Twilight of the Fourth Estate

Legacy media gatekeepers are losing their grip on the public conversation and they don’t like it, even if they mostly deserve it. That’s one of the reasons Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference was as well received by the successors to Spiro Agnew’s favorite scribes as a nationwide ban on free WiFi in press filing centers.

In the past, the default position of most in the media would be to at least grudgingly find a kindred spirit in a public figure who delivers a defense of free speech, even if they dislike the person who delivered the message or find them a flawed messenger for the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate. 

The trouble is that a nontrivial number of influential media figures no longer see themselves in such appeals to free speech, especially when a conservative political leader takes up the mantle. They see their competitors and, more charitably, the purveyors of wrongthink against whom they are the last line of defense.

This was apparent in the much-maligned question by Margaret Brennan of CBS News in which she blamed the Nazis’ “weaponization” of free speech for the Holocaust. While many have disputed the historical accuracy of her premise, she is also assuming that the anti-free speech laws in Europe can only regulate bad people, not urbane arbiters of which fruits are apples or bananas like herself.

Well, I am all for editors remaining fully employed and well compensated. (Please subscribe.) But the problem is that a high percentage of the public has lost faith in our collective decision-making. It was always going to be difficult to sustain an appearance of objectivity in a period of intense political polarization with elite newsrooms so slanted to one side politically, even if everyone involved tried their very best to be fair. The problem grew even worse with the rise of President Donald Trump, who is at odds with the sensibilities of even many conservative journalists and, as the veteran reporter Mark Halperin often points out, is genuinely challenging to cover.

Then there is the disappearance of both foreign bureaus and a lot of local news, along with print journalism’s transformation into a more white-collar profession. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” the former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times Magazine in a 2016 profile. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

An overwhelming majority of journalists disapproves of Trump barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office over the Gulf of America flap. Even if the AP would have certainly incorporated renaming the Gulf of Robert E. Lee into their style guide and their original reporting on the administration will likely be substantially unimpeded, I agree with that consensus view. It still amounts to the government penalizing an outlet for an editorial judgment that is their right to make and the profession should band together to reject—even resist!—it. (Though one former cable news guy’s attention-seeking proposal for doing so is particularly preposterous.)

It is nevertheless telling that there is less consensus around government anti-disinformation efforts at home and the much more sweeping restrictions on freedom of speech in Europe, with at least some of Walter Cronkite’s spoiled grandchildren wanting to participate in the former and feeling unthreatened by the latter. And it is ultimately self-defeating, because it will make people care less about these freedoms and retreat further into their own echo chambers.