Behind the Story: Crumbling Media Systems, Credentialism, and the Big Sort

RQ Ideas Editor Walter Foley on ‘No Gods, No Masters’

My article “No Gods, No Masters” in RQ’s “Renaissance” issue—which explores the work of independent videographer Ford Fischer and other journalists and editors—grew out of a series of dismal realizations about American media that became impossible to ignore throughout 2020. 

The institutions that many of us task with making sense of the world have been making a lot of noticeable mistakes lately. Such institutions have of course always made mistakes, but the nature of social media means that more people are aware of the dearth of competent people at the helm of this ship.

As these institutions lose trust—and often financial stability within rapidly evolving business models—they come to rely more heavily on gimmicks to keep their ship afloat. In the case of news companies, for example, budget cuts and emergent market forces have resulted in the widespread practice of analyzing opinions posted to Twitter as though they were evidence of whatever theory a particular journalist wants to advance.

So we’re left with bizarre and embarrassing public happenings that many of us simply can’t shrug away. Last year, for example, a New York Times editorial board member appeared on Brian Williams’ MSNBC show to praise the brilliance of a tweet that claimed Michael Bloomberg could have redirected the $500 million he spent on campaign ads and instead given $1 million to every American “and still have money left over.” That the math was wrong by six decimal points went unnoticed by everyone involved, including, apparently, Williams’ entire production team. 

Katie Herzog, who hosts the podcast Blocked and Reported with fellow journalist Jesse Singal, thinks that much of the degradation in quality within news outlets can be traced to consolidated media empires, which have incentivized an insular, centralized business model that was once more regional.

“We have Gannett and USA Today and these shitty networks that have hollowed out local papers that would have been the training grounds in the ’60s and ’70s, where people would go and cover the school board or the courts or whatever, and then maybe work their way up into a national paper,” she told me in March.

Throughout much of the 20th century, it was common for journalists to hone their craft through real-world experience—within a process more akin to learning a trade—which didn’t require a prestigious degree. Many of the most prominent editorial and writing positions are now filled by people who made connections through expensive educational spheres.

“I know lots of people who have gone from, like: prep school, Yale, internship at Mother Jones, job at New York Times,” Herzog said. “It’s just a totally different class of people who are doing this job than what the job of a reporter was several generations ago.”

A 2018 study from the Journal of Expertise showed that the average writer or editor at outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal is more likely to have attended an elite university than the average Fortune 500 CEO. One of the results of this seems to be that many of the most influential commentators in the U.S. are out of touch with the concerns of everyday citizens.

Thankfully, new sensemaking networks are emerging through social media that are able to take these institutional powers to task and criticize them when they are lazy or dishonest. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff: These innovators often operate on the same platforms as the least trustworthy voices in independent media.

Many of our once-trusted institutions see this as an opportunity to save face by claiming that all of the independent media figures who criticize them must suffer from the same defects: dabbling in misinformation, disinformation, crankery, bigotry, extremism, etc.

It’s become clear, however, that some of the most important journalism and research will necessarily come from those who have no formal institutional backing. And—for the time being—these courageous figures will be made to share space with some of the craziest people on the internet.

Our next endlessly confusing problem: Who’s who?

Read the full piece ‘No Gods, No Masters,’ that originally appeared in Vol. 2 Issue 4: RENAISSANCE.