Technology — radio, television, the internet — turned journalism from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified. “By 1983,” Stirewalt reports, “the percentage of Americans who got their news from television alone pulled ahead of all newspaper use” by offering “a passive, more emotionally engaged product”: “Television news can be far more emotionally compelling than the written version, and does not come with the need for nearly as much cultural literacy or the challenge of … internalizing ideas.”
Between 2004 and 2020, a quarter of U.S. newspapers disappeared. Today it is much easier to get national rather than local news; this encourages the belief that the national government is all-important. Into this context came, Stirewalt says, national journalists’ embrace of the moral imperative “to go to war” with a president: “Bigtime news dove in the mud with Trump, where he had home field advantage.”
The moment was ripe for Twitter. Stirewalt calls it a platform “that both depletes the value of journalism by dribbling out coverage in an endless gurgle but also enhances reporters’ sense of their own importance by creating a large echo chamber into which they can holler affirmations of self-worth.”
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