You Are Not the Media
And that’s good news
by (((Alana Newhouse)))More than a decade ago, I gave a speech in Cleveland. During the Q&A, a man in the back asked me what I thought of the then-emerging Iran deal, and I hemmed and hawed my way through a bullshit answer that said nothing. As I was leaving, he approached me. “Listen,” he said firmly. “I’m a dentist. It’s my job to wake up in the morning and fix people’s teeth. It’s your job to tell me what to think about the Iran deal or Greenpeace or whatever. If my patient’s teeth end up falling out of their mouth, they’ll find another dentist. If your ideas about the world don’t help me better understand and navigate it, I’ll find another magazine. But that’s your job, and you have to do it.”
I thought about my dentist friend the day after Trump’s reelection, when Elon Musk posted on X, “You are the media now.” It isn’t the richest man in the world’s most liked post—that honor still belongs to 2022’s “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in”—but, with 1.2 million likes and 107 million views, it’s up there.
I wouldn’t enter a rocket-making competition against Musk or a baby-making one or a who-can-survive-on-less-sleep contest. He’s even been to Auschwitz more recently than I have. In fact, this isn’t about him at all. This is about you, and making sure you haven’t been confused by recent events.
You are not the media.
Thankfully, neither are the people who had been for decades. Those individuals and outlets—newspaper, magazine, and television brands that collectively controlled public opinion for decades—have been dethroned, and not a minute too soon.
So, who is the media now? Are we all meant to sit on X all day looking at videos from the latest hurricane to know whether we like our president or not? Is it now your responsibility to curate your TikTok feed so you can know what to think about taxes? Social media is a miracle, but when it comes to enlightenment, it turns out that you get what you pay for. In exchange for their zero dollars, Americans have been dropped—gradually, and then seemingly all at once—into an ocean of free propaganda and mental confusion.
You are not the media, because the media’s job is to mediate, which in this case means forming a usable and trustworthy connection between people and the world at large. Doing that for yourself is like being one’s own therapist; it just doesn’t work. And while your ability to see that world more directly through your phone certainly tweaks the old definition of our profession, it doesn’t undo it. If anything, between government-sponsored spin, social media engagement farming, and deep fakes, there’s an even greater need for people whose job it is to wake up every day and tell you the truth—and before it’s too late for you to do anything about it.
For 16 years, Tablet’s central feature has been our ability to observe the world clearly—a skill that gave us a spooky ability to see around corners, which was especially useful as legacy outlets proved uninterested in acknowledging, let alone interpreting, obvious realities that people could see with their own eyes. We then took advantage of the web’s new instruments of accessibility and speed to bring that foresight to as many people as possible.
But now the internet is dying, in large part because it creates audiences that are broad but shallow—a majority of which these days are bots, driven by AI. On internet platforms, you may indeed feel like the media, but you are mainly its food.
By liberating you from the responsibility of being your own media, we are freeing you up to be something much more important and, frankly, much more radical in this moment: human.
