Barack Obama said this week in a television interview with CBS: "What worries me most is the degree of divided conversation we're in, in part because we have an antagonistic media." "When I came home from school, there were three TV networks, and people had a similar idea of what was true and what wasn't, what was real and what wasn't. Today we occupy different realities, which prevents us from agreeing on a basic set of facts."
The definition occurs when the media system and American journalism is going through a perhaps unprecedented crisis, verifiable in two axes: the failure of a part of its business model, and the questioning of some conceptual pillars on which it was built.
By influence, the dynamics of what happens there will affect much of the world.
The first data refers to the fall of digital native media, those that appeared more than a decade ago and, leveraged on their impressive audience numbers, achieved through social networks, questioned the leadership of the most traditional newspapers.
The closure of Buzzfeed News at the end of April, this week was joined by the bankruptcy of Vice, another of the star platforms of the early 2000s.
Vice, founded in 1994 as a Canadian counterculture magazine, and years later reconfigured as a digital platform in the United States, became "a growing journalistic force for its unconventional reporting on topics such as sex and drugs that the media in general covered more quietly," analyzed the Press Gazette site.
In 2017 Vice had reached a value of US $ 5.7 billion, and its annual profit exceeded US $ 175 million. The success of the informative website "that knew how to talk to millennials" (a virtue that was also attributed to Buzzfeed) attracted the interest of investors such as Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, and the Disney group.
Six years later, Vice filed for bankruptcy, cornered by a debt of $225 million.
"Vice had a proposal, 'we know how to attract young people,' but they never found a way to turn that proposal into a business," said Joseph Teasdale, chief technology officer at Enders Analysis, a media specialist. "They tried digital advertising, sponsored content, TV production, but they missed revenue targets and never achieved sustained profitability."
The end-of-epoch photo – although the process seems not to have ended – is completed with the closure of the Playground site, born 15 years ago in Barcelona, and the restructuring of Insider, among other platforms that seek to survive.
What collapsed is the idea of building a business model based on the millions of audience users achieved by the distribution of content on Facebook, which should have resulted in millions of advertising figures.
Part of the explanation is offered by journalist Ben Smith in his book "Traffic". There he quotes Andrea Breanna, the Mexican and one of the founders, among other places, of Huffington Post.
"We were weirdos. We had nothing to do with business. No one thought this would replace or be the future of journalism. We didn't know what it would become."
The creative audacity and experimental talent of some of the founders of the new platforms never translated into a concern for securing revenue. Today they seem to be footing that bill.
This crisis, however, is accompanied by another. The questioning of one of the conceptual bases of journalism: impartiality. The so-called "War of Objectivity" divides waters among the most important references in the industry, and provoked successive publications of figures such as Marti Baron, former editor of The Washington Post; Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist in residence at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and A. G. Sulzberger, owner and editor-in-chief of The New York Times.
Why is impartiality discussed? What is the relationship between this debate and the crisis of Buzzfeed and Vice?
The link is the search and support of the audience.
Once the illusion of a business model based on quantity is over, the new magic word is "fidelity" (of the readers, it is understood). And what awakens and guarantees such fidelity? Pure and hard information or explicit alignment with certain ideas? At a time when news has been "commoditized" and known and shared in seconds, what defines the reader's preference for one medium or another?
At this point it is a repeated concept that the appearance of new media and the influence of Social Networks generated "echo chambers" in which citizens consume only information that reinforces their ideology.
At least in the U.S., the result is readers demanding that traditional media abandon their impartiality in defense of more transcendent values, such as democracy itself.
The hypothesis would be: without audience there is no business model, and with impartiality potential loyalty decreases.
That is why objectivity is discussed.
"It was objectivity advocates themselves who eroded it," Wesley Lowery wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on Monday. "Instead of insisting on a rigorous reporting process, they obsessed with the appearance of supposed personal objectivity, wielding the term to police individual expression—not journalistic work—in public and private contexts. Its North Star has often been harmless, demanded by a business model based on advertising and audience."
Lowery does not hesitate: "News organizations often resort to euphemisms ("racially charged," "racially charged") rather than clarity in undoubted instances of racism and acts of government violence ("officer-involved shooting"). They are journalistic failures, but also moral ones: when the weight of evidence is clear, it is wrong to hide the truth. Justified as 'objectivity,' they are actually its distortion."
He adds: "While democracy dies, retired editors give misleading speeches lamenting a misunderstanding they created. They proclaim Trump to be a racist and a liar from the comfortable vantage point of hindsight, without acknowledging that these are the same terms they restricted their 'objective' reporters from using."
For Lowery, impartiality can be a trap that only serves to prevent a necessary position. It is the false neutrality rejected by the readers.
The answer came from A. G. Sulzberger, heir and publisher of The New York Times, the most successful newspaper with almost ten million subscribers, but also observed by an audience that demands an explicit position. In his text, Sulzberger states: "In recent years I observed how arguments against the independent journalism model spread and became more insistent, even within established news organizations, including the Times. This critique is accompanied by calls to adopt a different model of journalism, guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction." "Even those who habitually supported independent journalism suggested that our values had led us to a misguided neutrality, which endangered democracy."
"Social platforms – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok – have played a critical role in creating the conditions that threaten independent journalism (...) I refer to the profound changes in the way people relate to information, changes that exacerbated groupthink, fostered antipathy and fractured the understanding of reality. "If journalism was the unwitting victim of the platforms, it has been the explicit target of the political class" (...) "No one stands to lose more from these trends than the American people. For decades, spreading out a newspaper on the table or gathering to watch the news was an essential part of being a good citizen. The rituals may change, but the need may not."
Sulzberger appears today forced into a defensive position. The initiative of the debate was assumed by those who predict a reconfiguration towards a new model of journalism.
However, the matter is not settled. Professional premises built over more than a century are based on deep needs of readers. Those who a decade ago assured the end of traditional media have already erred. Forecasters can fail again.