The biggest media trend of 2016? Abject humiliation of the media

It was the year we realized that a lot of Very Important People who get paid a lot of money to know about U.S. politics have little more insight to dispense than the cab drivers they quote in their columns. Granted, plenty of normal people were wrong, too. But their faulty predictions weren’t recorded in national newspapers. Pundits who look back on their work might find a 16-month archive of headlines like “Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls.”

For Trump fans, it is thrillingly apt that the candidate whose rise to power blindsided the media is the same candidate who staked his entire campaign on bald contempt for journalists. Trump’s bone-deep loathing of the “dishonest media” might be his only coherent ideology. The president-elect routinely denounces the “failing” New York Times or CNN on Twitter and occasionally humiliates individual journalists by name. (In November, he retweeted a 16-year-old calling a reporter “pathetic.”) His most unhinged fans—self-described “deplorables”—harass and intimidate journalists as though they were getting paid for it. (If you’d like to meet these people, glance at @Newsweek’s Twitter mentions as soon as this article gets tweeted out, assuming they’re not all busy investigating a pizzeria for sex crimes.)…

Humiliation came in other forms in 2016, too. The newspaper and digital media industries continued to flail without a stable business model. Hundreds if not thousands of reporters lost their jobs. Mashable, The Associated Press, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Fusion all laid off journalists en masse—as did IBT, Newsweek’s parent company. (Getting fired is humiliating enough, but finding out you’ve been fired because your Slack log-in isn’t working is a nifty little bonus. Such is the modern termination.) Al Jazeera America shuttered. The Wall Street Journal pressured its employees to consider taking a buyout. Even the New York Times, which emerged during the final weeks of the campaign as an emblem of aggressive reporting on Trump’s taxes and alleged assaults, was vulnerable to pressure to downsize. Meanwhile, some outlets aggressively expanded into video and Facebook Live, granting reporters an opportunity to humiliate themselves willingly on camera, whether by eating a newspaper or blowing up watermelons. Stunt journalism—with self-degrading headlines like “I Let My Boyfriend Dress Me For a Week”—has become a pervasive genre of digital media.