"Objective" journalism was a business model by Matthew Yglesias

"Objective" journalism was a business model

In late March, the former Washington Post editor Martin Baron wrote a stirring defense of journalistic objectivity in his former paper.

The piece is shaped by the contours of his various fights over the years with former Post reporter Wesley Lowery. Baron doesn’t mention the dispute directly, and Lowery says he has simply avoided addressing those criticisms, which related more to the practice of objectivity than to the theory. Most of the replies to Baron that I’ve seen take some version of this line, though Brian Beutler offers what I think is a smarter criticism, namely that the practice of journalism inherently involves lots of questions that don’t have an objective answer.

I once prodded a high-ranking NYT employee about the paper’s coverage of the Clinton email scandal, challenging him to defend the proposition that the volume and prominence of the topic in his paper was equal to its significance in the world. He conceded that it was not. But he also noted, correctly, that the page layout of the newspaper is not and has never been an “objective” rendering of how important things are — the outcome of the Super Bowl is a “big news story” that goes on the front page even though in a cosmic sense, we all know it doesn’t really matter. A less trivial example is that the Times wrote up an April 7 story about how police officers in Farmington, New Mexico shot and killed a man by mistake — they knocked on the wrong door, Robert Dotson answered the door holding his gun, and the cops thought he was the suspect in a crime and shot him. The story itself is written in a perfectly straight news style, but the decision to designate “cops in random New Mexico town fucked up” as a story of national significance reflects a significant change in news judgment over the last 20 years.

I think the bigger issue here is that the journalistic values of American newspapers in the second half of the 20th century reflected first and foremost their business model. Both the good and the bad were fundamentally tied to business considerations —the “Chinese Wall” between business and editorial was itself part of that. And whatever consensus develops around objectivity in journalism going forward will also need to reflect the realities of modern business considerations.

The information utility

When I was an intern at Rolling Stone in the long-ago summer of 2000, interns attended weekly brown bag lunches with various higher-ups from the magazine.

One of the most memorable was with the head business guy. He said the thing editorial people didn’t get was that the most important parts of the magazine were the parts the editorial staff cared about the least: the capsule album reviews in the back and a roundup of national music and entertainment scene news in the front.

In the pre-internet age, people living in the suburbs of Cleveland or whatever didn’t have ready access to this kind of basic commodity information, like whether Billy Corgan did something funny on stage at a show in Dallas. So the Rolling Stone interns got day-late, out-of-town newspapers every morning, browsed their entertainment sections, literally cut out articles we thought the editors would be interested in, and photocopied a daily clips book of music news. Some of those stories would then be aggregated in the magazine for the benefit of a national audience of music fans.

That news roundup, along with the album reviews that people found helpful, was the core service that Rolling Stone provided to its subscribers. And those subscribers — an audience that skewed male and young, but not so young that it violated FTC guidelines to advertise booze and cigarettes to them — were valuable to advertisers. But you can’t just mail people a magazine full of ads. For every page of ads they sold, they would order a page of editorial. They needed at least one article about someone famous who would do a photo shoot for the cover, but beyond that, anything went — just try not to piss people off so much that they cancel their subscriptions.

Daily newspapers were even more like this.

A huge share of the value proposition of the analog newspaper consisted of stuff that is barely considered journalistic or media content today: the previous night’s sports scores, the weather forecast, yesterday’s Dow Jones movement, movie listings, and other commodity information. There were also, of course, the classified ads. You didn’t need to care very much about the news to want a subscription to the newspaper — it contained lots of useful information.

That included meta-information about whether there was even any interesting news in the newspaper. You could scan the front page and see most days there was nothing much happening. Every once in a while there’d be a big headline that said “HEY THIS IS A BIG DEAL,” and you could read that. Or you could read the rest of the paper if you happened to be extremely bored. The world in general was less entertaining with no smartphones and no streaming video, and the newspaper was both portable and disposable, which made it a good way to kill time.

“Is the journalism good?” was a sort of secondary or tertiary consideration in terms of the viability of the enterprise.

Do no harm

This is not to say that news organizations didn’t do good journalism.

But first and foremost, they tried not to do bad journalism. They tried not to libel people. They tried not to print stuff that was false and would undermine the credibility of the underlying information utility. They tried not to scandalize people — no curse words in the family newspaper. They also tried to avoid alienating advertisers. The Chinese Wall served to protect journalists from business considerations but also to protect ad salespeople from blowback. Each of these papers was trying to be an immovable object. If the appliance store wants to clear out its inventory of excess dishwashers, it needs to let people know about the sale, and how would it do that without putting an ad in the paper? If the store didn’t like the story last month about how dishwashers are contributing to algae blooms

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then too bad, there's a wall.

This encouraged a lot of blocking-and-tackling editorial work that was adjacent to the information utility function. Every paper had a section of death listings anchored by some proper obituaries and a page of box scores and sports standings filled out with game write-ups. If there’s no game to write up, maybe there’s a squib on how so-and-so is recovering from injury.

A reporter goes to the school board meeting to write down what happened there. Same for the city council hearing. Mayor does a press conference? Write down what she says. Police say something happened? Write down what they say happened.

It’s not to say that all stories were boring. But “this is boring” was not a deadly sin to a story the way it is on the internet. Ads were sold, and you needed some filler to go around the ads. You wanted the filler to align with the information utility mission, you wanted it to be accurate and non-libelous, and ideally, you didn’t want to annoy the hell out of your audience. So you’d just kind of write stuff up. A good thing for society is that someone whose job was to write down what happened at City Council meetings might become genuinely well-informed about the Council and its business. She might get some scoops and break some news. This served as an important public interest watchdog function. It also served her interest in leading a non-boring life, having her stories on the front page, and getting a promotion.

From the newspaper’s standpoint, this kind of thing — exposing scandals on the City Council — was probably actually not that important to the business. And on one level this is what made it all work. Because the economic value of the beat reporting was not that closely tied to how interesting it was, you could carry someone’s salary for indefinite periods of just diligently learning what’s up and getting to know sources.

The view from the middle

These same considerations also dictated the practical realities of ideological bias in journalism. The big television broadcast networks operated in a low-competition environment of three giant franchises. Newspapers operated in locally segmented markets where there was usually no direct competitor (maybe in a giant city there would be one competitor).

The aim was to reach as broad an audience as possible, which in practice meant not so much avoiding ideological bias as trying to make sure that your biases were in line with the audience. Even in the highly polarized landscape of 2017, the optimal way to pursue that strategy would have been with a kind of centrist ideological bias.

As recently as the mid-90s, the underlying distribution of American public opinion was in fact much more centrist, with the median Democrat not that different from the median Republican and lots of overlap. If you pitched down the middle, you’d please the largest possible chunk of the audience and stay on decent terms with key elites from both parties.

The causation went both ways, with a relatively non-polarized public opinion encouraging centrist media while centrist media helped discourage polarization of public opinion. But starting with AM talk radio in the 1980s, Fox News in the 1990s, and then the internet in the 2000s, the media landscape became much more open and competitive. And the news landscape started looking more like the newspaper landscape in the UK (which had multiple competitive national newspapers) had always looked. Outlets tried to define their niches more precisely, to be not just “a news source for people who live near Albuquerque” but “a news source for people like you.” Generic doesn’t work well when you’re jostling amongst a crowd.

Bias is a business model

Today we not only have a competitive, fragmented landscape that reinforces a polarized public, but we also have a badly skewed labor market.

An under-appreciated fact about the “mainstream media” is that the people who cover politics are often less left-wing than the copy editors and graphic designers or the people who write about cooking or television shows. That’s because publications are basically hiring from a pool of youngish college graduates who live in big cities, which means they end up with a distinctly left-wing group of people unless they make a special effort to achieve balance. The people who cover politics professionally actually do make some effort along these lines for the sake of maintaining sourcing relationships, understanding issues, etc. But to run a cooking section that wasn’t left-wing, you’d have to practice affirmative action for conservative food writers, which would raise costs and has no obvious upside.

This is reinforced by the asymmetry in the audiences. Educated people read more and are also more liberal. Liberals also seem to care more about politics.

None of which is to say there’s no market for conservative content; there’s obviously a huge market for conservative talk radio, and there’s a reason Fox News is the most popular cable channel. But successful conservative media tends to be anchored by small numbers of charismatic stars operating in a hyper-political context and a primarily audiovisual medium. The realm of “written recaps of television shows” is distinctly left-skewing not because journalistic values have collapsed, but because the easiest way to churn out content is to have mostly-liberal people writing for a mostly-liberal audience.

Mindful media consumption matters

I’m not suggesting that nothing has been genuinely lost in the displacement of the objective ideal.

But it really is worth saying that the ideal of the newspaper that speaks to everyone and for everyone wasn’t just a conceptual ideal, it was a business model. And to be clear, like objectivity itself, the universal newspaper was a regulative ideal, not a reality. Even in a town with no competition between newspapers, lots of families didn’t subscribe to the newspaper. But the goal was that everyone should subscribe, that the paper — the paper — was a big bundle of information services designed to be both comprehensive and inoffensive, and in principle, everyone should get it.

That doesn’t make sense as a contemporary business aspiration, in part because the landscape is so much more competitive and in part because the core information utility service is gone.

If you care a lot about having timely updates on sports, traffic, weather, and financial markets but don’t care that much about politics and government, you don’t really need a regular “news source.” You don’t need to subscribe to a magazine called TV Guide to know which shows are on which channels when. You don’t need to browse a newspaper to find out when that new movie about the Air Jordans is playing. But if you do write an article about politics, people are going to care how many readers it gets. Alternatively, a publication might (like this one!) have a business model that doesn’t rely on reaching a mass audience. Either way, though, while there’s a lot one could reasonably ask of a publication, it’s bound to end up being very different in tone and approach from the newspapers of “the good old days.” There’s just no way to keep the product similar while the underlying business model is revolutionized.

This mostly makes me wish that everyone would spend a little less time complaining about media that they think is bad and a little more time thinking about how to support media that they think is good. Spend less time getting mad online or marinating in anxiety about stuff you can’t control. Try to think of some questions you’re sincerely interested in and seek out the places that are doing the best job of informing you about them and try to support them financially. In a changing world, that’s the best we can do.