The newspapers don't know what to do with themselves.
In my opinion, they're following because we're in a period of flux or change in our society, driven by the massive impact of the internet and the barriers to publication being practically zero now.
Because there are so many voices shouting out right now, it's impossible to find the ones who are speaking "the truth" when that was something defined by a handful of editors in newspapers and TV networks 30 years ago.
Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die. I don't know if that problem is solvable in any way with the Internet in its current form.
Parallel with that misinformation and disinformation, society (speaking mostly about the USA) is struggling with enormous capital and power inequality. Groups of people of every political leaning know that "something is wrong" but so many are being told to blame this or that group of others.
We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law. We've been shown that we may not be able to do anything about that without significant revolution.
So in this period of massive change, we're told we're powerless.
Yes, the New York Times is following, because we all are.
I don't think that's really true. The pathological problems affecting most of the news media aren't universal, even within that industry, and certainly not if you broaden the definition of journalism slightly to include independent writers on blogs.
I remember some years ago, a big debate in the media was whether blogging represented some new revolution in journalism. Eventually the mainstream became obsessed with Twitter and sort of forgot about blogging, but it never went away.
By far the best journalism and analysis available during COVID-19 has been from this wider group of journalists. Some of them are both independent bloggers and writers in regular newspapers simultaneously. But many are just ordinary citizens who happen to work in mathematically or statistically rigorous fields, and found themselves with time on their hands to do analysis.
I think one reason they can do a better job is they're less conflicted than journalists are. They can write some calm, level headed articles pitched to any audience they like and don't have to worry about how many clicks they get, or whether subscriptions will grow or shrink as a consequence. A huge problem professional journalists have is that they earn more money when telling people there's a crisis, because news consumption goes way up. So anything scary is blasted out at full volume, and when it's discovered to have been a false alarm there's crickets. There's no incentive at all to tell people, OK, maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed.
I think this is also why so many journalists end up attacking vague, unnamed "deniers" and "sceptics". It's common for such people to write detailed blog posts drilling in to a specific scientific issue far deeper than newspaper or CNN talking heads can, and often concluding, actually, the issue is overhyped. They can reach that conclusion because their livelihoods don't depend on finding the opposite. But any time anyone reads this alt-journalism and concludes, hey, maybe I'm being manipulated into believing things that sell a lot of news, they drop out and stop consuming as much of the "pro" output. It makes sceptical bloggers the arch enemies of mainstream news.
Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die .... We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law.
I don't think we have. I think that's another narrative newspapers like to feed people to keep them watching or reading.
I think that’s too pessimistic. If it weren’t for Twitter and Facebook then yes the environment for journalism would be challenging, but we wouldn’t be in the dire straits for debate that we’ve found ourselves at. Notable that this crisis did not happen pre-Facebook.
In my opinion, they're following because we're in a period of flux or change in our society, driven by the massive impact of the internet and the barriers to publication being practically zero now.
Because there are so many voices shouting out right now, it's impossible to find the ones who are speaking "the truth" when that was something defined by a handful of editors in newspapers and TV networks 30 years ago.
Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die. I don't know if that problem is solvable in any way with the Internet in its current form.
Parallel with that misinformation and disinformation, society (speaking mostly about the USA) is struggling with enormous capital and power inequality. Groups of people of every political leaning know that "something is wrong" but so many are being told to blame this or that group of others.
We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law. We've been shown that we may not be able to do anything about that without significant revolution.
So in this period of massive change, we're told we're powerless.
Yes, the New York Times is following, because we all are.