Journalism in America is slowly transforming as old institutions fall apart and old technologies fall into disuse or are taken apart and repurposed. We are in a privileged moment, since journalism in a conventional sense no longer exists—we can now look at the past and try to achieve something more impressive in the future.

Before turning to the past and future, it’s useful to understand our present in light of the collapse of this conventional authority. There are now no journalists of national importance; there is no institution that commands national respect. Not only is it the case that all attempts to persuade or educate through mass media are partisan, but they fail to summon partisan loyalties or reach a wide audience. Moreover, media institutions aren’t even trying to achieve popularity or prestige.

A related sign of this collapse is the crassness of attempts to reimpose authority. The latest example is the significant number of media institutions, both TV and print, asserting in unison that Vice President Kamala Harris was never “border czar” when those same institutions all used the term previously, as digital media like X (formerly Twitter) can easily prove. These stories foster political partisanship, but they also speak to deeper, more important oppositions than liberal and conservative or Democratic and Republican. With regard to the privileged audience, that is, the minority of people constantly concerned with politics, this struggle over authority represents a conflict between older outgoing elites and younger incoming counter-elites who often wear the guise of populism. With regard to the technology and businesses built on it, the struggle opposes older TV to newer digital technology. The very attempt to impose authority through journalism, however, reveals the impossibility of doing so, as well as the deep divisions in American society.