First, a few updates and recommendations:
I have a new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “How to Build a Sustainable Faculty Career.” In it, I set out five principles for thinking about an academic career (or a human life). If you’re an academic, maybe you’ll find it relevant.
I also recently contributed to a Chronicle forum, “16 Bold Ideas to Make Higher Ed a Better Place to Work.” My bold idea was to go to your office and have chance conversations with people. Worth a try!
I’d like to recommend a review essay, “Not So Close,” in Commonweal by the brilliant literary critic Ashley C. Barnes on two recent books about Thoreau. Ashley knows more about Thoreau than anyone I know; we talk about him all the time. And her writing is always sharp and engaging.
I’d also like to recommend a new novel, The Last Grand Tour, by Michael McGregor, who was the writing coach at a writing retreat I took part in during a crucial stretch of my work on The End of Burnout. Michael is a wonderful coach and writer, and, like the protagonist of this book, he’s a former tour guide himself! Michael also has a memoir about solitude and his sojourn on the island of Patmos coming later this spring. If that’s more your thing, check it out.
Now for the main point: I think a big problem with “the media” actually reflects a problem with the values of people who consume media. People way overvalue opinion journalism and way undervalue daily and investigative reporting. I think if people reversed this valuation, many of their complaints about “the media” as failing to rise to the political challenge of the day would disappear.
I say this as someone who makes a (sort of) living by writing occasional opinion essays. Heck, you are reading my opinion right now, and I’m saying you probably don’t need nearly as many opinions in your life as you’re getting. So I’m, I don’t know, either a hypocrite or dumb, perhaps.
In the last week, I’ve seen many people get mad at the newspaper again. (I wrote about this phenomenon last year.) Recently, at least 75,000 people seem to have canceled their Washington Post subscriptions because the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decreed that its opinion page would henceforth publish no opinions that run contrary to the principles of “personal liberties and free markets.” The opinion editor quit as a result of the change.
This mass-unsubscribe event follows a loss of more than 200,000 subscribers following the Post’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the Presidential election last fall. This decision was widely seen as cowardice and capitulation to Trump.1
Me, I just re-subscribed to the paper. Not because I can’t wait to read — finally! — some defenses of personal and economic liberty, but because I know that unsubscribing won’t hurt Bezos’s wallet nearly as much as it will hurt the paper’s ability to investigate the very political regime the paper’s critics think it’s capitulating to.
(For a morally stinging take on the Bezos product you should unsubscribe to, I recommend Renée Darline Roden’s Substack post, “Voluntary Prime.” Note that I have not done [yet?!] the thing Renée recommends in this piece.)
A diminished Washington Post is great for Trump. The day this announcement was made, the Post published an investigation showing that Elon Musk had received $38b in government grants, contracts, and tax incentives over the years. There were seven bylines on that story; it probably took the reporters months to produce. News-gathering is a far greater part of the Post's budget than opinion is, and with fewer subscriptions, the paper will be able to do less of this vital work.
I don’t think it’s awesome that Bezos made his decision to narrow the opinion section’s scope. I just think it doesn’t matter nearly as much as diminished reporting will.
I have seen smart people say in recent weeks that as they turn away from the Post, they’re turning to a Substack page run by former opinion writers at national newspapers. I think this is a mistake. A Substack cannot substitute for a daily newspaper. You know it can’t. The people who post on the Substack in question don’t seem to do much original reporting. I’ve seen the page do roundups of local reporting and opine thereupon. Otherwise, it is a fount of takes for readers who already agree with everything it says.
In other words, the new Substack page is parasitic on real journalism. To this site, the news is just “a trainwreck to write about.” I think it’s a mistake to shift subscription dollars from news-producing outfits to opinion-producing outlets in the name of getting “better news.” You don’t get any news from opinion-only sites!
The site in question touts its “commitment to truth-telling.” This is a very clever bit of legerdemain. News-reporting is one species of truth-telling: it’s about gathering facts through interviews and studying boring charts for hours, checking the facts, arranging them into a coherent account, publishing it, and then waiting for someone to sue you.
Another thing we call “truth-telling” is where you believe you already know the truth and then say it to other people who already know that same truth. It’s called ideology, or cope, or knowingness. This form of “truth-telling” has its place (at a political rally, for instance), but it is not journalism. It is, frankly, easier and, alas, more profitable than the kind where you go out and find the truth. Knowingness isn’t going to solve our political problems. It’s a cause of our political problems and a distraction from efforts to solve them.
Maybe you’re thinking, “But I already know everything I need to know about Trump the lying fascist.” OK, fine, but did you know that Elon Musk had received $38b from the federal government he has been tasked with dismantling? Is that worth knowing? If so, then you need reporters to find it out for you. A Substack opinion-slinger won’t do it.
“We make a bold commitment to falsifiability”: now there’s a value I can get behind.
I’m so old, I remember 2017, when people thought the Post was the “good” alternative to the New York Times; the Post claimed then that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” while the Times was supposedly busy bothsidesing, normalizing, gaslighting, and sanewashing.