Traditional journalism has been blasted to pieces.
20 March 2025 (Berlin, Germany) — Depending on how embedded you are in the journalism/media industry, the last few weeks have been rather enlightening. And I have been a media guy all my life (my media history is in the postscript) so it is fascinating to me.
Over the last few weeks there have been some intense articles tracking the rise of antisemitism on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von. Will Sommer over in The Bulwark had a great piece and noted:
“I suspect that, with the right ascendant politically and culturally, bad-boy podcasters have run short of DEI sacred cows to skewer”.
Joe Rogan had a recent guest talking about the “greatness” of “Mein Kampf”
Sommer’s piece arrived this week alongside a big buzzy New Yorker feature probing similar depths: “Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?” The most exhaustive look yet at the question of “Where is the Joe Rogan of the left?”
Note to my readers: it’s more than just one guy. The left needs an entire information ecosystem. What we are seeing is the wholesale destruction of the liberal state. Everywhere you look, liberal institutions across America are being gutted … and it’s taken Trump just two months to pull it off. For hardline conservatism, it’s a triumph of historic proportions. I’ll have more on that tomorrow in a companion post to this one.
All of this soul-searching among the mainstream media basically boils down to, “What happened to American men?” Which is a little strange because we know. We’ve known for a decade that the “manosphere” (a term that, at this point, is like trying to define part of the ocean by calling it the “wet zone”) was a problem – and yet we still ended up here.
Which takes me to the larger, pretty much unspoken, anxiety hanging over all of these election postmortems dropping in increasingly esteemed publications like The New Yorker. One that I had been trying to articulate – until I stumbled upon an interview with Felix Biederman, a journalist who has a good bead on the media biz. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Soundcloud, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, SB Nation, etc., etc., etc., and he runs a brilliant podcast. As Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”.
As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters.
Note to readers: I wrote about this last year. On January 15, 2009, a US Airways flight from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte, North Carolina struck a flock of birds shortly after takeoff and had to ditch in the Hudson River near Midtown Manhattan. As I wrote, journalism, social media and the information ecosystem changed forever.
And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that “Article World”, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online.
The death of “Article World” is affecting our politics more than anything else right now. As I wrote last week, during the first Trump administration, the president’s various henchmen would do something illegal or insane, a reporter would find out, cable news and newspapers would cover it nonstop, and usually that henchman would resign or, oftentimes, end up in jail.
I’m not sure if the ChatGPT model that teaches fourth grade social studies in American elementary schools (yes, it is being used that way; more in another post) now covers this sort of thing, but this is why the media is typically called the 4th branch of the government. The other 3 are now fondly remembered as the executive, the legislative, and the judicial – now just merged into one.
But because “Post World” has defeated “Article World”, the 4th branch doesn’t work the way it used to. The most damning example being the incident last month where 25-year-old Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer Marko Elez resigned over racist X posts that included things like, “Normalize Indian hate” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” His posts were discovered by journalists, pressure was put on the executive branch to fire him, and he stepped down. Ok, he never really stepped down. That was merely political theater.
But everybody said “HURRAH! A perfect Article World win!!“
Except, days later, both Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance said they wanted to rehire him. As I said, it was unclear if he ever resigned in the first place, let alone, was rehired — that, in and of itself, a loss for Article World — but he’s also being investigated by the Department of Justice for sharing unencrypted personal information from the US Treasury. Maybe that’ll get him.
This also explains why Texas is trying to pass the “Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education,” or “FURRIES” Act, based on a years-old anti-trans internet conspiracy theory. It’s why Trump’s team is targeting former President Joe Biden’s autopen-signed pardons after the idea surfaced in a viral X post shared by Libs Of TikTok.
And it’s why U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is investigating random social media reports that military bases are still letting personnel list their preferred pronouns on different forms. “Posts” are all that matters now. And it’s likely no amount of articles can defeat them.
As I noted, the coronavirus lockdown accelerated the Cambrian Explosion of virtual spaces, and that, coupled with the January 2021 insurrection, meant *real journalism* was devoured by social platforms.
“Article World” is dying, or maybe already dead. “Post World” is ascendant. And it’s not just a political problem. It’s impacting music, fashion, celebrity, law, economics — I could go on and on here. It is effecting everything. We’ve replaced the largely one-way street of mass media with not even just a two-way street of mass media and the internet, like we had in the 2010s.
Think about it for a second. When was the last time you truly felt public “consensus”? On anything? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon? Was it in the last two years? Was it this decade?
And, yes, the most skilled and seasoned journalists could try to win that back – to use journalism to shift public perception and hold the powerful to account.
But not with bullshit. With clear writing. As an example, read “The E.P.A. Shifts Its Mission“. Excuse me, but: “the EPA shifts its mission“? I know American papers (and the NYT in particular) are terrible at headlines. But wouldn’t “abandons its mission” be more truthful? Or “says yes to pollution“? Almost anything would be more accurate 🤦♂️
Yes, I know, I know. An admirable endeavor. But unless the very architecture of the internet changes, it’s likely whatever they write will end up as “just another post”.
And the people I (somewhat) pity? The core MAGA constituency will never get the information they need on what is really going on – in case by any miracle they actually believe it.
Just a brief intro to my writing, since many of you have asked me “what is your process?“.
When I was a wee lad, around the age of 9 or 10, I started a weekly neighborhood newspaper – interviewing my neighbors, following local events, etc. One of my Mom’s friends ran a typeset print shop and he helped me design and set-up production. He eventually added a mimeograph machine to his business which made production and distribution of my weekly paper much easier. He eventually got me a job on our town’s local newspaper, running a newspaper delivery route (by bicycle). I eventually built it to over 100 customers. When I got older, the paper hired me as a freelance reporter. The newspaper biz got into by blood.
At university I joined the radio station. In 1972/1973 I was studying at the University of Paris. My university radio station asked me to call in a report on the Vietnam peace talks. There I was, standing outside the Hotel Majestic on 27 January 1973, as the peace accords were formally signed and announced – not grasping the history unfolding. Later in my career, well after law school, and well into my lawyer career, I went to journalism school and to film school – in my 50s.
I am by profession a lawyer, a writer, a journalist, a media producer – and in my wildest dreams, a historian. As a lawyer I began my career working for clients in the technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sectors. I stayed in those sectors. It drew me to my own video and film production work, and although I am now semi-retired so I could write more, I still produce a bi-monthly newsletter for my TMT clients while my media team continues to produce bespoke videos for those clients. And I have jumped in and out of my genocide/Holocaust/perpetual-war blog and video series. It has been frustrating, and horrific.
But with the explosion of social media, the continuing Cambrian Explosion of virtual spaces and the dispersion of creativity came the development of wonderful curation tools to parse a tsunami of information so readily available.
Like most of my media cohorts, I don’t “read” Twitter or Linkedin or any mainstream social media anymore. I use APIs like Cronycle and Factiva that curate the whole social media firehose so I only receive selected, summarized material that pertains to my immediate research or reading need. That led me to develop my own company, Luminative Media.
But really, if you look back at the development of digital media since the turn of the millennium, artists have been writing, and circulating their writing, like never before: essays, criticism, manifestos, fiction, diaries, scripts, and blog posts have charted a complex era in the world at large, away from mainstream social media, weighing in on the exigencies of our times in unexpected and inventive ways.
What is different is the level of social media toxicity and mis-information/dis-information/mal-information. And so one needs to set up some rules:
1. I use media (traditional or social) to become aware of things, but certainly not to reach conclusions on anything. What’s included and excluded, and takes upon it, are always subjective on anything as important as today’s catastrophes. As I have noted many times, to be an informed citizen is a daunting task. We move through myriad, overlapping spheres, ones that are forever entangled. All moving at an exponential pace. We are living through social and technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. But occurring in only a fraction of the time.
Plus, what we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority, primarily but not exclusively governmental – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one. All of these other features are just the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history. You need to do a lot of homework to get things right.
That is why, as I have noted, my media team and I receive and/or monitor about 3,500 primary and secondary resource points every month (about 120 items each day). But we use an AI program built by my CTO (using the Factiva research database + four other media databases) plus APIs like Cronycle that curate the media firehose so we only receive selected material that pertains to our current research needs, or reading interest, which is coupled with an AI that summarizes each item, and links to the original source.
2. I make it a point to pay most attention to sources which are primary or near-to-primary as possible. So I read cover-to-cover the judgments and the official statements. And so far as journalism is concerned, I only pay attention to the most credible investigative type of material, based on documents and testimony from people directly involved, or people I have known and trusted through the years.
3. In considering official documents about serious allegations, serious matters, you need to pay attention to the precise wording to discover what is not being said, what agendas are hidden. What’s accepted (expressly or implicitly), what’s denied, what’s avoided, what’s recharacterised-then-denied. What’s between-the-lines. All those subtleties give clues as to where the real sensitivities and issues are.
But sometimes (sigh) you just step back and try to sense the humanity of it all.
Which brought me to Berlin for 3-days, for an intensive military intelligence program on the Ukraine War and the Gaza War. To gain an overall narrative.
Because everyone, everywhere, lives by a story. This story is handed to us by the culture we grow up in, the family that raises us, and the worldview we construct for ourselves as we grow. The story will change over time, and adapt to circumstances. When you’re young, you tend to imagine that you have bravely pioneered your own story. After all, the whole world revolves around you.
As you age, though, you begin to see that much of what you believe is in fact a product of the time and place you were young in.
It was a study of the First World War that turned it around for me. It was monumental in scope, larger and more devastating than anything in anyone’s experience. The factors leading up to it were a confusing tangle of alliances, feuds, and rivalries, and the ordinary person might be hard-pressed to say just what they were fighting for. So many had died, and for what?
Oh, the complexity of the world. And the faux social environment that rewards simplicity and shortness, and punishes complexity and depth and nuance. I simply detest it. To understand the world you need to step outside your usual lanes, and cross disciplines, and cultural boundaries.
And I get it. It ain’t easy. I realize that many of my readers are “commerce monkeys, commerce machines” (not my turn of phrase – provided by a long time reader) – with barely enough time to read and write and produce for your jobs. You barely have time to scan and parse social media to keep up-to-date. I know. I know.
To be an informed citizen is a daunting task. We move through myriad, overlapping spheres, ones that are forever entangled. Moving at an exponential pace – living through social and technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. But occurring in only a fraction of the time.
What we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority (primarily but not exclusively governmental) and the breakdown of all norms – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one if you read your history. All of these features are, really, just the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history.
But still, though everything seems broken, we must still struggle with “why”, to struggle to understand – to struggle to survive. We are in the formative years of a new period whose name and character we don’t truly know yet.
Antonio Gramsci, from his “Prison Notebooks”, a series of essays written between 1929 and 1935 while he was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime.