Financial Times title: Why the elite media are surviving in this populist age
FT subtitle: ‘A reader introduced himself as “an FT/Economist liberal”. Elite media are becoming clubs’
Author: Simon Kuper
Published: 11 April 2019
“These are bad times for most journalists. Leaders from Emmanuel Macron to Jeremy Corbyn accuse us of lying. In France, where I live, trust in the media has hit a 30-year low, and gilets jaunes regularly attack reporters. The great internet-induced destruction of journalistic jobs continues at local papers and digital media. Advertisers have migrated to Google and Facebook.
And yet, “elite media” – publications, especially in English, that sell to metropolitan liberals – are blossoming in this anti-elitist era. The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, New Yorker and Atlantic have been setting records. The NYT has surpassed four million subscribers; its peak print circulation, in 1994, was 1.18 million. Meanwhile, the FT has just registered its millionth paying reader – the most in its 131-year history. The “Trump bump” and “Brexit bump” have lasted for us all. Why?
The populist triumphs of 2016 caught us unawares. The slow death of local newspapers (the traditional early warning system for anything brewing outside court) meant that we missed the anger in Sunderland and Ohio. Populist jibes at the “out-of-touch metropolitan media” hit home: elite media are now largely staffed by people with masters degrees, taking the national pulse from Brooklyn or north London.
After 2016, we could have decided to change: to post journalists to the regions, and to hire populist writers who pushed Brexit and border walls. Instead, semi-consciously, elite media have turned into clubs for liberal readers.
Many critics think our anti-populism is ordained from on high. I’m often told by readers that the FT’s editor, or its Japanese proprietor Nikkei, ordered me to oppose Brexit. In fact, I made that call by myself, and I suspect others did too. It’s not so much that we’re committed ideological liberals. Most pundits in elite media know they don’t know much; their historical function is to be the mouthpiece of accredited establishment experts. If economists had told us Brexit would work, or climate scientists had dismissed global warming, we’d have believed them. But they didn’t. And so even elite publications that previously leaned right (The Economist endorsed George W Bush in 2000) now oppose the populists.
In these crazy times, many liberals are turning to elite media to find their own values expressed. Newspapers never previously knew what readers read but in the digital era we found out: currently, they like articles that reaffirm their identities. In anglophone media, that means anything about Trump or Brexit. Whether you’re for or against, you feel emotionally involved. By contrast, articles on climate change go unread. Inevitably, most elite newspapers are giving liberal readers the topics they want. That’s partly why the New York Times fixates on the American culture wars, and possibly overcovered the Trump-Russia story, although in that case old-fashioned scoop-getting played a role too: traditionally, leaks in DC go to the Times or Post, and scoops run big.
Meanwhile, elite media are reaching out to readers like never before, with cruises and festivals. The leftist Nation magazine organises “progressive” trips to Iran and Cuba. The Guardian runs a “Soulmates” online dating club. Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter sells electric bikes bearing the paper’s name. All this boosts readers’ emotional attachment. The Guardian readers whose donations practically saved the paper don’t feel like mere readers; they are members. One of our readers once introduced himself to me as “an FT/Economist liberal”. Elite media are becoming clubs.
Conversely, illiberal longtime readers are stomping out of the club. A climate change-denying Australian recently emailed to say he hoped a car would knock me down. In Italy, the Corriere della Sera, traditionally the newspaper of the centre-right northern elite, is losing readers who have shifted far-right. The Economist and FT have alienated Trump- and Brexit-supporting readers.
Angry readers are probably right to complain about liberal bias. But they are wrong to accuse us of lying. Just as lawyers get struck off for malpractice, journalists at elite media get sacked for lying. Populists sometimes point to Claas Relotius, the Spiegel reporter who made up stories. But Relotius’s career ended in 2018 when Spiegel belatedly discovered his deceit, whereas Trump is still making up stories. This suggests that elite media have stronger safeguards than the US constitution.
Elite media constantly make mistakes. That’s inevitable: a newspaper publishes a book’s worth of words every day, often about people who are dissembling. But we try to tell the truth.
That isn’t a very compelling offer. For most people, truth is a second-order priority. Identity and entertainment have probably always mattered more. Still, we bash on, and though we’re now drowned out by social media and public-relations professionals (who outnumber journalists by six to one in the US), we still sometimes get heard. The New York Times’ revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predations sparked the MeToo movement; the Post’s reporting forced Trump to sack his compromised national security adviser Michael Flynn; every day, elite media challenge populist claims. As Matthew D’Ancona notes in his book Post Truth, Trump attacks the Times and Post partly because they matter.
I just worry how we’ll cope after populism.”
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a2596610-5b1f-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a
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