It only takes a few days in the University of Connecticut Department of Journalism to hear with unambiguous clarity that the journalism industry is in trouble. Most introductory courses prominently display statistics and graphics detailing the precipitous decline in the availability of local newspapers, or mourning the dwindling readership of legacy media publications. Presented with a somewhat gloomy state of the industry today, journalism students are advised to steel themselves for a future in a field facing significant challenges in the turbulent age of social media and political polarization.
Without a doubt, the terrain ahead is rough for aspiring reporters, analysts and those few lucky columnists who get paid for having opinions. It’s enough to make journalism students such as myself who are nearing the end of their undergraduate degree doubt the economic viability of their desired career path. What’s the point, after all, of staking your livelihood on an industry that is apparently on the ropes?
Journalists who care about holding the powerful to account and exposing anti-democratic, violently bigoted and imperialistic tendencies in our government should not have to ask this question.
By way of vanishing revenue streams, decreased circulation, and even the interplay between social media and polarization, journalism is certainly in jeopardy from without; but even moreso, it is in crisis from within. In 2022, Gallup estimated that 38% of Americans — over one-third — had no trust at all in print, television or radio news, with Republicans and right-leaning independents comprising the bulk of those skeptics and naysayers.
Of course, right-wing media outlets such as Fox News have hinged much of their brand on platforming blatantly false or irrelevant conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election and Hunter Biden, respectively, in order to appeal to their base of Trump loyalists; the upshot of this, among other things, has been promoting skepticism of legacy media outlets with what they see as liberal bends. As Perry Bacon Jr. writes for the Washington Post, “a news outlet being honest about Republicans is both solid journalism and good business.” In other words, publications have no obligation nor need to kowtow to the fictitious narratives of the GOP.
However, the numbers game of publishing the most grandiose political theater for audiences willing to pay for it creates a contradiction. The influential papers and networks doing high-level reporting could not be more out of touch with potential readers whose immediate experiences with wages and the cost of living, under-resourcing of public health and social services and other everyday material issues are far more relevant that a trial of a former president or another speaker fight in Congress.
When major media outlets do cover international issues of interest, their reporting tends to warrant distrust as well. The systematic bias in reporting on Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign of Gaza, and continued casual framing of the U.S-backed slaughter of more than 26,000 Palestinians as “Israel’s war with Hamas,” are reason enough to look elsewhere for coverage that treats Palestinian death with the same gravity as anyone else’s. Such tepid language about ongoing genocide and mass slaughter from an organization like the New York Times, which is quick to rightly charge former President Trump in its reporting with being a liar with authoritarian tendencies, contributes to the crisis that the press finds itself in.
The journalism industry is chock full of ideological hand wringing about the danger to the American public should journalism be eclipsed by social media. The most concise example of this are the words emblazoned on the masthead of the Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Post’s slogan, adopted in 2017 after — but allegedly not in response to — the election of President Donald Trump, upholds journalism as the light that prevents the crumbling of America’s democratic institutions. The corporatisation of journalism has allowed upwardly mobile careerists to view themselves as hard-scrabbled defenders of American values. Thus, the stakes of journalism’s decline are simultaneously democracy and a gig.
But if the stakes truly are allowing the U.S. to succumb to the depraved political whims of demagogues and tyrants, the economic erosion of the industry should not be of a concern. In the Philippines, journalists like Maria Ressa, founder of the news organization Rappler, continue their reporting in the face of legal and political repression. In India, activists and authors like Arundhati Roy continue to level criticisms of India’s occupation of Kashmir despite prosecution. Palestinian journalists like Wael Dahdouh report on the Israeli occupation even after airstrikes killed his immediate family — Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh paid the greatest sacrifice for her reporting in the occupied West Bank when she was shot in the head by a member of the Israeli military during a raid.
Just because journalists enjoy nominal freedom of press in the United States does not make it any less perverse that speaking truth to power is an enterprise. The very question of journalism’s institutional frailty is a testament to the fact that, when the cost of honest, relevant reporting becomes high enough, this critical service will fold. Journalism is indeed in crisis — one that disaffected readers should feel no obligation to solve unless those of us who value reporting can remold the vocation into something that will eschew profit in favor of socially necessary coverage. If the press is truly as critical as its appraisals in lecture halls and professional conventions make it out to be, it will persist without its traditional funding mechanisms. Furthermore, we should welcome, not fear, a sea change where independent journalists — who can prove their own ethical fortitude — are able to shine a light on fraud, exploitation and wanton imperialist violence without a paycheck.