At City Journal, Andrey Mir sheds considerable light on why legacy mainstream media is dying out.

Most of us content ourselves with saying “It’s because they’re so biased!” Well, yes, they are. But how many people noticed, let alone objected, when they were pumping up enthusiasm for the home team or the country’s war objectives? The key difference — and that’s a topic that Mir homes in on — is that today’s media bias is simply no longer that of the public.

Mir, author of Postjournalism and the death of newspapers (2020), begins by making clear that the decline is ongoing and irreversible:

The year 2024 began with grim news for the news. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 staffers in January, triggering doomsday conclusions about journalism’s future. Media experts who had worked hard to save the industry seemed ready to admit that the end was near. As one longtime observer noted, “It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry. . . . The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors—from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionaires—has failed them.”

“An Obit for Journalism,” March 2, 2025

Yes, the billionaires too have failed. More people than ever rely on social media for news. Political parties know this. That’s why there was an uproar both at the Democratic Convention last August and at the White House in December when social media were seated alongside formerly privileged legacy media.

“The death of objectivity has been both cause and effect.”

Mir offers a more thoughtful analysis of the trend toward unrepresentative bias than we might typically read. Granted that journalism profs heap scorn on “bothsidesism” — the question is, why do they?

He notes that twentieth century journalism was largely funded by direct advertising to the public, which kept it focused, for better or worse, on what the public wanted to hear about. But starting in the early 2010s, sensing that the world and the advertisers were moving online, media went looking for subscribers there:

Editors at many publications believed that they simply needed to adjust their practices to the new carrier, the Internet, as it offered amazing new capacities for news production and delivery. “Digital first!” proclaimed publisher-innovator John Paton in 2011. The media rushed onto digital platforms and started wooing the audience there, seeking to convert it into subscribers. In the early years of social media, that audience consisted disproportionately of young, urban, educated, white progressives. It was not hard to adjust the news coverage to the values of this audience—for journalists themselves disproportionately belonged to the same demographic.

The turn to the digital audience radically changed journalism. The news media started building their alliance with digital progressives. The process was inevitably accompanied by the rapid increase in social-justice agendas and language, later labeled as “wokeism.” “An Obit for Journalism”

That might have worked, except for one thing:

Digital progressives became the referential group for most of the news media, but they rarely bought subscriptions, while demanding greater loyalty from their new allies in the media industry. The situation was akin to the negative feedback loop of an abusive relationship: hoping to grow subscriptions, the media tried to please its object of desire; accustomed to being courted, digital progressives took for granted this ideological service and insisted on more. “An Obit for Journalism”

Post-journalism on the world-wide web

In any event, traditional news consumers became an object of media scorn just as they were going online in large numbers and seeing the scorn for themselves:

The decline of trust in the media didn’t occur because journalists adhered to the “view from nowhere” for too long, but rather because they enthusiastically abandoned any attempts even to simulate objectivity, hoping to profit from moral stances. It is a crowded market now, and one in which journalists may still retain some influence: in a world where digital denizens are still learning how to manipulate their audiences, journalists are ahead of the curve. But institutional journalism as we knew it, with its twentieth-century professional standards and codes, is dead. “An Obit for Journalism”

The legacies will sort of survive online, he thinks, but “A cynic might speculate that stories will be based on, and driven by, people who know what to report—and, crucially, what not to. Whatever form post-journalism takes, it mostly will be supported not by those who want to read it but by those who want others to read it.”

Choosing your news in a horizontal digital world

An early instance of the new order might be the fractious meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice-President J.D. Vance, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28, 2025. Here it is on C-Span, 49:57 minutes:

Endless commentary ensued, praising and vilifying all key parties.

Astute commentators strongly recommend watching the whole meeting before offering an opinion regarding heroes and villains (a little background on the war wouldn’t hurt either…).

But here’s the critical factor: The digital world is horizontal. That is, you — not just a White House press correspondent — can watch this top-level meeting from anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. Even if YouTube blocks C-span, some medium will likely air it. Alternatively, you can choose whose opinion you want to believe from a vast variety. That’s the difference the internet has made, especially if you live in what was formerly a one-paper town. And there’s no going back.

It’s not that the New York Times will die but that it will compete with Joe Rogan and many others on much more equal terms.