For a very long while through my life and times as a reporter, the primary complaint coming from the audience at the back of the ballroom (or the grumpiest commenter on Facebook) was some version of “Hey, why don’t you write about X?” X, in this case, would inevitably represent some subject in which they, as a consumer of news, had an interest, but I, as a producer of news, had no expertise. This complaint could run the gamut from “Why didn’t you quote my New England Journal of Medicine piece?” to “Why don’t you write about the potholes on my street?” My response, by and large, was some more polite version of “I am not in fact a vending machine, so it is not my responsibility to write about everything that is interesting or urgent to everyone, every day.”
I actually believed that we had reached peak “but what about my thing” about 10 years ago, when the smart legal thinkers around me were calling it the “Daily Me.” Around that time, I became inured to being berated for the things I didn’t say or write or post. I simply reminded myself that everyone inhabits a news bubble and consumes their own Daily Me reality, and so it is irritating but understandable that they find themselves baffled that we don’t have a news apparatus that works precisely that way. But in recent months, I have noticed that what appeared to be peak Daily Me was perhaps just a rest stop on the way to the actual summit of Me Mountain. And the news apparatus now operates in precisely that way.
Because there’s a brand-new berating in town that goes something like this: “Hey. Why doesn’t anyone write about Y?” With Y, in this instance, being some topic upon which many, many people have expounded, in many, many places, but that they have not personally been exposed to, and thus have come to believe doesn’t exist.
For a while I would patiently make this point, noting the number of journalists and investigative reporters and also TV and radio pundits who have published pathbreaking work on this issue. I would carefully spell out their last names and the names of their various publications, in case this was genuinely a research project. But lately it has begun to seem that this is not a research project at all; it is a way to fault “mainstream media” or “commercial journalism” for failing to be targeted in precisely the ways the “Daily Me” once sought to algorithmically guarantee. And even more, the blame here is not so much about “the media” and its failure to cover some story that matters a great deal to the future of lawful democratic self-governance. Instead, it’s a way to fault journalism writ large for the fact that we now live in bubbles so tiny they can only deliver the same content every day.
And frankly? That would be fine if we were in the Before Times when the news could consist of sports/cooking/princess photo scandal/weather/Dow Jones Industrial Average/Oscar fails. But we happen to find ourselves in a moment in which the news is being accused of failing to deliver existential, five-alarm-fire reporting on creeping fascism, and global authoritarianism, even as it is doing quite a bit of five-alarm creeping fascism reporting. More and more, the complaint I hear is not that nobody is producing important news, but rather that the Media is failing to deliver that news directly to readers and listeners, in the manner of the mother bird with the worm in Are You My Mother? The critique isn’t so much that I am not writing the right things, as it is that readers are not reading the right things, which is somehow also my fault and also the fault of corporate media. But I promise, hand to heart, those creeping fascism stories are written and broadcast every day in prominent, fact-checked, sober publications. I just don’t know if those publications are making it to your doorstep or your television screen or your phone.
And first, mea culpa: Yes, I have been right there for months now bellowing that the mainstream press is failing in every possible way to prepare news consumers for what is coming if Donald J. Trump wins the presidential election this November. The widespread critiques as to the tawdry horse race, the clickbait headlines, the lack of depth and context and stakes are still spot on. But there is something else that can’t be blamed on “journalism” so much as on ourselves as consumers of it. Anyone who was surprised to learn, thanks to Greg Sargent’s great reporting, that large swaths of voters have never even heard of Trump’s overt threats to the rule of law and basic freedoms, hasn’t quite grasped that large swaths of voters don’t read what they read. It’s not that they simply failed to “pay attention,” as we like to mourn; it’s that they have quite specifically organized their news not to tell them about it.
Long before thinkers like Cass Sunstein warned us about the dangers of a media that gives us exclusively more and more of what we want—the textbook definition of the “Daily Me”—it was clear that media bubbles and epistemic closure would ensure that most of us could travel through life without encountering an idea that alarmed or discomfited us, even as we consumed ideas nonstop. What has changed is not so much that the “news” we consume has been foamed and frothed up in the form of sound bites and circus and entertainment—that is both true and, to some extent, has always been the case and is now just exponentially faster, and more targeted. Rather, the big change in our relationship to the news these days is how little enters our world that is different from what came yesterday. A media architecture created to give us more and more and more of what we thought we wanted turns out to give us less and less.
For my part, I must admit—I much preferred being yelled at for all the pieces I didn’t write, to the present reality in which I am perpetually being yelled at for the pieces someone else didn’t read. And this infinitesimal pivot, of being confident enough to declare “the press missed this” when the reality is that “I missed this” is an alluring way to shift blame from all that is broken about the media landscape in this moment to blaming only the New York Times. Which is incredibly annoying, because, well, reporting the news is expensive. Fact-checked, edited, non-A.I.-generated news is ever more expensive, and it is disappearing when we need it most.
Blaming our corporate overlords is very gratifying. It’s also not going to correct for the problem, though it will eat up immense quantities of our time. If we want to change the way election year news is disseminated, we will have to do more than stand in our bubble, hollering at the bubble. In the months ahead, we can continue to direct our fury and umbrage at the clickbait corporate media and the social media companies and algorithms that have built the bubbles. Or we can ask ourselves what matters to us, and why we aren’t seeing it, and how we might find it.
