The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni

Author:Frank Bruni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

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The Covington episode was anything but a sideshow if only for what it said about the evolution of the traditional media, which has been affected not just by social media—it’s impossible to separate the two, to treat social media as its own discrete phenomenon—but also by other technological advances and by economic and cultural forces that put a premium on speed, attitude, boldness, loudness. The internet altered everything. It gave advertisers more efficient ways to reach consumers than through publications and television news programs, taking a fatal bite out of the revenues of many news organizations, especially local ones. But it also markedly decreased what it took for someone to stake a media presence of sorts: no big investment, professional credential, or finely honed skill was required to create an online publication or blog—to assemble a website, lickety-split. And the cheapest way to get into the content-creation game wasn’t to hire a platoon of journalists who did extensive, objective on-the-ground reporting that commandeered serious time and racked up serious expenses: flights, rental cars, hotel rooms. It was to hire writers who puzzled over and pontificated about the material that richer organizations were airing and publishing. And for cable news networks such as CNN, which debuted in 1980, and MSNBC, which joined the fun and the fray in 1996, filling all twenty-four hours of programming every day with truly fresh information was (and is) logistically undoable. The solution: to have anchor after anchor, guest after guest, panel after panel hash over and riff about the same basket of information, with the look of the set and the lineup of talking heads changing every ten or thirty or sixty minutes. The solution was commentary. The solution was opinion.

I can’t overstate how many of the changes in the news business since I took my first full-time newspaper job in 1988 have increased the presence and pointedness of opinion in journalism. Many of the online publications I just referred to donned partisan colors, in the way so many print publications in Europe always have. They made no bones about presenting news and commentary through a liberal or conservative lens. The line between neutral and opinionated journalism in news outlets that offered both began to blur, as articles that offered “analysis” created a space for subjectivity behind a fig leaf of objectivity and as the whole model and morality of objective reporting—in its classical form and according to its traditional definition—came up for debate. And the opinion sections of news outlets that did all kinds of journalism grew, largely because of another new technological wrinkle: the ability to measure what online readers, who represent the overwhelming majority of readers of the Times and similar news organizations, are looking at and responding to. Turns out they especially like columns, commentary, essays with a distinct point of view. So they’re getting more of that.

I don’t think many people outside the news business appreciate the revolution in a news organization’s ability to monitor its online readers.

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