifada, and I spent a lot of time in Gaza interviewing Hamas leaders and members of Hamas. It was just a basic part of my job to understand and report on their worldview, to inform Times readers of it, better equip them to deal with it and our governments deal with it. I never got attacked by my colleagues for doing that kind of work. It was seen as a basic part of our job. But after the election of Donald Trump, doing that kind of journalism about our fellow citizens was seen as morally wrong, “platforming” dangerous people and ideas. And that distorted the coverage and therefore readers’ understanding of life in America.
You don’t need to take my word for it. In 2020, the editor-in-chief of the Times said that the paper still didn’t understand why so many people voted for Donald Trump in 2016. How is it that a paper that prided itself for more than a hundred years on doing its work without fear or favor could see it as a point of principle to declare broadly popular conservative ideas too scary to cover?
A lot of this shift has to do with the illiberal ideology that percolated for years on a number of our college campuses and swept out in the last decade to really take hold on the American left—at least the affluent, educated left from which a lot of legacy news organizations have for decades drawn most of their staff. And as they rushed to replace old print-era staff with new so-called digital natives, they failed to provide much training or insist upon their old institutional cultures. They also paid too little attention to the other cultural consequences of technological and commercial changes underway in the news industry, which pose the deepest challenge, I think, to the old values of open-minded and fair American journalism.
There are many influences at work here. Let me point to four.
The first—and this is what we call in journalism “a story about a dog that’s not barking”—is the internet, which, as you know, wiped out a lot of local journalism. In the last twenty years, the U.S. has lost a third of its newspapers and two thirds of its newspaper journalists. That’s 43,000 jobs in all. It’s impossible to measure the civic cost of that loss because, again, it’s a dog that’s not barking. It’s stories that aren’t being reported about local corruption. It’s local officials not being held accountable for where their potholes are getting filled. It’s opportunities for empathy, feature stories that aren’t getting written about your neighbors. It’s a hole that we can’t really measure in our civic life.
But the other thing it did was it destroyed the critical training ground for journalists, the places where reporters came up reporting out in the real world, discovering how complicated and sophisticated people from all walks of life actually are, and also having the experience of being held accountable for your accuracy and the nuance of your work. People know whether that pothole is getting filled or not, and whether you’ve done a good job of covering the question.
The second, huge influence is social media. Many of the new digital journalistic startups started freely mixing news and opinion in their reports because that’s what the internet rewarded, with more shares by people who agreed with it or disagreed with it. And the old distinction between news and opinion began to break down, and there was a crisis of confidence in the old ways.
A lot of news organizations like the Times began to adopt the same approach. Even more damaging, I think, is that social media is a conformity machine, and journalists began developing their own big followings on social media. And the best way to do that is to help lead one tribe or another. That not only made it even harder for journalists to do the hard work of questioning groupthink, it turned many of them into enforcers of groupthink—the very opposite of what was once understood as their ideal role.
The third factor is that the internet really expanded to infinity the amount of news that could be printed every day, at the same time that we were losing all these great journalists. We’ve invented whole new categories of stories and news to fill the sucking void. Think about it: How much of what you’ve read or watched on the internet is about stuff that’s happening on the internet rather than in the real world? Or maybe it’s something that started in the world but then has taken on exaggerated significance in the virtual world. Memes or news, shocking tweets from famous people, or maybe even something you’ve never heard of are now “news,” and they generate reams of commentary and coverage.
Journalists began spending more and more of their time covering these sorts of virtual events, as I think of them, or covering the world via the internet. That meant they spent less time in the real world talking to actual people. Real reporting is also expensive. It’s much cheaper and easier to cover what’s happening on the internet, and the internet also favors that kind of work because very online people like to read about what’s happening online. I’m not saying it’s not worth covering, but I do think virtual events have come to occupy way too much of our attention and mislead us about the real world—they distract and confuse us, even, about what is real. Humans are so much more complicated and interesting and often more reasonable than the sum of their tweets or their retweets or their Instagram posts. And the internet tends to reinforce cartoonish stereotypes of people and groups we don’t have personal experience with.
The fourth and most profound effect is that the internet basically destroyed the old business model for American journalism. Advertising dollars began disappearing to the big platforms, and those news businesses that began to succeed in this new era shifted their emphasis back to relying on subscribers. And they quickly rediscovered the old lesson that the easiest way to get someone to subscribe and then to resubscribe was to constantly assure them that you saw the world the same way they did, to affirm them in their assumptions and their opinions. This is a major reason, I think, that the mainstream—the once mainstream media—has become so partisan.
One of the paradoxes of the internet is that, in the year 2025, it’s returned us to the business model of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the journalistic ethos that went along with it. In retrospect, it was a very happy coincidence that for about a century, the incentives created by capitalism, at least in journalism, aligned with the fundamental values of liberalism, with liberalism’s convictions about free speech, open, honest inquiry, and the value of open debate.
And for all its many failings during the twentieth century, journalism as practiced by its mainstream publications was a bulwark of self-government, partly because it was grounded in those values: by being humble about how little they knew, curious to learn as much as they could, and empathetic, not sympathetic—it’s an important distinction—to people from all walks of life.
Journalists tried to provide, and often did provide, the reliable facts and the wide-ranging debate that helped other citizens form their own views about public life. The journalist’s role was to be the sworn witness. The reader’s role was to be the judge and the jury. And today, a lot of journalists in the institutional media believe it’s the journalist’s proper role—even their moral responsibility—to be the judges themselves, to instruct rather than to inform, to answer rather than to ask, to settle debates rather than to protest. In other words, to tell people what they should think rather than to help them think for themselves.
That’s a problem in itself, but what makes it so hard to address is that the technology and the commercial realities of the news business are also arguing now in favor of those same values. They’re promoting partisanship. They’re promoting contempt for other points of view, and they’re promoting the value of presenting alternative versions of reality. And now I’m afraid we can add fear of the American government to that list of forces too.
That puts the serious people who are left in the institutional media in a really tough position—I empathize. They need to summon real clarity about what it is they want to stand for. They need to have the discipline to promote those values, and sometimes—often now, I think—they must have the courage to defend them and push back.
This struggle, though, also requires, in the finest tradition of journalism, more serious self-scrutiny. The institutional media worries constantly over why mainstream America has lost trust in it, and I think the first step to regaining that trust will be for these organizations to recognize that they broke faith with mainstream America first.
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Q&A
JON BASKIN: Thank you for that, James. I’d be remiss as the moderator, given the news that broke today about the Washington Post, not to start by asking you about what happened and what your read on it is with the opinion editor leaving there. And it strikes me, given what you just said, that the Post and the Times in particular really have a specific ideal of what a national opinion page is for—what its function is—which is not the same, for instance, as the Wall Street Journal’s. Some commentary I saw on what happened today is that Bezos wants to make the Post’s opinion page more like the Journal’s, where you have a certain kind of ideological tilt that you know going in. And so I wondered, in answering this question about what’s specifically happening to the Post, if you could also speak a little bit about what you see as the good of an opinion page like the one that you tried to run at the New York Times.
JAMES BENNET: Well, there has been a series of explosions over the last couple of months now at the Washington Post. It’s been hard to watch what’s happening there. And today, David Shipley, the editorial page editor, as Jon said, resigned because Jeff Bezos wants to push the paper’s opinion pages in a very different direction. And this is where I’m a little hesitant to judge, because we don’t know fully what he is saying. But what’s been reported is that he wants the paper to take clear positions in favor of capitalism and “personal liberties.”
What’s weird to me is that it makes it sound like he only wants to publish those views. Will he brook no challenge to those views on the opinion page of the Washington Post? David, who’s a guy I’ve known a long time, and a very good journalist—I’ve not spoken to him about this—didn’t want to be part of that plan. And Marty Baron, the very, very great former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, came out this afternoon and just blasted this decision as craven and, basically, as a concession to Donald Trump. Coming from him, that’s a devastating appraisal.
If Marty’s right, that’s a terrible sign, not only of what’s happening right now, but of things to come. And that’s why I started this talk with my own concern about what’s happening to the media environment right now. It’s so puzzling, right? Because: free markets, personal liberties—I’m completely down with that. It’s very weird, though, to imagine that that worldview is consonant with then excluding disputation. That’s like the pillars of the liberal ideal married to utter intolerance.
And on top of everything else, and this is part of my problem with it—I’ll come back to your question about op-ed pages with the monoculture we’re creating—it’s also incredibly boring. An opinion page that only has one opinion on it—every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day—is just anti-journalistic.
When I was the editorial page editor of the New York Times, I looked with envy at what the Washington Post was doing, because those guys published a much wider range of opinion than I was able to—we got pushback for people like Bret Stephens. They were publishing many more pro-Trump voices in the Washington Post than we were publishing in the New York Times and basically doing a better job of it. The Post has a richer tradition of this, actually, maybe partly because of the different culture, being in Washington, not New York. They didn’t have the Brooklyn problem that I had, as I came to think of it. And so it’s really concerning to see them moving in what seems like exactly the wrong direction.
We need a lot more clarity, as readers of the Post, about what the vision is here. If it’s to enunciate those values more clearly as the Post editorial line, I don’t have a problem with that, as long as they’re forthright and transparent about it and as long as they make room for dissent and disputation. If they don’t do that, it’s a terribly discouraging development that’s really, I think, bad for the country and bad for the Washington Post.
BASKIN: On the one hand, the story you’re telling about journalism is very much about technology and commerce. But I’m curious where you see the pressure points, where the space for agency is, of people who are working in these places. Does it mostly come down to a matter of leadership? Are there things that you saw work and not work at creating a more open culture within the Times while you were there?
BENNET: I mean, there was an existential crisis. And during that crisis, a lot of organizations, including the New York Times, stopped doing a lot of the training that they used to do. They stopped doing a lot of the acculturation. And there were bad parts of that too, like the brainwashing. And, again, I sound like a fossil, but when I first joined the paper, every journalist who came on had to do a stint on the Metro desk in New York, covering the city, being beaten up by old Metro editors, and learning the culture and the ways of the New York Times.
There were downsides to that. But big upsides too, because you developed an understanding of the ethos of the place. And I think journalists at very old institutions like the New York Times, where people tended to come and stay for a long time, never really developed the habit of articulating those values to themselves, what they stand for.
In fact, when I arrived as editorial page editor, I kept asking people: What does the editorial page of the New York Times stand for? What are our values? The Wall Street Journal’s is “free markets, free people”—I get it, that’s their slogan. The only thing I could find was that statement by Adolph Ochs back in 1896. The answer was always, Well, it’s what the family thinks, and it’s what the archive says.
There was a lack of clarity about [what we stood for]. So it’s not the fault of the journalists who brought a different idea of what journalism is. And it wasn’t just the journalists—it was new salespeople, it was coders. There was a ton of hiring that changed the nature of the workforce without a lot of conversation about, this is who we are.
When I joined the Economist, it was still COVID times. And I was new to the Economist—I’d never worked there. So I went to the orientation for interns that was being held on Zoom, and a an editor did the orientation from London. And the first thing she did was put up a PowerPoint slide that said, “This is who we are” at the top, with four bullet points. And I practically burst into tears. It’s not that hard. And it’s not an offensive conversation: we’re always open to debate, but this is who we are. And if you don’t want to be part of this project, probably should work someplace else. But they’d lost track of that.
The Slack channels, the internal communications, and Twitter just became places where people would beat their colleagues up. It’s very hard to be an opinion writer. They’re thinking out loud all the time. They’re doing public thinking. And this is an environment where you get treated brutally for doing that kind of work. You get a lot of rewards from people who agree with you, and you get a lot of punishment from those who don’t. That’s what’s making a lot of writers less interesting and more predictable. When they take a chance, they need to have an editor that backs them up 100 percent—that’s what it requires in this environment. And that’s what I mean about having clarity about what you stand for.
BASKIN: I wanted to ask you about something that you touched on today, but it’s also explored in more detail in your Economist article. You make an interesting point about the differing values between these two visions of journalism: the pluralistic liberal vision that you refer to as more old-fashioned and the newer, what you term “illiberal,” mindset. And one of the things you say is that the old-fashioned version, while it’s very skeptical on the surface and crotchety and alienated, is actually quite idealistic, in the sense that it has an idealism toward the public. It believes that what the journalist’s job is to do is to equip the public with the facts, and the public can make their own judgments, whereas the new ethos is very idealistic on the surface, because there’s often a kind of very direct application of moral ideals to journalism, but it doesn’t really trust the public. It’s somewhat cynical about the public’s ability to deal with dangerous ideas or ideas they consider dangerous. It feels the public has to be guided. And I wanted to ask you: one thing I’ll hear a lot of people say who are more from that second tendency, is: Well, why are you so idealistic about the public? What’s your evidence that the public can actually handle the facts?
And in your talk, you talked about your faith that the American mainstream still exists, that there’s a mainstream audience that deserves to be treated with the respect that you—and I also—think is really important. But I’m kind of curious how you respond to that, the people who have become cynical about the American public.
BENNET: Let me tell you another old story from the New York Times. When I was a political reporter back in 1996, there was a very great editor of the New York Times named Joe Lelyveld, and he used to make us do stories that we just hated. They were called “Voices” pieces. And you’d have to go to some place, some town in a swing state—you know, Macomb County, Michigan; in those days, York, Pennsylvania. I went to Raleigh, North Carolina. And there was a rule—I can’t remember how many it was—you had to talk to, like, two dozen people. But you couldn’t stop them in the street. You couldn’t stop them at the mall. You had to knock on their doors and go to a bunch of new neighborhoods and, like a vampire, persuade them to invite you inside and sit down and talk to them about who they were going to vote for and why.
It was a lot of work. And the stories weren’t that interesting because there wasn’t really a throughline. And we’d write these stories, and they wouldn’t get on the front page. It wasn’t until years later that the penny dropped for me, when I was an editor myself, and I realized that Joe was teaching us. He probably didn’t care about those stories too much; what he cared was that we were having that experience. And the experience that I had when I was a reporter was constantly to be delighted by the intelligence and the sophistication of everybody I talked to.
I get in arguments about this all the time: Voters are smart. They make decisions in their own interests. They know what their interests are. And it is profoundly condescending and disrespectful to suggest otherwise. And again, maybe it sounds terribly naive, but it has been my experience. We are so disoriented and confused now about what’s real. So maybe that’ll change. But if that’s the case, then democracy is kind of over.
As a journalist, our role, our contribution to the civic project is to provide them with the truth. And this is another one of the differences between what I see as the old versus the new ideology. The old values… as cynical as my editors could seem—and they thought every word out of every politician’s mouth was a lie—they believed in truth. They believed there was a truth out there, however difficult it might be to get at it, apprehend it, communicate it. And the new ideology really does believe that truth is a function of narrative, a word I’ve come to hate. And it’s about power.
And if that’s right, then I think we’re kind of lost. Maybe it’s an act of faith on my part at this point.
BASKIN: I’m just going to ask one more question, just to bring into particular focus the challenge for an opinion page in particular of covering Trump and the movement around him. You’ve spoken yourself about how in 2016, people could have read the New York Times opinion page and not really had any idea why so many people were voting for Trump after the election.
And while you did bring in Republicans to the opinion page, I don’t know, I wonder if you would say you brought anyone in who sort of represented the Trumpist part of the country. I wonder about the specific challenges you see at institutional media outlets of covering a movement that is, at its core, so anti-institutional—in some sense, that’s the animus behind a lot of the movement. How would you think about that as an opinion page editor? How did you in his first term and how you would you find a way to represent that part of the country or of the political scene now?
BENNET: Can I say quickly first that part of the problem that guys like me had in trying to defend the old ways, as I keep calling it, is that we hadn’t lived up to them ourselves. And it was totally fair for a lot of people to say, you’re a hypocrite, or where were you worrying about a wide range of views before—when I arrived as the editorial page editor, there were twelve columnists at the New York Times, all individually awesome, but only two of twelve were women; one of twelve was Black. And the Times hired its first Black opinion columnist in the 1990s and had only ever had one at a time. Two were conservative, or identified as conservative, out of twelve. And pretty much all of them supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and not Bernie in the primaries. So here I am extolling liberalism, but people have total justice in saying, this institution was not honoring that ideal for a really long time. And again, that’s not a knock on any of the writers that were there, but it’s a sign, I think, of the blindness and the failure to capture the wide range.
Now, you’re right, I didn’t get a Trumpist columnist. And I looked with some envy at the Washington Post, which was doing that. I tried. I didn’t think at that point—and we can argue about how coherent it is, but the whole “American greatness” ideology, the scaffolding that’s been built on top of the personality of Donald Trump, didn’t really exist. So to be a columnist in favor of Donald Trump then was to hold a series of really intellectually inconsistent positions that were all explained and lent coherence only by support of the man. So what I’m saying, and maybe defensively, is that I thought it was very hard to find a really good columnist with intellectual integrity who could take that position. I think it got more possible over time. But there were other voices that we were missing.
In the old days, there was a classic opinion voice of the American working class that populated American op-ed pages. I’m thinking, for those who remember, of people like Jimmy Breslin. And there were important voices, particularly in the New York tabloids—that voice is kind of gone. And in our era, I kept thinking, it’s more like somebody who’s worked at Walmart. That was a voice I was trying very hard to find and didn’t succeed in when I was there.
I mean, that’s the fun of doing this work. And that’s why I was excited about it. Really diversifying that range is the whole point. And that’s why what Jeff Bezos is talking about doing is so disturbing.
Image credit: Nicolas Nova (Flickr / CC BY)
This is the text of a talk delivered by James Bennet at the University of Chicago on February 26th, followed by a Q&A with Point editor Jon Baskin. The event was part of the Public Thinking Lecture Series, co-organized by the Point Program for Public Thinking and the Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse. A recording of the lecture can be viewed here. Want to keep up with the Public Thinking initiative and its future events? Sign up for the Public Thinking newsletter.
The title of this talk is framed as a question: Is there a mainstream media? And at the risk of having you all get up and leave right away, I’m going to skip straight to the answer, which is: of course there isn’t. And I suspect most of you already know that.
What was once the mainstream media—the networks, the newspapers, certain magazines—years ago lost the command that it had of the nation’s attention and with it the ability to create a shared national understanding of what was going on in the world of reality. We get our information now by finding our way through a bewildering, ever-splintering media landscape. The proportion of people who say they turn to a news site or an app as their main source of news these days is continuing to drop. It’s down to about 22 percent globally. That’s a drop of ten points in just seven or eight years, according to the annual survey that Reuters does with Oxford. Even the big online platforms themselves are continuing to splinter the audience. A matter of a decade ago, two of them commanded plurality of users, and now there are six platforms that each draw about 10 percent.
In the early years of the internet—and there are a number of people in this room who probably were not present for those years, but those of us who were, I think, will agree with me—it was a time of tremendous optimism and excitement about the possibilities of this new technology. It was going to enable new forms of citizen journalism to flourish and promote truth and greater understanding. I shared those hopes, certainly, and those expectations, even. And it’s maybe forgivable because it’s part of an old pattern.
It’s true throughout history that we tend to get very excited and even a little Panglossian about the arrival of any new revolutionary communications technology. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikola Tesla predicted that his new telegraph was going to abolish war. And then a few years later, the inventor of the radio said the same thing—it would make war impossible. That was just a couple of years before World War I broke out.
In the case of the internet, being able to communicate with one another so much more easily is making it harder for us to understand each other. Users’ experience, confirmed by social science, has shown this to be the case, in a media landscape in which the mainstream media has left the scene. Social media promotes lies and antipathy much more effectively than it does truth or empathy. According to that same Oxford survey, we now rely upon so-called influencers to guide our path through this landscape, far more than we do any brand or even any journalist, and they tend to be partisan. Number one on the survey’s list was Tucker Carlson, followed by Joe Rogan. The only conventional TV anchor or journalist to make the top ten was Anderson Cooper, and he came in number seven after Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones.
So, what was once called the mainstream media is now more commonly called the “legacy media,” but I don’t think that term is quite right either, because it leaves out newish digital brands that share many of the values that we associate with the legacy media. For the purposes of this talk, I’m going to refer to it as the “institutional media,” because I think what properly distinguishes these organizations is that they aspire to have an institutional identity that’s greater than any individual voice and that they’re attempting, or at least aspiring, to cultivate values that will endure beyond any one generation. And among those values is that they want to reach an audience that crosses partisan and demographic lines, an audience that itself represents the American mainstream. And if the American mainstream media no longer exists, I do believe that an American mainstream is still out there, eager to be communicated with.
I want to back up and talk about how we got here. It’s not a story about bad faith and much less about bad people. It’s mostly about changes in technology and related changes in commercial incentives—big, giant forces that have transformed journalism—and along the way some bad decisions got made. These two forces have always shaped our understanding of what counts as news, and therefore, our sense of what’s real beyond our doorstep, what we can actually apprehend with our own senses.
But I also think—in what has been a very confusing and even frightening time in the industry I grew up in—some organizations in the “mainstream media” have made mistakes that accelerated the institutional slide toward irrelevance. I am mindful about voicing criticisms like this right now, because this is, I think, the most challenging moment in my lifetime for serious journalism. Arguably, on the plus side, it’s actually a great time for journalism because there’s no shortage of news that’s important, because huge ideas are under debate—or ought to be.
Institutions are cracking apart domestically and globally. There’s just no shortage of big questions that need to be asked and investigated. The American government, its effectiveness at home and abroad, is either being torn apart or possibly being rejuvenated before our eyes. And either way, it’s a hell of a story, from a journalist’s perspective. As morally despicable as that point of view might seem, it’s actually the proper journalistic one.
The downside for the legacy or “institutional” press is that it’s under assault. I can’t laugh it off when someone is powerful as Elon Musk, who presents himself as an advocate of free speech, says a journalist from 60 Minutes deserves to be jailed. Likewise, it alarms me to see Donald Trump banning reporters from the Associated Press from covering White House events because the AP won’t call the Gulf of Mexico by his preferred name, the Gulf of America—won’t only call it by his preferred name. (They want to use both.) It may seem like a silly or frivolous thing, but it’s not. I don’t care who the president is: it’s a basic matter of press freedom that the president does not get to dictate what words a media organization uses. Like a lot of people, this president seems to love free speech only as long as he likes what he hears.
A few days ago, at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), Elon Musk sat for an interview, and he talked about how through his work at DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—he had discovered that “a massive amount of your tax dollars is going to legacy media companies.” That was a reference to the fact that the government was buying some subscriptions, including to the publication I work for, The Economist. For my own part, I’d say that’s probably a good investment, if it was helping government workers do their jobs better, but we can have an argument about that.
What’s more striking is what Musk went on to claim that this government spending—and he didn’t say how much it was—explained “why the legacy media all says the same thing at the same time.” He was arguing that because of this government spending, the legacy media had become a mouthpiece for the state. That’s a particularly silly claim coming from him. Even back in the 1970s, in the heyday of the mainstream media, when the network newscasts reached about one in three American viewers every night, that mainstream media didn’t celebrate or promote any one president’s priorities the way Elon Musk promotes Donald Trump on X.
Elon Musk is an employee of the state. He’s a giant contractor of the state. And he owns X and controls its algorithm. Through his own feed, he reaches 200 million people with dozens of posts a day, many of them extolling the priorities of Donald Trump. And that may not actually even be the starkest example of our new statist media, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Donald Trump, as you know, has his own mighty X feed, with more than 100 million followers. But he also controls Truth Social, and that’s where he makes a lot of his most important pronouncements as president of the United States. For the first time in our history, the president himself is the largest shareholder in his own influential media company. That’s what a mouthpiece for the state looks like. And it’s a far more partisan and, in my view, less trustworthy means of understanding the world than the legacy media ever was.
I don’t think we’ve yet really reckoned with how profound this change is and what its consequences may prove to be. That’s why I’m mindful at this moment for piling on and voicing some criticisms of the legacy media. But I’m doing it in hopes of being constructive. And because I think the institutional press needs to recommit itself to certain basic journalistic principles and attitudes, if we have any hope of recovering some shared national sense of what’s true and what’s not.
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Let me start, if I may, begging your indulgence, back in the beginning—with the first paper that was published in America, before the United States existed. It appeared in Boston in September 1690, and it was called Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. The editor said the paper would appear just once a month, unless “any Glut of Occurrences” should happen.
Just think about that. Imagine a reality and an understanding of news, of the pace of events and of the distribution of information, in which publishing once a month would seem like more than often enough to take note of anything that actually mattered. By the way, it only published for one month in the end. It was suppressed almost immediately because the editor also said he looked forward to exposing lies by the colonial government at the time.
That idea of news, that it was something quite occasional, and often providentially determined, endured for generations—until the nineteenth century, when the technology of the industry started to change. The rotary press was able to print on both sides and churn out many more papers. All of a sudden there was more space to fill. Then came the telegraph, the radio, the television, which could reach far more people. And that meant even more space, more need to come up with fresh news to replace all the old news that was turning stale.
Where did it all come from? Some of it was made up, some of it was sensationalism, but a lot of it came from more reporters dispatched to more places, covering a broader array of subjects. And the world also obliged the need to fill all this space by speeding up and becoming ever more complicated.
This new technology changed the definition of news, and it also changed the business and the ethos of journalism as it was practiced in the United States. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, news was distributed largely in small-circulation newspapers, which were generally quite partisan, and the reason they were quite partisan is commercial one: it was an easy way to cultivate a loyal audience. But now, with this expansion and scale, publishers and broadcasters saw a chance to reach a mass audience and make money by selling advertising instead. Attracting as many eyeballs as possible to ads meant alienating as few people as possible. And that helped give rise in America to the ideal of objectivity in reporting. It just made good business sense to strive for a straighter, just-the-facts presentation of reality.
It was during this period, in 1895, that a publisher from Tennessee named Adolph Ochs gained control of the New York Times. And like some other publishers, he saw an opportunity to stand out by producing more trustworthy journalism. He published an announcement promising that under his leadership, the Times would report the news impartially, “without fear or favor.” He also didn’t declare fidelity to any political party or ideology but instead wanted the paper to be a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance. And so it would invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion, presenting a wide range of views to best serve the curious and open-minded reader. This was another way to establish the newspaper’s impartiality and credibility.
These sorts of ideas about objectivity and openness to debate spread unevenly throughout the news business. And then after World War I, really, the industry recognized a need to build trust, and it set out to professionalize itself. The American Society for Newspaper Editors was created in 1922, and the first principle it enunciated was that news organizations owed it to their readers to clearly separate news and opinion. Over the following decades, opinion writing flourished in the United States, and so did newsgathering. And the idea prevailed that these roles were both important but needed to be kept distinct in order for Americans to be able to trust the media and to help them get at the truth.
Then came the biggest shock to publishing and the concept of news since the invention of the printing press itself. Even for those of us who lived through the arrival of the internet, it can be hard to realize how profound its consequences have been. I worry a lot that I sound like the old man that I am, growling about this kind of stuff when I start to criticize it. So let me say quickly that I believe a lot of those consequences, including for journalism, have been good.
I spent fifteen years as a reporter at the New York Times and ten years at the Atlantic as the editor. And the ten years I was there was a period when the internet radically changed American journalism. Those were great years for the Atlantic, fun years. We were able to publish a wider range of voices than we ever had before, many more ideas, identify promising new journalists, and make the magazine profitable for the first time in memory. It was when I came back to the Times in 2016 that I really confronted some of the less pleasant consequences for journalism, in my view, of this new technology.
I was brought in to do a version at the Times of what we’d done at the Atlantic: digitize the opinion operation and widen the range of views to better reflect the breadth and richness of American debate. People at the paper were perfectly happy with most of that. I never got an objection from inside the Times to new voices I brought in from the left, but almost every time we hired or even published a conservative, it upset at least some of the staff, starting actually from near the beginning, when I hired Bret Stephens, who was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and at the time, one of the most eloquent critics of Donald Trump. But some of his views were just seen as beyond the pale by some of our colleagues, and they felt free to go after him on Twitter.
I lasted four years in that job until we published the Tom Cotton piece. It’s a funny thing to work for an institution you really believed in for nineteen years, and what you’re known for is getting fired from it. But that’s where I am. And you can challenge my view of what happened. But that episode was just one of the more extreme of many clashes within the Times and other newsrooms, which continue to this day, between the old institutional values and the new ascendant ones.
These sorts of fights didn’t play out only in opinion columns. The news reporters came under heavy criticism for writing empathetically about Donald Trump or Americans who supported him. At one point in my career, I was the bureau chief in Jerusalem. It was during the Second Intifada, and I spent a lot of time in Gaza interviewing Hamas leaders and members of Hamas. It was just a basic part of my job to understand and report on their worldview, to inform Times readers of it, better equip them to deal with it and our governments deal with it. I never got attacked by my colleagues for doing that kind of work. It was seen as a basic part of our job. But after the election of Donald Trump, doing that kind of journalism about our fellow citizens was seen as morally wrong, “platforming” dangerous people and ideas. And that distorted the coverage and therefore readers’ understanding of life in America.
You don’t need to take my word for it. In 2020, the editor-in-chief of the Times said that the paper still didn’t understand why so many people voted for Donald Trump in 2016. How is it that a paper that prided itself for more than a hundred years on doing its work without fear or favor could see it as a point of principle to declare broadly popular conservative ideas too scary to cover?
A lot of this shift has to do with the illiberal ideology that percolated for years on a number of our college campuses and swept out in the last decade to really take hold on the American left—at least the affluent, educated left from which a lot of legacy news organizations have for decades drawn most of their staff. And as they rushed to replace old print-era staff with new so-called digital natives, they failed to provide much training or insist upon their old institutional cultures. They also paid too little attention to the other cultural consequences of technological and commercial changes underway in the news industry, which pose the deepest challenge, I think, to the old values of open-minded and fair American journalism.
There are many influences at work here. Let me point to four.
The first—and this is what we call in journalism “a story about a dog that’s not barking”—is the internet, which, as you know, wiped out a lot of local journalism. In the last twenty years, the U.S. has lost a third of its newspapers and two thirds of its newspaper journalists. That’s 43,000 jobs in all. It’s impossible to measure the civic cost of that loss because, again, it’s a dog that’s not barking. It’s stories that aren’t being reported about local corruption. It’s local officials not being held accountable for where their potholes are getting filled. It’s opportunities for empathy, feature stories that aren’t getting written about your neighbors. It’s a hole that we can’t really measure in our civic life.
But the other thing it did was it destroyed the critical training ground for journalists, the places where reporters came up reporting out in the real world, discovering how complicated and sophisticated people from all walks of life actually are, and also having the experience of being held accountable for your accuracy and the nuance of your work. People know whether that pothole is getting filled or not, and whether you’ve done a good job of covering the question.
The second, huge influence is social media. Many of the new digital journalistic startups started freely mixing news and opinion in their reports because that’s what the internet rewarded, with more shares by people who agreed with it or disagreed with it. And the old distinction between news and opinion began to break down, and there was a crisis of confidence in the old ways.
A lot of news organizations like the Times began to adopt the same approach. Even more damaging, I think, is that social media is a conformity machine, and journalists began developing their own big followings on social media. And the best way to do that is to help lead one tribe or another. That not only made it even harder for journalists to do the hard work of questioning groupthink, it turned many of them into enforcers of groupthink—the very opposite of what was once understood as their ideal role.
The third factor is that the internet really expanded to infinity the amount of news that could be printed every day, at the same time that we were losing all these great journalists. We’ve invented whole new categories of stories and news to fill the sucking void. Think about it: How much of what you’ve read or watched on the internet is about stuff that’s happening on the internet rather than in the real world? Or maybe it’s something that started in the world but then has taken on exaggerated significance in the virtual world. Memes or news, shocking tweets from famous people, or maybe even something you’ve never heard of are now “news,” and they generate reams of commentary and coverage.
Journalists began spending more and more of their time covering these sorts of virtual events, as I think of them, or covering the world via the internet. That meant they spent less time in the real world talking to actual people. Real reporting is also expensive. It’s much cheaper and easier to cover what’s happening on the internet, and the internet also favors that kind of work because very online people like to read about what’s happening online. I’m not saying it’s not worth covering, but I do think virtual events have come to occupy way too much of our attention and mislead us about the real world—they distract and confuse us, even, about what is real. Humans are so much more complicated and interesting and often more reasonable than the sum of their tweets or their retweets or their Instagram posts. And the internet tends to reinforce cartoonish stereotypes of people and groups we don’t have personal experience with.
The fourth and most profound effect is that the internet basically destroyed the old business model for American journalism. Advertising dollars began disappearing to the big platforms, and those news businesses that began to succeed in this new era shifted their emphasis back to relying on subscribers. And they quickly rediscovered the old lesson that the easiest way to get someone to subscribe and then to resubscribe was to constantly assure them that you saw the world the same way they did, to affirm them in their assumptions and their opinions. This is a major reason, I think, that the mainstream—the once mainstream media—has become so partisan.
One of the paradoxes of the internet is that, in the year 2025, it’s returned us to the business model of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the journalistic ethos that went along with it. In retrospect, it was a very happy coincidence that for about a century, the incentives created by capitalism, at least in journalism, aligned with the fundamental values of liberalism, with liberalism’s convictions about free speech, open, honest inquiry, and the value of open debate.
And for all its many failings during the twentieth century, journalism as practiced by its mainstream publications was a bulwark of self-government, partly because it was grounded in those values: by being humble about how little they knew, curious to learn as much as they could, and empathetic, not sympathetic—it’s an important distinction—to people from all walks of life.
Journalists tried to provide, and often did provide, the reliable facts and the wide-ranging debate that helped other citizens form their own views about public life. The journalist’s role was to be the sworn witness. The reader’s role was to be the judge and the jury. And today, a lot of journalists in the institutional media believe it’s the journalist’s proper role—even their moral responsibility—to be the judges themselves, to instruct rather than to inform, to answer rather than to ask, to settle debates rather than to protest. In other words, to tell people what they should think rather than to help them think for themselves.
That’s a problem in itself, but what makes it so hard to address is that the technology and the commercial realities of the news business are also arguing now in favor of those same values. They’re promoting partisanship. They’re promoting contempt for other points of view, and they’re promoting the value of presenting alternative versions of reality. And now I’m afraid we can add fear of the American government to that list of forces too.
That puts the serious people who are left in the institutional media in a really tough position—I empathize. They need to summon real clarity about what it is they want to stand for. They need to have the discipline to promote those values, and sometimes—often now, I think—they must have the courage to defend them and push back.
This struggle, though, also requires, in the finest tradition of journalism, more serious self-scrutiny. The institutional media worries constantly over why mainstream America has lost trust in it, and I think the first step to regaining that trust will be for these organizations to recognize that they broke faith with mainstream America first.
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Q&A
JON BASKIN: Thank you for that, James. I’d be remiss as the moderator, given the news that broke today about the Washington Post, not to start by asking you about what happened and what your read on it is with the opinion editor leaving there. And it strikes me, given what you just said, that the Post and the Times in particular really have a specific ideal of what a national opinion page is for—what its function is—which is not the same, for instance, as the Wall Street Journal’s. Some commentary I saw on what happened today is that Bezos wants to make the Post’s opinion page more like the Journal’s, where you have a certain kind of ideological tilt that you know going in. And so I wondered, in answering this question about what’s specifically happening to the Post, if you could also speak a little bit about what you see as the good of an opinion page like the one that you tried to run at the New York Times.
JAMES BENNET: Well, there has been a series of explosions over the last couple of months now at the Washington Post. It’s been hard to watch what’s happening there. And today, David Shipley, the editorial page editor, as Jon said, resigned because Jeff Bezos wants to push the paper’s opinion pages in a very different direction. And this is where I’m a little hesitant to judge, because we don’t know fully what he is saying. But what’s been reported is that he wants the paper to take clear positions in favor of capitalism and “personal liberties.”
What’s weird to me is that it makes it sound like he only wants to publish those views. Will he brook no challenge to those views on the opinion page of the Washington Post? David, who’s a guy I’ve known a long time, and a very good journalist—I’ve not spoken to him about this—didn’t want to be part of that plan. And Marty Baron, the very, very great former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, came out this afternoon and just blasted this decision as craven and, basically, as a concession to Donald Trump. Coming from him, that’s a devastating appraisal.
If Marty’s right, that’s a terrible sign, not only of what’s happening right now, but of things to come. And that’s why I started this talk with my own concern about what’s happening to the media environment right now. It’s so puzzling, right? Because: free markets, personal liberties—I’m completely down with that. It’s very weird, though, to imagine that that worldview is consonant with then excluding disputation. That’s like the pillars of the liberal ideal married to utter intolerance.
And on top of everything else, and this is part of my problem with it—I’ll come back to your question about op-ed pages with the monoculture we’re creating—it’s also incredibly boring. An opinion page that only has one opinion on it—every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day—is just anti-journalistic.
When I was the editorial page editor of the New York Times, I looked with envy at what the Washington Post was doing, because those guys published a much wider range of opinion than I was able to—we got pushback for people like Bret Stephens. They were publishing many more pro-Trump voices in the Washington Post than we were publishing in the New York Times and basically doing a better job of it. The Post has a richer tradition of this, actually, maybe partly because of the different culture, being in Washington, not New York. They didn’t have the Brooklyn problem that I had, as I came to think of it. And so it’s really concerning to see them moving in what seems like exactly the wrong direction.
We need a lot more clarity, as readers of the Post, about what the vision is here. If it’s to enunciate those values more clearly as the Post editorial line, I don’t have a problem with that, as long as they’re forthright and transparent about it and as long as they make room for dissent and disputation. If they don’t do that, it’s a terribly discouraging development that’s really, I think, bad for the country and bad for the Washington Post.
BASKIN: On the one hand, the story you’re telling about journalism is very much about technology and commerce. But I’m curious where you see the pressure points, where the space for agency is, of people who are working in these places. Does it mostly come down to a matter of leadership? Are there things that you saw work and not work at creating a more open culture within the Times while you were there?
BENNET: I mean, there was an existential crisis. And during that crisis, a lot of organizations, including the New York Times, stopped doing a lot of the training that they used to do. They stopped doing a lot of the acculturation. And there were bad parts of that too, like the brainwashing. And, again, I sound like a fossil, but when I first joined the paper, every journalist who came on had to do a stint on the Metro desk in New York, covering the city, being beaten up by old Metro editors, and learning the culture and the ways of the New York Times.
There were downsides to that. But big upsides too, because you developed an understanding of the ethos of the place. And I think journalists at very old institutions like the New York Times, where people tended to come and stay for a long time, never really developed the habit of articulating those values to themselves, what they stand for.
In fact, when I arrived as editorial page editor, I kept asking people: What does the editorial page of the New York Times stand for? What are our values? The Wall Street Journal’s is “free markets, free people”—I get it, that’s their slogan. The only thing I could find was that statement by Adolph Ochs back in 1896. The answer was always, Well, it’s what the family thinks, and it’s what the archive says.
There was a lack of clarity about [what we stood for]. So it’s not the fault of the journalists who brought a different idea of what journalism is. And it wasn’t just the journalists—it was new salespeople, it was coders. There was a ton of hiring that changed the nature of the workforce without a lot of conversation about, this is who we are.
When I joined the Economist, it was still COVID times. And I was new to the Economist—I’d never worked there. So I went to the orientation for interns that was being held on Zoom, and a an editor did the orientation from London. And the first thing she did was put up a PowerPoint slide that said, “This is who we are” at the top, with four bullet points. And I practically burst into tears. It’s not that hard. And it’s not an offensive conversation: we’re always open to debate, but this is who we are. And if you don’t want to be part of this project, probably should work someplace else. But they’d lost track of that.
The Slack channels, the internal communications, and Twitter just became places where people would beat their colleagues up. It’s very hard to be an opinion writer. They’re thinking out loud all the time. They’re doing public thinking. And this is an environment where you get treated brutally for doing that kind of work. You get a lot of rewards from people who agree with you, and you get a lot of punishment from those who don’t. That’s what’s making a lot of writers less interesting and more predictable. When they take a chance, they need to have an editor that backs them up 100 percent—that’s what it requires in this environment. And that’s what I mean about having clarity about what you stand for.
BASKIN: I wanted to ask you about something that you touched on today, but it’s also explored in more detail in your Economist article. You make an interesting point about the differing values between these two visions of journalism: the pluralistic liberal vision that you refer to as more old-fashioned and the newer, what you term “illiberal,” mindset. And one of the things you say is that the old-fashioned version, while it’s very skeptical on the surface and crotchety and alienated, is actually quite idealistic, in the sense that it has an idealism toward the public. It believes that what the journalist’s job is to do is to equip the public with the facts, and the public can make their own judgments, whereas the new ethos is very idealistic on the surface, because there’s often a kind of very direct application of moral ideals to journalism, but it doesn’t really trust the public. It’s somewhat cynical about the public’s ability to deal with dangerous ideas or ideas they consider dangerous. It feels the public has to be guided. And I wanted to ask you: one thing I’ll hear a lot of people say who are more from that second tendency, is: Well, why are you so idealistic about the public? What’s your evidence that the public can actually handle the facts?
And in your talk, you talked about your faith that the American mainstream still exists, that there’s a mainstream audience that deserves to be treated with the respect that you—and I also—think is really important. But I’m kind of curious how you respond to that, the people who have become cynical about the American public.
BENNET: Let me tell you another old story from the New York Times. When I was a political reporter back in 1996, there was a very great editor of the New York Times named Joe Lelyveld, and he used to make us do stories that we just hated. They were called “Voices” pieces. And you’d have to go to some place, some town in a swing state—you know, Macomb County, Michigan; in those days, York, Pennsylvania. I went to Raleigh, North Carolina. And there was a rule—I can’t remember how many it was—you had to talk to, like, two dozen people. But you couldn’t stop them in the street. You couldn’t stop them at the mall. You had to knock on their doors and go to a bunch of new neighborhoods and, like a vampire, persuade them to invite you inside and sit down and talk to them about who they were going to vote for and why.
It was a lot of work. And the stories weren’t that interesting because there wasn’t really a throughline. And we’d write these stories, and they wouldn’t get on the front page. It wasn’t until years later that the penny dropped for me, when I was an editor myself, and I realized that Joe was teaching us. He probably didn’t care about those stories too much; what he cared was that we were having that experience. And the experience that I had when I was a reporter was constantly to be delighted by the intelligence and the sophistication of everybody I talked to.
I get in arguments about this all the time: Voters are smart. They make decisions in their own interests. They know what their interests are. And it is profoundly condescending and disrespectful to suggest otherwise. And again, maybe it sounds terribly naive, but it has been my experience. We are so disoriented and confused now about what’s real. So maybe that’ll change. But if that’s the case, then democracy is kind of over.
As a journalist, our role, our contribution to the civic project is to provide them with the truth. And this is another one of the differences between what I see as the old versus the new ideology. The old values… as cynical as my editors could seem—and they thought every word out of every politician’s mouth was a lie—they believed in truth. They believed there was a truth out there, however difficult it might be to get at it, apprehend it, communicate it. And the new ideology really does believe that truth is a function of narrative, a word I’ve come to hate. And it’s about power.
And if that’s right, then I think we’re kind of lost. Maybe it’s an act of faith on my part at this point.
BASKIN: I’m just going to ask one more question, just to bring into particular focus the challenge for an opinion page in particular of covering Trump and the movement around him. You’ve spoken yourself about how in 2016, people could have read the New York Times opinion page and not really had any idea why so many people were voting for Trump after the election.
And while you did bring in Republicans to the opinion page, I don’t know, I wonder if you would say you brought anyone in who sort of represented the Trumpist part of the country. I wonder about the specific challenges you see at institutional media outlets of covering a movement that is, at its core, so anti-institutional—in some sense, that’s the animus behind a lot of the movement. How would you think about that as an opinion page editor? How did you in his first term and how you would you find a way to represent that part of the country or of the political scene now?
BENNET: Can I say quickly first that part of the problem that guys like me had in trying to defend the old ways, as I keep calling it, is that we hadn’t lived up to them ourselves. And it was totally fair for a lot of people to say, you’re a hypocrite, or where were you worrying about a wide range of views before—when I arrived as the editorial page editor, there were twelve columnists at the New York Times, all individually awesome, but only two of twelve were women; one of twelve was Black. And the Times hired its first Black opinion columnist in the 1990s and had only ever had one at a time. Two were conservative, or identified as conservative, out of twelve. And pretty much all of them supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and not Bernie in the primaries. So here I am extolling liberalism, but people have total justice in saying, this institution was not honoring that ideal for a really long time. And again, that’s not a knock on any of the writers that were there, but it’s a sign, I think, of the blindness and the failure to capture the wide range.
Now, you’re right, I didn’t get a Trumpist columnist. And I looked with some envy at the Washington Post, which was doing that. I tried. I didn’t think at that point—and we can argue about how coherent it is, but the whole “American greatness” ideology, the scaffolding that’s been built on top of the personality of Donald Trump, didn’t really exist. So to be a columnist in favor of Donald Trump then was to hold a series of really intellectually inconsistent positions that were all explained and lent coherence only by support of the man. So what I’m saying, and maybe defensively, is that I thought it was very hard to find a really good columnist with intellectual integrity who could take that position. I think it got more possible over time. But there were other voices that we were missing.
In the old days, there was a classic opinion voice of the American working class that populated American op-ed pages. I’m thinking, for those who remember, of people like Jimmy Breslin. And there were important voices, particularly in the New York tabloids—that voice is kind of gone. And in our era, I kept thinking, it’s more like somebody who’s worked at Walmart. That was a voice I was trying very hard to find and didn’t succeed in when I was there.
I mean, that’s the fun of doing this work. And that’s why I was excited about it. Really diversifying that range is the whole point. And that’s why what Jeff Bezos is talking about doing is so disturbing.
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