Nieman Lab.
Predictions for
Journalism, 2024.
In 2024, we will finally take political economy seriously. What might that augur for the future of journalism? For starters, it means moving beyond critiquing the predictable failures of hyper-capitalist media to imagining and building democratic alternatives. But first we must shift how we understand the relationships between the market, media, and democracy.
American media criticism tends to fixate on the symptoms of the journalism crisis rather than its root causes. Far too often, this amounts to a “bad apples” analysis — insisting that if we rein in this or that media mogul, irresponsible journalist, or Silicon Valley executive, all will be well with the fourth estate. But if our analysis starts with systems and structures rather than individuals and algorithms, the scale of the problems haunting our media comes into full focus and small-bore reforms are shown to be deeply inadequate.
Consider problems with dis/misinformation and election coverage. The default remedy is to change cultural norms in newsrooms: If we shame journalists into doing a better job by more factchecking, more adversarial coverage of feckless elites, and more principled newsgathering in general, many believe that we’d actualize better journalism. While none of these activities are meaningless, they amount to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship if we ignore the structural threats to journalism, especially the tremendous damage caused by capitalist imperatives that privilege the profits of media owners, investors, and advertisers over the needs of a multiracial democracy.
From eviscerating the news industry (since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists) to perversely incentivizing newsgathering based on shock, fear, and scandal, run-amok capitalism is decimating and debasing journalism. No amount of shaming will make the market produce the journalism we need.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t subject our news media to ruthless criticism. But it does mean that we should pair critique with “non-reformist reforms” that aim to ultimately transform journalism and significantly lessen or remove altogether the commercial pressures that warp our media at a structural level —from encouraging clickbait to laying waste to newsrooms. The market’s hidden hand is the greatest censor of them all.
One controversy that brings this dynamic into stark relief was the police raid on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small weekly newspaper in Kansas. Late last summer, police confiscated the newspaper’s computers and forcibly shut down its investigations. The raid drew justifiable public outcry and condemnation from news organizations across the country. But when the commercial market does essentially the same thing — dismantling local media outlets and marching journalists out of newsrooms onto the street — we resign ourselves to this silencing of the press. It’s an unfortunate outcome, we might say, but we cannot resist the iron laws of supply and demand and the creative destruction unleashed by new technologies.
Instead of accepting such techno-fatalism, a political economic framework points us in a different direction. First and foremost, it returns agency to democratic society by reminding us that our media’s design is based on inherently political decisions. Indeed, a major tenet of a political economic critique is that media are neither natural nor inevitable, but rather the product of policy decisions — decisions that should be determined by us all, not just media owners and investors, who are predominantly wealthy white men.
If we finally reckon with the political economy of journalism, we’d know that the road to reform starts with apprehending and confronting illegitimate power structures. Earlier generations of reformers felt this critique in their bones, which led them to experiment with publicly-owned newspapers and advocate for public media. But this critical awareness has been attenuated over decades by a neoliberal drift seeping into all sectors of policymaking. This ideological and intellectual retreat is also reflected in academia, where structural critiques of the media have long been pushed to the margins for being too reductive and too radical.
Nonetheless, we can dare hope that our journalistic institutions of the future will look nothing like the past. We can fight to ensure that our media embody the principles of participatory democracy and are dedicated to serving social needs, not private profits. We must replace the always-already failing commercial media system to rescue journalism from the death-spiral of capitalist logics. Ultimately, the market won’t save journalism. If we take political economy seriously, we’d know that in our bones.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
In 2024, we will finally take political economy seriously. What might that augur for the future of journalism? For starters, it means moving beyond critiquing the predictable failures of hyper-capitalist media to imagining and building democratic alternatives. But first we must shift how we understand the relationships between the market, media, and democracy.
American media criticism tends to fixate on the symptoms of the journalism crisis rather than its root causes. Far too often, this amounts to a “bad apples” analysis — insisting that if we rein in this or that media mogul, irresponsible journalist, or Silicon Valley executive, all will be well with the fourth estate. But if our analysis starts with systems and structures rather than individuals and algorithms, the scale of the problems haunting our media comes into full focus and small-bore reforms are shown to be deeply inadequate.
Consider problems with dis/misinformation and election coverage. The default remedy is to change cultural norms in newsrooms: If we shame journalists into doing a better job by more factchecking, more adversarial coverage of feckless elites, and more principled newsgathering in general, many believe that we’d actualize better journalism. While none of these activities are meaningless, they amount to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship if we ignore the structural threats to journalism, especially the tremendous damage caused by capitalist imperatives that privilege the profits of media owners, investors, and advertisers over the needs of a multiracial democracy.
From eviscerating the news industry (since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists) to perversely incentivizing newsgathering based on shock, fear, and scandal, run-amok capitalism is decimating and debasing journalism. No amount of shaming will make the market produce the journalism we need.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t subject our news media to ruthless criticism. But it does mean that we should pair critique with “non-reformist reforms” that aim to ultimately transform journalism and significantly lessen or remove altogether the commercial pressures that warp our media at a structural level —from encouraging clickbait to laying waste to newsrooms. The market’s hidden hand is the greatest censor of them all.
One controversy that brings this dynamic into stark relief was the police raid on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small weekly newspaper in Kansas. Late last summer, police confiscated the newspaper’s computers and forcibly shut down its investigations. The raid drew justifiable public outcry and condemnation from news organizations across the country. But when the commercial market does essentially the same thing — dismantling local media outlets and marching journalists out of newsrooms onto the street — we resign ourselves to this silencing of the press. It’s an unfortunate outcome, we might say, but we cannot resist the iron laws of supply and demand and the creative destruction unleashed by new technologies.
Instead of accepting such techno-fatalism, a political economic framework points us in a different direction. First and foremost, it returns agency to democratic society by reminding us that our media’s design is based on inherently political decisions. Indeed, a major tenet of a political economic critique is that media are neither natural nor inevitable, but rather the product of policy decisions — decisions that should be determined by us all, not just media owners and investors, who are predominantly wealthy white men.
If we finally reckon with the political economy of journalism, we’d know that the road to reform starts with apprehending and confronting illegitimate power structures. Earlier generations of reformers felt this critique in their bones, which led them to experiment with publicly-owned newspapers and advocate for public media. But this critical awareness has been attenuated over decades by a neoliberal drift seeping into all sectors of policymaking. This ideological and intellectual retreat is also reflected in academia, where structural critiques of the media have long been pushed to the margins for being too reductive and too radical.
Nonetheless, we can dare hope that our journalistic institutions of the future will look nothing like the past. We can fight to ensure that our media embody the principles of participatory democracy and are dedicated to serving social needs, not private profits. We must replace the always-already failing commercial media system to rescue journalism from the death-spiral of capitalist logics. Ultimately, the market won’t save journalism. If we take political economy seriously, we’d know that in our bones.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
