How far has journalism fallen? Many outlets are content to mirror Twitter

How far has journalism fallen?

I long way. I know because I was a journalist for more than 30 years, and I see what passes for journalism these days. The sight of it makes me glad I’m on the sidelines, no longer a journalist but an author, copywriter, and columnist-blogger.

I’m not pretending to be something I’m not, but a lot of people are.

Back in the day, assigning editors, teams of reporters, and copy editors would work on a story. It might take a few hours or a few days or even a few months, depending on how complicated it was and how much sourcing/fact-checking needed to be done.

These days, copy editors have all but vanished. Who needs proper grammar and fact-checking in an age where stories come and go minute by minute? It doesn’t matter anyway, because those who don’t know don’t care, and those who do are resigned to the fact that standards have been lowered, and there’s still nowhere to go but down — the same direction newspaper budgets and circulation have been heading, consistently, for 15 years or so.

And those complex stories? A few outlets, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post still tackle them. But the local papers (those that are still in business) largely abandoned them around the same time they stopped covering public meetings and high school sports in person. They didn’t have the staffers or the money to pay them.

A lot of the news these days isn’t written for the public’s interest, but to get clicks, page views, and SEO. On the other end, it’s no longer generated by press releases or news conferences, but via social media pronouncements, Twitter wars, and shaming for keyboard-in-mouth disease.

It’s not just Trump who does it. It seems like it’s pretty much every celebrity or politician under the sun. In response, news “stories,” such as they are, often consist of an introductory paragraph or two, followed by a long string of screen-shot tweets under a generic headline that contains the words “Twitter reacts to” or something similar.

This is not journalism — even if it includes some modest fact-checking (which it usually doesn’t). It’s just copying stuff down. There’s no storytelling, no background, and very little context. Why should anyone bother even reading it instead of reading, well, Twitter?

Subscribing to this kind of slapdash modern journalism is like taking a class on Shakespeare where you’re required to read only the Cliff’s Notes. It’s like being shown the trailer to a movie that isn’t in theaters. Or being shown a 3-minute highlight reel instead of the actual game on Super Bowl Sunday.

But this is the world we live in today: a world of appetizers without any main course; a world of headlines without actual stories and 240-character tweets based on nothing but bias and speculation. Trump built an entire presidency on it, and news outlets are building a new model of pseudo-journalism on the same slippery foundation.

The mutual dependence of politicians and journalists on social media — especially Twitter — has created a sort of symbiotic relationship between the two, nowhere more so than between Trump (who provides the ratings) and cable news networks (which need them to survive).

Even the new media model, which focuses on “breaking news,” mimics a social media feed, where the newest material’s at the top. Once it falls down the list, it’s forgotten, and so are most issues with the story, whether they involve facts or presentation — especially in an age of disinformation, where facts are readily spun, denied, and twisted beyond all recognition.

Without context, it’s easy to storm the gates of reason and restraint, and without reporters and editors to provide that context, journalists can’t perform their traditional function as gatekeepers. Everyone just believes what they want to believe, and purveyors of spin sell them on what they want to read and hear.

This is what Twittermania has wrought.

This is how far journalism has fallen.