The deluded tears of Taylor Lorenz

The deluded tears of Taylor Lorenz​

The death of the mainstream media is nothing to cry about.

Jenny Holland 26th January 2024​

Spiked / Archive


American media’s preeminent Mean Girl, Taylor Lorenz, would like all us plebs to know that things are, like, really, really hard for her and her fellow mainstream-media journalists right now.

Earlier this week, in a video breathtaking for its profound lack of self-awareness, Lorenz decried a ‘really dark’ period of mass lay-offs throughout the media industry. ‘Tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year’, she said. ‘Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem which myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in, has been completely hollowed out.’ ‘If you’re a young journalist today’, she continued, ‘there’s almost no on-ramp to traditional journalism’.

In a sense, she is right – people losing their livelihoods is always awful. But to be very blunt, and putting individuals to one side, the mainstream media only have themselves to blame for their demise. For one, they have catastrophically failed in their duties to inform the American public these past few years. Instead, today’s journalism nags, it propagandises, it lies and it misrepresents.

Besides, what would Lorenz, the queen of Twitter and TikTok, know about ‘traditional’ journalism, anyway? In truth, so-called traditional journalism is merely a nostalgic memory wafting around in the Trump-deranged brains of well-heeled, blue-state Boomers. It’s gone. It’s dead. It has ceased to exist. And it’s been that way for a lot longer than Lorenz seems to realise.

A good 10 years before Twitter even existed, I was given a very similar message about the state of the media from almost every single editor I worked with at the New York Times. I was told – correctly – that the golden age was over, and I had missed it by about 20 years. The lionisation of reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the 1970s, after they broke the Watergate scandal, produced an oversupply of crusading young Ivy Leaguers, keen to right the wrongs of society. And there were not enough jobs to go around.

The internet then revived the media landscape somewhat. But what the internet giveth, the internet taketh away. Instead of producing a new digital golden age, what the internet gave instead was a horde of millennials with Twitter accounts and unearned superiority complexes.

At the same time as print sales were declining, the class divide between the people writing the news and the general public grew to Jupiter-sized proportions. It has been decades since young people from poor or working-class backgrounds could realistically get the connections required to land media jobs. And even if they could, they would struggle to afford to live in expensive cities like New York or Washington, DC. With prestigious graduate programmes in journalism costing an actual fortune – Columbia has the nerve to charge $126,691 for its nine-month course – anyone starting out in the media who does not have millions in a trust fund is, at this point, purchasing a one-way ticket to penury.

Lorenz’s current employer is the Washington Post, which also shed a lot of its staff late last year – despite, as Lorenz points out, having the potentially limitless financial backing of ‘billionaires’. Four years ago, the Washington Post had to pay out a whopping $250million to a schoolboy it falsely accused of being a racist. It was later revealed that the teenager, Nicholas Sandmann, was actually the victim of harassment. He was widely condemned in the media, which assumed, because he was wearing a MAGA cap and was anti-abortion, that he must have been the bad guy, without bothering to check the facts.

Despite this and many other instances of journalistic malfeasance, Lorenz thinks Americans should feel really, really sorry for the poor old mainstream media.

Watching this once-vital part of American public life crumble before our eyes is undoubtedly alarming. But far more alarming has been the depths of the self-delusion and corruption into which the American media have sunk in recent years.

This is what Lorenz gets most wrong in her impassioned little speech. She seems to imply that journalists deserve special protection because they are so darn virtuous. Their jobs are so important. When, in reality, the mainstream media have outraged and alienated at least half of the American population. Mainstream journalists have been the main purveyor of government disinformation on topics ranging from Russiagate to the origins of Covid-19 to the culture war. They treat ordinary Americans as akin to domestic terrorists if they do not want boys in girls’ school bathrooms. Far too many media professionals exist in privileged bubbles and make their contempt for regular people – who they never tire of stereotyping as racist, sexist, homophobic mouthbreathers – abundantly clear.

And now we should feel sorry for them? It’s a little late for that.

 

[frozen_runner]

Everyone should post the picture of her bawwing over internet bullying until she dies.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Watching this once-vital part of American public life crumble before our eyes is undoubtedly alarming.

No it isn't alarming. An "institution" is only valid so long as it serves the interests of the American public. The moment any such body ceases to be a benefit to the American public is the moment it can and will be cast aside. So it was with rule under the mother country of Britain, so it is with modern journalism.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

A good 10 years before Twitter even existed, I was given a very similar message about the state of the media from almost every single editor I worked with at the New York Times. I was told – correctly – that the golden age was over, and I had missed it by about 20 years. The lionisation of reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the 1970s, after they broke the Watergate scandal, produced an oversupply of crusading young Ivy Leaguers, keen to right the wrongs of society. And there were not enough jobs to go around.

Pathetic misinterpretation by your editor and you're a dummy for believing it.

Journalism died on October 3, 2000.

On that day, second-stringer search engine Google (true gentlemen of course preferred Altavista) launched AdWords, the first programmatic way to buy advertising space on the internet.

See, this journo somehow, improbably, thought newspapers were about reading news, but they never were.

The news in newspapers only existed because people won't read a big sheaf of ads with nothing else there. Advertising drove the journalism industry from its very beginnings, with periodicals like 1731's The Gentleman's Magazine featuring advertising for a range of products and services.

If you worked in a small newspaper it was beyond obvious how this worked and what actually mattered to newspapers, because a small newsroom put designers and writers into the same small space and one iron law reigned:

Ads are inserted into the paper (or any other periodical) first. Everything else that goes into the periodical...all the news, calendars, letters to the editor...that stuff is trimmed to fit around the ads. There was a cool local sports story but that page has a lot of ads? Looks like most of the story is now being continued on page 14.

Even the number of pages that the newspaper would be was determined solely by the number of advertisements.

But naive idiots like the writer of this piece and her editor never realized that, because they worked for much larger newspapers. At a very large newspaper, the design and advertising aspects of the periodical are removed from the sight of the writers. Not for them to notice how ads were clearly the dominant force of the newspaper, or how it was much easier to stop the presses for a mistake in a phone number in an advertisement than it was if you realized you'd printed a lie in a news story (the latter, you could issue a correction for and all would be well...but if it was the former, you wouldn't get paid for that ad, and that could not stand).

The large newspapers claimed this was all about integrity and editorial freedom.

It was not. It was designed to turn the journalists from potential smarks into marks. A journo who understood the true purpose of the newspaper and how the game was played could figure out how to make it work to get information to people. But the larger newsrooms had all these dumb kids who went to expensive J-schools who truly believed they were going to change the world, without even realizing they were simply the bait to get the public to put their eyes on ads.

Which is why they never saw the rest coming.

On October 3, 2000, AdWords started. Suddenly, there was a way to advertise on the internet without talking individually to site owners and creating images to click through.

Less than a year later, in the days following 9/11/2001, American consumer spending plummeted and ads plummeted with them. When the companies creating advertisements started to spend money on ads again, they took a hard look at their spending and decided to divert from their least successful channel, newspapers, to a new channel with endless potential...search engine and internet ads.

At first, newspapers didn't bother to tell the journalists that their position had been fundamentally changed into a "click driver," because they hadn't realized they were there to drive ad traffic before, so why tell them now? But soon it became impossible to ignore, because newspapers could not survive on their ad revenue with their staff budgets. They began to merge and to use more and more national news stories instead of covering local issues, because it was cheaper to grab something from AP or Reuters than to pay someone to cover the local high school soccer match.

With this, they dug their own grave, because they started offering only topics that people could read about anywhere. Newspapers began to shrivel until a new era started, driven by Lorenz-type useful idiots: the era of the conscious journo-influencer, who knew they were clickbait and liked it, and deliberately provoked hateclicks and all the other negative reasons people will click an internet news story and take sides in it.

The author of this article laments the end of the golden age, but the only reason those 60s-70s journos believed themselves to be in a golden age of reporting was that newspaper journalism at that time needed to step up its game so that newspaper ads could compete with television advertising, and one thing TV was terrible at in the era of 3-4 broadcast channels was long-form and investigative reporting. News publishers didn't have a sudden flourishing of investigative reportage because they believed in the virtues of sunlight. They made a canny business decision.

The dawn of cable news stopped the bloom of investigative reporting because 24-hour news channels could do all the long-form reporting they wanted, and breaking investigative reports was no longer solely the province of the newspaper. As soon as you could put ads on the internet, where people could write as many words as they wanted on anything they wanted, the coffin of reportage was nailed shut and the infancy of influencer culture had begun.

 

[Begemot]

Guys, chill out. This is not a pro mainstream journalism piece. You need to actually READ these articles and stop putting them into an easy culture war,

The author isn't 'lamenting' anything.

 

[DoomsdayElite]

Fucking malignant cunt. This is you. This will always be you.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Guys, chill out. The is not a pro mainstream journalism piece. You need to actually READ these articles and stop putting them into an easy culture war,

The author isn't 'lamenting' anything.

This isn't something about a two sided culture war. It's about a woman who decries how out of touch journos are and how they are the architect of their own demise, while spending years writing fearmongering stories about muh climate change and dumb garbage science popularization about animals. She writes blogs about how overpopulation means we should make sure to all have small families. She literally wrote about how you should eat the bugs more than a decade ago. She wrote "news" stories about supermodels being photographed with goats.

Taylor Lorenz is dumb. So is this author, even though she doesn't like Taylor Lorenz. Her ideas of what caused the slide into irrelevance of journalism is basically "once upon a time there were Big Heroic Men who made it so attractive to be a journalist that everyone wanted to do it and flooded the market." This isn't even remotely an accurate story, and it's one the author has accepted totally uncritically without even bothering to do basic fact checking that could disprove her premise.

The number of graduates from the most prestigious J-school programs has remained stagnant or been in decline for over 20 years. There was no mass influx of would-be journos flooding newspapers with talent that made supply/demand skew far to the supply side. The demand side is what changed in the journalism equation. Her idea that digital journalism "revived the landscape somewhat," even temporarily, is absolutely batshit insane. It did nothing of the sort. From the moment the internet had ads, newspaper circulation and revenue tanked, and mergers/acquisitions shattered most of the local publishers.

Why should I listen to the opinion of someone who decided she's against the media landscape in the last 1-2 years as the wind started blowing a new direction, but who for years championed the exact things she now claims to condemn?

She profited madly from the landscape she claims was 20 years past its peak. She lives in two houses and in her career she "has flown in zero gravity over the Gulf of Mexico, dived with tiger sharks in the Bahamas and ducked below a reef-shark feeding frenzy on the Great Barrier Reef, shimmied up the tallest tree in Costa Rica, gone cobra hunting with a bare-handed Vietnamese farmer, camped on an active volcano in Hawaii, crawled into a bear’s den in northern Minnesota, and sat fireside with bushmen in Papua New Guinea learning to carve spears."

She lives the kind of life normal people can't even dream about, all so that she could have animal adventures in her job instead of actually reporting on anything of consequence. And then she has the unmitigated gall to say other people are responsible for journalism's demise.

 

[JosephStalin]

Lorenz is wrong. Journalism as SHE knows it is dying, and frankly good riddance to it.

Lorenz is just angry that people have so many sources for news now. Undoubtedly she finds the rise of The Epoch Times disgusting. Too bad. People want news without the constant leftist slant and barely-disguised indoctrination.

There's still a market for the news the way it used to be - information, with a minimum of partisan slant, or if any slant, on the conservative/American values side.

I pay to subscribe to The Epoch Times and County Highway. Read two free local papers. Funny, the left-wing paper constantly appeals for donations from the community. I donate what they are worth - not a fucking cent. The paper that's more on the conservative side asks for no donations; heck, they have a big real-estate section where all the big Pebble Beach/Carmel/Monterey real estate companies advertise.

Having said all that, do you think Lorenz cries when she takes it up the ass?

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

We really don't hear enough about the death of the funny papers.

I was gonna throw that off as a one-liner quip, but I thought about it another five seconds and decided I mean it seriously as well.

Think about what we lost, not having our daily dose of Calvin and Hobbes, Snoopy and the gang, even the stupid disappointing ones like Ziggy or Mark Trail.

It was something. And now it's gone. Webcomics are shitty ideologically driven piles of high falutin' garbage. The best of them could hardly stand up next to the worst of Beetle Bailey.

 

[JosephStalin]

We really don't hear enough about the death of the funny papers.

I was gonna throw that off as a one-liner quip, but I thought about it another five seconds and decided I mean it seriously as well.

Think about what we lost, not having our daily dose of Calvin and Hobbes, Snoopy and the gang, even the stupid disappointing ones like Ziggy or Mark Trail.

It was something. And now it's gone. Webcomics are shitty ideologically driven piles of high falutin' garbage. The best of them could hardly stand up next to the worst of Beetle Bailey.

The Epoch Times runs comics.

 

[MirrorNoir]

We really don't hear enough about the death of the funny papers.

I was gonna throw that off as a one-liner quip, but I thought about it another five seconds and decided I mean it seriously as well.

Think about what we lost, not having our daily dose of Calvin and Hobbes, Snoopy and the gang, even the stupid disappointing ones like Ziggy or Mark Trail.

It was something. And now it's gone. Webcomics are shitty ideologically driven piles of high falutin' garbage. The best of them could hardly stand up next to the worst of Beetle Bailey.

They canceled Mark Trail? I got into that strip in the late 00s along with Mary Worth, when both strips suddenly went after the Millennial demo with Mary Worth fighting evil drunk wedding planners and Captain Kangaroo and dealing with Game of Thrones addiction and being yelled at for not swapping her book library and PC for a tablet, along with Mark Trail fighting college aged mustachioed preppie thrill killers and telling Iraq War vets that they shouldn't be ashamed of the war crimes they committed overseas and to get a haircut/shave and rejoin society instead of isolating themselves from society out of guilt for the war crimes they did.

Also, Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes never really went away. Peanutes has been running reruns via a large bank of stand-alone gag a day strips from the 60s through the 90s that the syndicate compiled decades ago to run when the strip ended to keep the gravy train going, combined with the fact that Calvin and Hobbes gets offered for reruns too, though for a larger fee that most papers are willing to pay most of the time.