Why We're Divided: Newspapers and the New Bias
Why We're Divided: Newspapers and the New Bias
With the New York Times leading the way, national newspapers give up on objectivity in a fight for survival
Contributing to our polarization is the increasing bias of our oldest and most sophisticated news medium: newspapers. While local papers have (mercifully) not suffered much, in recent years, big-name newspapers like the New York Times have lost the trust of many Americans due to the way they responded to changes in the media landscape that took place in the 2010s.
Journalists, historically, have been a left-leaning bunch; only 25% of journalists self-identified as conservative in the 1970s, when objectivity was still a mainstay of the news industry. However, because newspapers primarily made money off of print advertising—which was kept strictly separate from the news side of the business and never really had an influence on coverage—there was little economic incentive to be biased. That has all changed.
As new digital forms of news media have cropped up—from digital-only sites like Axios and Vox.com to social platforms like Twitter—the circulation of newspapers’ print editions has declined by over two-thirds since 1973, taking a huge chunk out of ad revenues. Having failed to make up the deficit through online advertising, editors have had to enforce massive layoffs in order to continue operations. In 2023 alone, 2,700 journalists lost their jobs, up from 1,800 in 2022. In January of 2024, the Los Angeles Times laid off 20% of its newsroom. Newspapers are also losing legions of employees to digital-only outlets such as Slate, Huffpost, and Politico, as well as to social networks like Facebook. Indeed, since 2008, the number of newspaper employees fell by 57% while employment at digital-only outlets rose 144%.
All this has made print advertising obsolete as a business model, and placed newspapers at the mercy of a consumer that has gotten used to consuming news on-demand and in near unlimited quantities—and who since 2010 has been conditioned by social media to expect the news to be delivered in the language of “influencers” and ideologues who care nothing about journalistic ethics. Consequently, newspapers everywhere find themselves in a quandary: either stand athwart a changing culture and face a slow but certain extinction, or abandon journalistic values in exchange for more clicks and higher subscription numbers. Sadly, most newspapers chose the second option.
Ten years later, the internet has increased the quantity and accessibility of news while decreasing its quality, a fact even journalists recognize: according to a Pew Research Poll, while 23% of journalists say that the news industry is great at “getting the news out”, an equal share say that it is horrible at “getting the story right.”
There are a few unfortunate side effects of our digital news age that may help explain why:
(1) Readers are no longer united by geography. Whereas people used to read whatever newspaper appeared on their doorstep, now, with online editions, a man from, say, Puerto Rico can read a paper based in Boston. The result is that the readers of a given newspaper are united more by shared interests than by a shared location, creating an echo chamber where journalists and their readers increasingly hold the same views. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 40% of New York Times readers are in the top income bracket, 60% are highly educated, and around 80% are Democrats or independents—which is to say, the Times’s journalists and readers come from the same progressive, cosmopolitan stock. This effect holds for other prominent papers: the Wall Street Journal and The Economist boast an overwhelmingly male readership, at 71% and 73%, respectively.
For the first time in history, newspaper audiences are beginning to match those of TV networks like CNN and Fox News. And, bereft of the financial cushion provided by print advertising, they are forced to adopt cable news tactics to keep their readers hooked and engaged at all costs, lest they unsubscribe and put them out of business. Thus, the ideal of “independent journalism” gives way to another ethic, namely, “the customer is always right.”
(2) The line between “reporting” and “opinion” has been blurred to nonexistence. Once again, the New York Times provides a good case study. In an effort to tailor coverage to a post-literate generation, the Times bought out seasoned reporters and replaced them with staffers from trendy online magazines like the Huffington Post. While this led to a wave of creativity in graphic arts and audiovisual content, it had a tragic side effect: young journalists began to transplant the style of their old employers—slanted, sensational, self-reflective—into their reporting. Cultural critics could thus work under the guise of “reporters”, even though they consistently wrote the news with a progressive spin. The Times’s former opinion editor, James Bennett, saw this as a further erosion of journalistic values, because readers were now able to read what amounted to opinion pieces (dubbed “analysis” or “newsletter”) under the illusion that they were news reports. Writes Bennett,
And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionization of the silicon valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.
How this shift toward opinionated reporting came to other newspapers is unclear, but what is clear is that newspapers, on average, are becoming more slanted in their reporting—which wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that they are pretending to be unbiased (the New York Times still calls its work “independent journalism”, a characterization its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, has defended against charges of liberal bias; this is the newspaper equivalent of Fox News calling itself “fair and balanced”).
Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Adair notes, “Bias is good. It just needs a label.” But newsrooms are unlikely to get more adept at distinguishing news from opinion if they keep shamelessly following the money. According Business Insider, the Washington Post is coming out with a new offering that promises news tailor-fit for digital audiences. In the words of the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis,
This third newsroom will be comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of American—who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed—compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.
“Social media journalism”? “Compelling, exciting” and “accurate”? And “in the style they want”? Considering how social media prompted a wave of journalistic malpractice, this kind of “third newsroom” doesn’t seem likely to encourage ethical reporting.
(3) The new digital dynamics turn newspapers into “social media” platforms and journalists into “influencers.” News editors, in an effort to drive engagement on social media, have set their journalists loose on Twitter, and have also incorporated social media-like features into the online editions of their newspapers. The result? Newspapers are gradually recreating themselves in the image of Twitter and Facebook. Nowhere is this clearer than at the New York Times, a trendsetter in the news industry. Newspapers have recreated themselves for digital audiences in several ways:
Since 2010, many journalists have started to post on Twitter, where they can stay in touch with their readers while opining on current events. Thus, a culture forms where journalists increasingly see themselves as “influencers” building their own online brands… and entertainers writing for a private audience. This, among other things, has furthered the shift away from a unified, dispassionate “voice” in news reporting. It has also driven reporters to be self-conscious and glory-hungry, according to James Bennet, two traits that are anathema to good journalism.
On the New York Times and Wall Street Journal website and app, some articles now come with a comments section—complete with an upvote system—which allows readers to share (with great pathos) how much they liked or disliked a given story.
“For you” pages on the app versions of popular newspapers allow the reader to further curate coverage to their personal tastes.
Push notifications alert readers to “breaking news.” The expectation of instantaneous reporting on breaking news, as opposed to preparing articles for publication the next morning, puts pressure on reporters to publish potential rumors and falsehoods without proper verification. This may help explain why newspapers are spreading fiction along with facts at an unprecedented rate. According to a broad-based study in the Columbia Journalism Review, instead of fact-checking the original source of the rumor and crosschecking it with other sources, many news outlets
rely on linking-out to other media reports, which themselves often only cite other media reports as well. The story’s point of origin, once traced back through the chain of links, is often something posted on social media or a thinly sourced claim from a person or entity.
By adopting social media tactics, newspapers have become less trustworthy sources of information. Recall from the last article how news stories with moral-emotional language are more likely to go viral online. This is a self-reinforcing loop: editors see how sensationalist language drives more engagement on social media, which spurs them to fold that language into the newspaper’s permanent style. In a longitudinal study of 23 million headlines from 47 major news outlets between the years of 2000 and 2019, researchers found a sharp increase in “headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines.” (Notice how the levels of fear, anger and disgust all began to spike around the early 2010s, when social media began to dominate the digital market.) There has also been an uptick in negative language and anger-related words, particularly among right-wing news outlets.
But there is a deeper side effect flowing downstream from the increased connectivity and hyperactivity of the new space:
(3) Journalists have never been more aware of what their readers think about their work. While anonymity may be toxic on social media, it is a necessity for journalists if they are to remain unswayed by the shifting winds of consumer opinion—and if they are to be protected from the online mob. James Bennett, the former Times opinion editor, shared a telling exchange in an article he wrote for The Economist:
I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
In June of 2020, as the nation was being roiled by social justice protests, James Bennett was forced to resign after he approved the publication of an op-ed written by Senator Tom Cotton—entitled “Send in the Troops”—which called for the “use of troops to protect lives and businesses from rioters.” Bennett’s firing came three days after thousands of readers flooded the article’s comments section with complaints and several Times staffers voiced their displeasure on Twitter. There was also a “staff uprising” inside the Times, with many reporters expressing their outrage on private Slack channels and calling for the article to be taken down, claiming that it would put black journalists in danger. The New York Times later apologized for ever publishing the article, appending this note to the online edition:
After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
While the Times claimed to have made an oversight error, the truth is that Dean Baquet, the editor-in-chief, had both read and approved the piece, and asked for Bennett’s resignation only after facing mounting pressure to do so. Furthermore, as Bennett observed, even if the piece failed on a technical level (which it didn’t), many other projects failed to meet editorial standards and were still celebrated, such as the Times’s 1619 Project. And past pieces by controversial foreign leaders met little backlash, even when bearing the bylines of Vladimir Putin and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban. So it is hard, if not impossible, to avoid the conclusion that Dean Baquet was motivated by self-preservation. He must have known that in the new attention economy, going against your reader’s wishes is a sure recipe for bankruptcy—or job dismissal.
Media bias has thus morphed from an unethical quirk of journalists—who are human, and naturally prone to bias—into a low-risk strategy for staying financially solvent. The “free press” is quickly becoming the “enslaved press”—enslaved to their readers, that is1.
When considering such episodes, it is no surprise that national trust in traditional news outlets—spanning TV, radio and print—fell to a record low of 40% in 2020, which is 30% lower than it was in the 1970s. However, this decline in trust is far greater among Republicans, only 14% of whom said they trusted the media “a fair amount or a great deal”, compared to 20% of independents and a whopping 70% of Democrats. This may be because left-leaning outlets far outnumber right-wing ones, both in newspapers cable news stations. Which makes it even more crucial for reporters to resist their natural liberal bias and provide news for all Americans. That has not happened.
2020—the year of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and Trump’s election loss—saw a deepening of extremism in U.S. politics that tested newspapers’ commitment to objectivity—a test most of them failed. President Trump was frequently disparaged in the pages of national newspapers for his aggressive stance toward BLM rioters, while the same papers often covered them with fawning deference—likely for fear of alienating a core part of their overwhelmingly liberal readership. Their coverage of other issues was not much better. What James Bennett said of his former employer could be applied to most news outlets of the time:
The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
There were exceptions of course, such as the business-oriented, economically conservative Wall Street Journal. But 2020 was, by far, arguably the worst year for print journalism in United States history.
The Capitol riot on January 6th, 2021, was the final rift. Newspapers covered every aspect of the violence in painstaking detail, but after months of downplaying left-wing riots, their credibility, especially with conservatives, plunged even further. This likely contributed to a further mobilization of the Trump wing the Republican party against the “liberal establishment.” It also sealed off conservatives from inconvenient facts by forcing them to retreat to outlets like Newsmax and Fox News2.
In their zeal to counter what they perceived as conservative overreach, journalists have squandered whatever chance they had at regaining the public’s trust. In doing that, not only have they built an echo chamber around themselves and their readers, they have ceded important ground to right-wing echo chambers as well.
(1) The Times is not the only newspaper to have experienced a staff revolt. Only a month later, some 280 Wall Street Journal reporters attempted a similar uprising when they signed a letter to the publisher that accused the opinion department of being too conservative. But the rebellion was quickly quashed by the editorial board, who made it clear that they were not impressed: “It was probably inevitable that the wave of cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution,” they wrote in an op-ed, “But we are not the New York Times.” In June of 2024, Robert Winnett declined a job offer as CEO of the Washington Post because the discovery that he had paid money to obtain phone records for a reporting job in the U.K. sparked a staff uprising led by Pulitzer-winning journalist David Maraniss.
(2) If we are to believe a 2003 study that defines media bias as “running along a continuum from Fox News (whose viewers are the most misinformed on most issues) to National Public Radio (whose listeners are the least misinformed overall)”, this development should be seen as detrimental to the health of a democratic society.
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