I LOVE talking to teens about this. In broad strokes, most of them think of "the media" as newspapers/magazines/TV news — very institutional stuff. They typically put TikTok and content creators into a separate category, one they tend to trust more than "the media" because it's first-person.
I was once told by a teen that Tim Pool was "bigger than the New York Times" because his viewer count was larger than their subscription based. But if the media critics have a larger audience than the media, aren't they the media themselves?
Ah yes, the appearance of in-person authenticity
Part of a broader collapse in any institutional legitimacy, it seems
Yes. But also, the mid-century obsession with journalistic standards was a new innovation. It wasn't always that way. And their reasoning was largely to please advertisers as a whole. (Not individual advertisers, per se.)
I've always found it amusing that the Pulitzer prize is named after a guy that got rich on yellow journalism.
If that's the case, I think they have a very clear view of reality. Those outlets are owned and controlled by billionaires. Individuals reporting on social media and new digital outlets make the concentration of "institutional media" a non concern for their ability to become informed.
As someone who has been a working journalist, I can tell you that institutional media has also done the hard work of covering all the little things. And that required money. You can only copy someone else's work if someone else is doing the work. "The media" is a conveniently amorphous term.
I've found the most informative and useful reporting from small outlets and individuals that charge subscriptions to fund their work and people who are familiar with an area of interest sharing their experiences directly often for free but not on any sort of regular schedule if they even have
That's noble. But my observation is that a community newspaper, in its ideal form, was a public good like a public school. And if you break it up for parts to serve individuals, then people get left out. When I was working for a daily, we called it "eat your peas" journalism.
bsky.app/profile/nytp... This is why people (not just young adults) don't trust the media.
I hear you. My problem is with lumping everything into one monolithic entity called “the media” which is then represented by the NYT. We’ve been trained to do it. And the NYT deserves many of the kicks in the pants that it gets.
There’s a reason why “the freedom of the press” is guaranteed in the constitution, and it’s because the institution of a free press is a check against authoritarianism. And at the local level, it’s the person schlepping to town council meetings that most people don’t go to, so what happens there…
… gets documented and the town council spends your tax money responsibly. When it’s gone, corruption increases — studies show this. That’s money out of your pocket, because newspapers are boring. TL;DR.
I suspect that my local paper would be shuttered if it weren't for the seasonal tourism based advertising they depend on.
If you still have a local paper, you're lucky. (Although some of them admittedly do suck.)
multiple posts.