[HN Gopher] From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and t...
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From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of
legacy media
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 74 points
Date : 2026-02-09 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thejournal.ie)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thejournal.ie)
| jmclnx wrote:
| >n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds
| milking them dry, or by billionaires
|
| I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time
| there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own.
| We need those laws back.
| tgv wrote:
| The internet has made Bezos rich and newspapers poor. It was
| practically unavoidable in a society where greed has become the
| norm.
| tharmas wrote:
| Don't forget the people who voted for "Get the Government off
| the [rich] people's back". Ronald Reagan and every subsequent
| government since. Neoliberalism. The rest of the Anglosphere
| followed suit.
|
| It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American
| Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See
| Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.
| treetalker wrote:
| Hear, hear!
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I don't see how the fairness doctrine will help. It feels like
| a brutal disgusting tool Carr whips out to censor perfectly
| reasonable talks.
|
| "Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and
| good left people every now and then), but these people are
| there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or
| strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when
| Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing
| disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
|
| The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make
| journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a
| technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to
| spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that
| be. It's not gonna help .
|
| I agree about limiting the number of media companies.
| Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how,
| is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital
| independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.
| laughing_man wrote:
| Jarvis is off the reservation here. Newspapers aren't being
| "milked dry" by anyone, since they don't make money. The
| billionaires are there because they want their own views in the
| public discourse, and they can afford to lose money every year
| making it happen.
| gdwatson wrote:
| > I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine.
|
| There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to
| enforce it? I don't trust my own "side" to do so, and I sure as
| heck don't trust the other side.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Who coined the phrase, "legacy media?"
|
| Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to
| social media bullshit.
| knowtheory wrote:
| This is a piece written by Jeff Jarvis who was a founder of
| Entertainment Weekly and then a long time professor focused on
| innovation and journalism.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis
|
| So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit
| of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and
| Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_media
| layman51 wrote:
| The last section heading about "Old media as a cultural
| construct and colloquialism" is pretty relevant to the parent
| post. Lots of theorists claim that the binary between new and
| old media is inaccurate.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Certainly in the UK the 'legacy' part of media orgs (print) is
| still far more profitable than the pennies paid for ad-clicks.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Not many people buying papers here anymore. I bought one
| yesterday, but it's months since I last did.
|
| Even the Metro free sheet goes uncollected a lot of the time.
| I just go to its puzzle page now. Constant scare stories and
| manipulation.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| No history to be found here, but the phrase 'legacy media'
| started making sense to me, in Australia, when it became
| obvious to me that said legacy media were being intentionally
| dishonest / obviously biased in their reporting of progressive
| topics like renewable energy and fiber optic internet roll out.
|
| 'Legacy' basically meaning a representation of the past, not
| the future.
|
| I'm just realising that Google is pretty much 'legacy search'
| given that the choice is generally between paid promotions and
| scams (which could be two ways of saying the same thing). AI
| may actually have saved Google as their search results were
| enshittifying themselves into oblivion.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA
| seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they
| abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape
| public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and
| eventually torn to shreds.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
|
| If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should
| disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against
| the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making
| itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
|
| The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers
| because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and
| obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was
| objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending
| like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your
| obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a
| situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both
| sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape
| opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it
| involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at
| length.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their
| readers' opinions.
|
| Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked
| stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil,
| gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.
|
| Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-
| checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is
| clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people
| who support X.
|
| The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad
| things, and always take the opportunity to fuck _each other_
| over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the
| partisan journals, who just don 't bother reporting all the
| skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Sadly, this is true.
|
| Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful,
| but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.
| alwa wrote:
| I guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem,
| anything important enough to have a constituency gets
| reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by _somebody_.
|
| The public are still free to care _which_ truthful things
| they care about (or want to pay attention to)--and part of
| the job of politics is still to try to direct attention
| toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But
| with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs
| reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of
| truth-finding gets done.
|
| That, I think, is the loss.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| > Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
|
| I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part.
| I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather
| than pushing an agenda.
|
| > If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should
| disfavor that party very strongly.
|
| Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the
| lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are
| in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.
|
| But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or
| disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and
| they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should
| not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a
| direction you happen to like today.
|
| If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their
| thumbs on the scale.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The newspaper _industry_ has never been neutral. It has always
| been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as
| warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration,
| reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or
| inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of
| their owners ' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from
| the owners' actual lines of business.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Journalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous
| class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are
| focused on conveying certain facts and steering the
| conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological
| construction that is not related to reality.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| they just can't help themselves as they see themselves above
| the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be
| said about the modern science community that has been
| thoroughly ideologically captured.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I feel nothing but schadenfreude.
| 9dev wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans
| too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their
| work. That doesn't invalidate all their work though, and
| it's vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions
| floating around, and citizens getting in contact with
| that spectrum.
|
| Big newspapers and media outlets are the only
| institutions able and persistent enough to dig through
| things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we
| loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and
| balances.
| hobs wrote:
| Fox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds
| - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news
| dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to
| the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not
| care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be
| two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable
| unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window
| wherever it happens to go.
| toolazytologin wrote:
| It's very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides
| at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own
| opinions.
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-
| brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or
| outright false narrative while only presenting factually
| true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died
| has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.
| maratc wrote:
| Not only that: it's impossible to report on _everything_
| that happened, so any outlet only reports on the
| _important_ stuff. What is and what isn 't considered
| important is a matter of bias, too.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| All true. But you can choose what and how you report in
| order to give one side a boost, or you can choose what
| and how to report in order to give the best, most
| accurate picture you can of what's actually going on. The
| difference matters.
|
| Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it
| right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that
| you'll come _closer_ to doing it right.
| laughing_man wrote:
| I would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think
| -- just tell me what happened yesterday.
| edot wrote:
| Thousands of newsworthy things happened yesterday. Which
| ones do you put on the front page?
|
| You don't have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You
| just report or fail to report the news that goes or
| doesn't go with your agenda.
| 9dev wrote:
| So, facts, huh.
|
| Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and
| looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands
| of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing
| the election?
|
| Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the
| violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home
| country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to
| establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the
| Shoah?
|
| Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a
| tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out
| of imperialistic greed?
|
| You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain
| that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors
| and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and
| thousands of others peacefully protest against the
| Democrats stealing the election?
|
| Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather
| interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald
| Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight
| the election results (or something to that effect, I
| don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of
| people were protesting and then went past the security
| barrier to enter the Capitol. You can _interpret_ those
| facts in different ways (as your question shows), but
| either interpretation admits the same facts.
|
| As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian,
| put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and
| their particular way of connecting them. Most political
| arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our
| opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing
| different relationships between them". I think he's spot
| on with this observation, and one must be _extremely_
| careful to delineate between objective fact and the
| conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not
| objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are
| obviously correct.
| 9dev wrote:
| That's exactly my point: You present _yet another_
| alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the
| former two groups. There is no authority to establish
| which of the three views is the canonical truth,
| regardless of how much you think your own is obviously
| and objectively true.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the
| things I said in such a way that either of the groups you
| proposed would find no objection to my saying those
| things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I
| don't think I did. _My_ point is that we can indeed agree
| upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are
| not what people argue over. They argue over an
| interpretation of the facts that tells some story about
| who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the
| facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally
| the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very
| rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but
| rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was
| acceptable for those things to happen.
| 9dev wrote:
| I see your point, but don't think it is correct: Opposing
| groups will absolutely debate whether and which events
| happened, and will attest to a different timeline.
| Moreover, I don't believe you can cleanly tell facts from
| interpretation. Sometimes there is just no way to know
| (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce. This
| is invariably shaped by your personal lens of opinions,
| then.
| Animats wrote:
| Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look
| at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story
| start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is
| usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.
|
| The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known
| is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note
| how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks
| going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath
| of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern
| US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference
| between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage
| we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota.
| (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention
| center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed
| since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front
| page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl
| commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic
| ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
|
| "News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is
| publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there
| digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local
| sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage.
| Far less than a decade or two ago.
|
| So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about
| ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-
| consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
| laughing_man wrote:
| Newspapers rely pretty heavily on wire services, which tend to
| have their own biases, but they do have reporters.
| Animats wrote:
| The Washington Post was one of the few remaining US
| newspapers with a large reporting staff scattered around the
| US and the world. That's why this is a loss. Thirty years
| ago, most major metropolitan newspapers had sizable local
| staffs and some national and international reporters. Now the
| New York Times is almost the only US newspaper with a large
| reporting staff.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890034
| the_fall wrote:
| The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a
| self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the
| purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers
| in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and
| published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this
| morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East
| Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and
| some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced
| which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.
|
| Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence
| of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social
| cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves
| presented a particular viewpoint.
|
| But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-
| tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the
| biases of Washington Post or The New York Times _unless_ you want
| to signal something to your ingroup. I don 't think this is as
| much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet
| evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of
| engagement bait.
| themafia wrote:
| > the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
|
| It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the
| republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually
| publishers.
|
| > this consensus
|
| Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an
| interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this
| vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists"
| are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why
| terms like "main stream" even exist.
|
| > it helped with social cohesion and national identity
|
| Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so
| relentlessly.
| cowpig wrote:
| I'm so tired of these false equivalences
|
| You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the
| gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining
| of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint
| a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then.
| Besides today, of course.
|
| And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact
| that journalists tended to study at university and therefore
| share points of view with people who went to university is the
| same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story
| about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start
| a war.
|
| And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies
| sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus
| foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic
| custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the _worst we
| have ever seen_.
| Terr_ wrote:
| In the words of Mon Montha from _Andor_ :
|
| > They don't even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that's
| the final humiliation.
|
| While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the
| ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores
| or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
|
| Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to
| _appear_ unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--
| versus one who does not.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| It is now easier than ever to locate, contact, and spotlight for
| questioning individuals of any given movement, no matter how
| fringe. Yet the public still hears from the same journos,
| commentators, talking heads, and explainers, year after year,
| decade after decade. Really makes you think.
| nephihaha wrote:
| It's partly because many papers have the same stories, culled
| from the same few press agencies, and poor writers. Most of their
| original content is often on non-news topics, and the Hollywood
| image of the roving investigative reporter is rarely mirrored in
| reality.
| laughing_man wrote:
| The problem with modern print journalism is the business model
| just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper
| provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs,
| obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was
| in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad
| there.
|
| The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly,
| but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed
| costs.
|
| Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death
| spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be
| less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing
| another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up
| used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now
| it totals about twenty pages in one section.
|
| Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news
| copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from
| rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the
| cost of gathering news themselves.
| cowpig wrote:
| Why doesn't it work anymore? Are there policies we could put
| into place that could change that?
| cowpig wrote:
| I feel like I'm in a psy op reading this comments section.
|
| As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now
| compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of
| information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As
| if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored
| personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms
| that replaced some biased ones.
| tolerance wrote:
| So what? Soon all legacy media will die or be subsumed into
| different organizations save for NYT who will be the only
| outlet left with the gumption to have a VTuber as EIC in 7
| years?
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