The Front
March 26, 2019·2 comments·In Brief
News organizations operate a deceptive structure: what appears to be a news operation is now primarily a vehicle for opinion, analysis, and commentary. The shift happened quietly, without announcement. The facts haven't changed. But what gets reported and how it gets framed has been thoroughly inverted.
• The Mueller Report coverage collapsed into speculation almost instantly. Within two days, 77.5% of media articles about the investigation were opinion pieces, explainers, or analysis. Barely more than one in five articles presented straightforward news. The architecture of coverage had already been decided before the facts were fully available.
• The most influential language in the network wasn't news language at all. Articles with the highest structural influence on the information ecosystem were six opinion pieces, commentary, and partisan talking points. These shaped how everything else connected and flowed through the media landscape.
• The dominant narrative focused on what the Mueller findings meant for the 2020 election, not what they actually said. Before digesting facts, media outlets converged on interpreting those facts for election strategy. The gray cluster of highest internal cohesion wasn't about the investigation itself—it was about voting and campaign implications.
• Natural Language Processing software couldn't reliably distinguish news articles from opinion journalism. When machines struggle to tell reporting from commentary, the distinction has become functionally meaningless. Something fundamental about how these pieces are constructed has converged.
• The freedom to publish opinion never required eliminating news as the primary output. The question isn't whether analysis journalism should exist. The question is whether the ratio of analysis to reporting has inverted so completely that the "news" operation is now a front for something else entirely.
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Comments
Good stuff Rusty, walkthroughs like this are helpful for moving up the learning curve on the quid maps. Although, I must say I still wouldn’t trust myself to come to a conclusion on my own. But your point about how journalism has turned a corner is important. This article from the NYT in 2016 crystalized for me that we had moved into a new world for news.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=1
It used to be: News -> Reaction (personal) -> Spin -> Reaction (public). But now that the news bureaus have been so hollowed out that they lack the foundational knowledge to process data on their own (like me with Quid). As a result journalists had to depend on biased sources particularly when it comes to politics or finance. In some cases, the journalists don’t even know they are being played. The new world is: Pre-spun news -> Public reaction -> Personal reaction (heavily influenced by peers). We are all still adapting and I have found you & Ben to be wonderful guides and sources of moral support. Keep up the great work!
I think this piece by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi (he of Goldman “Vampire Squid” fame) on how Russiagate has destroyed the credibility of the press is was pretty damning – https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million . It chronicles how out of either ideology or desire for ratings/clicks (more likely both) news organizations abdicated their core value of fact checking.
key quotes :
We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.
Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, (NY) Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper’s standard had moved from “Don’t get it first, get it right” to “Get it first and get it right.” From there, Okrent wrote, “the next devolution was an obvious one.” We’re at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.
I guess the reason is why there are so few news articles Rusty, as that these organizations don’t actually do news anymore. Maybe its too expensive and can’t be supported by current business models, maybe (a la Fox News/MSNBC) the only way to generate sustainable revenue is to be more entertainment/preaching to the choir/“analysis”.
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