Great post! The takeaway is then that the fourth estate has switched its profession from being guardians of democracy to being mere stooges of the rich & powerful, pushing their agenda.

I've heard this more times than I care to count and it maybe true - democracy is in decline (in the West). What keeps me up at night is this question: What is replacing democracy? What will take the place of demoracy, what kinda system will fill in for democracy, if it we stay on course, letting the chips fall where they may? A cross betwixt autocracy and plutarchy? These we already tried and rejected! Maybe we've forgotten the lessons we learned, it's hard to say, oui?

How about a corp-ocracy? ... I've long viewed such figureheads as U.S. presidents and Canadian prime ministers as being mostly symbolically ‘in charge’, beneath the most power-entrenched and saturated national/corporate interests and institutions. The elected heads ‘lead’ a virtual corpocracy, i.e. “a society dominated by politically and economically large corporations”.

Powerful business interests can debilitate high-level elected officials through implicit or explicit threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate ‘requests’ aren’t accommodated. [Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin affair/corruption scandal is a prime example of this.] It’s a political crippling that’s worsened by a blaring mainstream news-media that are permitted to be naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regards to job and capital transfers and economic weakening.

Also, every nation and culture has its own propaganda and core beliefs, true and false; though some culture/nations — usually the biggest, most powerful — are much more corrupt and brutal than the smaller, weaker ones. And western mainstream news-media are a significant part of this moral problem. Yet, the editors/journalists likely sleep well at night, nonetheless. One can still hear or read praise, or conservatives' scorn, heaped upon The New York Times for their supposed uncompromised integrity when it comes to humanitarianism and ethical journalism.

Yet, did they not help create the Iraq War, through then-U.S.-VP Dick Cheney’s self-citing via The Times' website? That would be the same Cheney who monetarily benefitted from the war via Iraqi oil fields — a war I consider to have been much more like a turkey shoot, considering the massive military might attacking the relatively weak country.

I recall reading that The Times had essentially claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was/is at fault. But is it really plausible that The Times did/does not insist upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers' anonymous information sources — in this case, a devious Cheney — especially considering that Cheney himself would then use that anonymous source’s (i.e. his own) total BS about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify a declaration of war that inevitably resulted in genuine gratuitous mass suffering and slaughter, both abroad and domestically?

I believe that The Times jumped on this atrocity-prone Iraq-invasion bandwagon also because of their close proximity to the massive 9/11 blow the city took only a few years prior. There was plenty of that particularly bitter bandwagon going around in Western circles back then. Quite memorable was Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show (May 29, 2003), where he ranted about the war’s justification and supposed success: “… We needed to go to that part of the world; and what they needed to see [was that] American boys and girls going house to house, from Basrah to Baghdad, [and] simply saying, ‘suck on this’.”

It's as though they all decided: ‘Just to be on the safe side, let's error in favor of militarily assaulting, invading and devastating Iraq’.

[As an aside: I'd have much greater respect for Liz Cheney regarding the brutal January 6 political aftermath she's suffered (though I've read that her Congressional-riding electorate have mostly remained behind her and therefore her seat essentially secure) — if only she’d come out and denounce her then-VP father's part in fraudulently manufacturing American consent for the 2003-11 attack on Iraq. Not surprisingly, many people (including me) would place Dick ahead of D. Trump on the Mr. Evil scale. ... And that's without getting into 9/11 itself.]

Well, as far as I can tell, the media can take sides and a powerful incentive/disincentive to do that is money!

Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. — Wizard of Id

The dilemma for the media is this: Credibility (unbiased information delivered to the public) or Survival (pick a side in a debate and become a mouthpiece). Tough call and it's obvious, going by what you say here, what the media has opted for (survival).

I prefer to look at most issues from a systems perspective. Any journalist, in my humble opinion, would prefer to report the truth - the pricking of the conscience is no small matter (professional integrity) - but the system is such that this comes at a price that no one can afford (existential threat).

The quagmire the media finds itself in is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to systemic flaws that thwart/forestall ethical considerations in our lives - we want to do good, but give the circumstance, the way the system works, that's suicide; we all know what happens next!

This is the Platonic form of the systemic ills that plague us: Do something bad OR ELSE Die! Worship Satan OR Feel the wrath of Algos/Thanatos. We need to fix that!

Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted was NEVER a function of the press or media. That honorable and thankless task belongs to gadflies***. The 'media' have always served the interests of their owners, whether they were crude money grubbers or refined money grubbers.

***a fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly.
an annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.
"always a gadfly, he attacked intellectual orthodoxies"

That said, the press and the media have also managed to be a useful source of information, ranging from low quality to high quality, despite themselves.

Great question, I think this is the most important topic of our day.

Aside: The mainstream media has been one of the most important sense-making institutions in our society, like the senses of a human body. As it has deviated from truth, as its analysis and emphasis on problems, causes, and solutions has become driven more by agenda than truth, it's like having senses that are hallucinating. Directly, not the end of the world, but if you can't make sense of the world accurately, it becomes easier for internal and external threats to critically damage you. I think the general sense of decline we feel in many ways in the west can be traced to problems with mainstream media, which is why I think this topic is so important. Elaborating on this is a whole other topic though.

Some people would disagree with the premise of this question, that anything bad is happening with the mainstream media. Many have documented this phenomenon very well, names like Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi come to mind immediately. I'll start from the premise that this is happening, and give two causal explanations.

Technological/Economic: Mainstream media doesn't just have to compete with other mainstream media, it has to compete with all media. There are only 24 hours in a day, and if people's eyeballs are on something else, that has an economic impact on mainstream media. So where are people's eyeballs? Largely, social media. Facebook came onto the scene, and could provide more instantaneous, more personalized, and more engaging and interactive content. It's more emotionally stimulating, and immediately so. If traditional mainstream media is like healthy vegetables, social media is like sugary colorful Jell-O. News could only survive if it became shareable, more prone to arouse strong emotions, more real-time (faster to "press", less time for "shoe-leather journalism").

Hundreds of years ago, the technology to cheaply mass-produce, distribute, and store fun-colored, easily slurpable, super sugary Jell-O simply didn't exist. But everything from plastics to refrigeration and more created the potential for this. And once it became possible, a child is naturally going to need Jell-O far more than they'll want broccoli, and parents are stuck fighting an uphill battle to keep their kids healthy, and avoid obesity. So, assuming technological advancements are going to happen, there's a bit of an inevitability/historicity to this situation.

I think the same is true of the technological advancements in information technology inevitably creating the economic forces driving mainstream media to need to be more arousing and enraging, and more narrative-driven than driven by facts, data, and research.

Cultural/Economic: While the liberal west has a notion of a free and independent press which can hold government accountable as essential to a good and just society, what arises in practice is influenced by culture (and economics) as well. Think of this notion as a guiding principle, which hopefully points journalism in the right direction, but the specifics of what a given journalistic operation does, which ones successfully become mainstream, etc. depend on lots of other factors too.

There was a time when journalism in America was dominated by cheap, highly circulated papers that the common man would read, and was written for the common man, often holding the wealthy to account. The "comfortable" (as in "afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted") were the wealthy folks at this time. The journalists at these papers were typically working class folks as well.

The New York Times was founded on a different business model, rather than revenue from a large number of people purchasing the paper, it would be based on ad revenue. The aim was to cultivate an elite, high-spending audience and thereby command a premium from advertisers who wanted access to this lucrative consumer segment.

To cater to this audience, the writing had to be more high-brow, and journalism became a profession for the highly educated rather than the working class. As academia increasingly became a political echo chamber, and a place detached from reality and everyday people, that eventually flowed into journalism as it became a job almost exclusively for the very highly educated.

I think this graph sums it up best:


(Source)

On the far left you'll see academia, newspapers and print media, online computer services (the tech industry), and the entertainment industry ("Hollywood"). While Hollywood is not full of highly educated people, the tech industry is. But more importantly, what all four of these have in common is the same sorts of divisive, aggressively ideological, and self-righteous attitudes deeply woven into their internal cultures which, in the case of journalism, manifests itself in what we're seeing today.

Today, ad revenue is no longer the dominant source of revenue, but the profession remains one (for now) for the highly educated elite. They're driven to produce content that lets their readers feel they're better than half of society, that their readers can share and virtue signal to their group, so papers still need to produce articles that look and sound smart, in addition to being enraging.

In summary:

IT advances -> fast/emotional/real-time social media -> news/mainstream media more about emotion/narrative/agenda and less based on facts and research

??? -> academia becomes a left-leaning echo chamber -> professions that demand the most highly-educated new college grads fill their ranks of content producers with people who don't value neutrality

ad revenue targeting wealthy consumers who want to consume high-brow content proves to be a lucrative business model for news -> journalism becomes a profession that demands highly-educated college graduates -> with the social media model, subscription revenue overtakes ad revenue but the ranks are already filled with agenda-driven writers, plus the articles that get shared and drive engagement still need to sound smart and sophisticated even if the facts and research behind them are thin.

The media has been deluding itself and its reader/viewership by proclaiming itself to be the guardians of truth. I'm sure aspiring journalists are fed this poppycock in their courses by their professors. They soon learn that this is, to borrow Wolfgang Pauli's expression, not even wrong.

People aren't interested in the truth! No, not at all! What we expect from the media is simply confirmation and reinforcement of our beliefs and suspicions, however wrong they may be!

The long and short of it, we don't blame the butcher for selling ham because that's what the people are demanding. It takes two to tango, oui? The media, what it is now - biased in so many ways than we could make sense of - reflects the warped psychology of the people.