How NPR, Slate, The LA Times, Cable News—the Media Writ Large!—Lost Their Way
Independent journalist and podcast pioneer Mike Pesca has a soft spot for Walter Cronkite (ugh!).
This week’s Reason Interview podcast is a fast-paced, snappy live conversation with
, who hosts The Gist (an excellent half-hour daily news and commentary program) and has worked at places like NPR and Slate. He famously was fired/pushed out from the latter in 2021 for reasons we get into—and will curl your hair in the stupidity of their specifics. We end up disagreeing over whether the olden days of three giant TV networks and a few definitive media sources are preferable to today’s cacophony—he’s got a bad case of Cronkite-iteus (?), by which I mean he has some nostalgia for a world of consensus. Scroll down now to listen or watch!Mike has deep experience in all sorts of old, new, legacy, and independent media, so he’s worth listening to when he talks about the current era, where trust and confidence in journalism have been tanking like nobody’s business.
If you are a Baby Boomer or a Gen Xer and a journalist, there’s a good chance that you got interested in the profession because of characters like Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Oriana Fallaci, and many other young turks who, by their own accounts that should be read more critically than they usually are, took down whole governments and exposed official lies and dissembling. If The New York Times and The Washington Post weren’t publishing the Pentagon Papers, smaller and more radical outlets like The Progressive, Ramparts, and The New York Review of Books were getting hassled for publishing plans for hydrogen bombs, lists of undercover CIA agents, schematics on how to create blue boxes for phone phreaking, and the like.
To be a journalist was to be an anti-establishment, adversarial truth-teller whose vocation was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Much of that was true—and we owe a huge debt to journalists and whistleblowers who uncovered all manner of horrible actions by state, local, and federal governments, corporations, and religious leaders and others. But much of it was pure self-mythologization, helped along by an endless stream of romantic, crusading-journalist books and movies (think All The President’s Men and Parallax View).
It turned out that the press wasn’t immune from the much bigger trend which it no doubt helped push along: the broad evacuation of trust and confidence in virtually all major institutions in American life. As I’ve written in Reason, for the past half-century at least, we have been moving from a high-trust to a low-trust society as we’ve become hip to the fact that people in power tend to lie constantly. Gallup has been tracking this for decades and here is its latest tally, based on responses in June. You’ll need to scroll way, way down to find newspapers and television news. As of this year, just 7 percent of us have a great deal of confidence in the former and just 6 percent of us have a great deal in the latter. To put that in perspective, twice as many of us—13 percent—have more confidence in the presidency!
Mike Pesca says that when it comes to places like NPR and Slate, a lot of the decline in trust and confidence comes because the management explicitly set aside commitments to journalistic values of truth, accuracy, objectivity and relevance in favor of explicit commitments to making its workplace, coverage, and audience more diverse. The result? NPR was no longer informing its audience but hectoring them, and often giving them stories in which they weren’t interested. According to The New York Times, since 2020, NPR’s audience has shed 18 million weekly listeners just since 2020, down to a weekly audience of 42 million.
As former employee
wrote in , the focus on diversity didn’t change the racial and ethnic demographics of NPR. Those “numbers have barely budged,” he writes and are still well below the country’s demographics. Apart from a massive decline in absolute numbers, what did change was the ideological composition of the audience:Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
In our conversation, Pesca notes his former employers NPR and WNYC (a leading public radio station based in New York) acted slowly when it came to moving into podcasting and hanging on to talent. Management, he says, was stuck in older models of distribution and thought the network, rather than particular people, generated audience share. In that, they resemble Rupert Murdoch, who regularly fires top-performing stars at Fox News as a way of reminding everyone there that they are ornaments while the network is the Christmas Tree.
Pesca moved on to Slate, which when it started in the late ‘90s as a pioneering online magazine, originally funded by Microsoft and then owned by The Washington Post before spinning off on its own. In 2021, Pesca and Slate agreed to part ways after a contretemps on an internal Slack channel about the firing of New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil for using the n-word in a conversation with high-school students he was chaperoning on a trip to Peru. The catch here is that Pesca didn’t use the actual n-word or even the euphemistic “n-word” in the Slack conversation (you can read an account of the controversy here or listen to this episode of
about it).We talk about Mike’s experience at Slate and how wokeness, diversity, and related issues are also hurting many daily newspapers in the country, whose business models were upended by a wide variety of factors. His career and experiences help explain that decline in confidence in media, despite the fact that he’s the very model of a good journalist—he foregrounds his biases and always shows his math so you can figure out whether he’s right or wrong.
I shed no tears for legacy media, or for any era in media or any particular outlet, though I love Reason, of course, which I’ve been reading since the late ‘70s and working at since 1993. Starting my political journalism career in the ‘90s helped me understand and appreciate how the very forces that were undermining legacy media empowered what used to be called alternative media. These included the internet, of course, which changed the economics of information and the costs of distribution and lowered barriers to entry. Legacy media also took it on the chin due to the rise of cable news, which offered up huge blocks of time that needed to be filled with stories and ideas that led to network heads reaching out to more, different perspectives. It was a lot easier to be a libertarian journalist in the ‘90s than the ‘70s partly because there was so much more time to fill!
As a small circulation magazine started in 1968, Reason’s reach was necessarily limited. In the old days, building print circulation (and there was only print circulation) meant spending tons of money up front to rent lists and send out subscription offers. You could play an influence game—magazines like Reason, Commentary, National Review, The Nation, Dissent, etc. never expected to compete with Time or Life, but they hoped to influence the thinking and topic selection of people who worked there. There were moments when alt mags unexpectedly went big. Ramparts magazine (look it up if you’re not familiar, and read Warren Hinkle’s If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade) briefly hit the big time in its heyday, drawing major advertisement dollars as the bible of the cool hippie antiwar left. In the 1990s, on the basis of increasingly unhinged and uninteresting exposes about the Clintons, The American Spectator went from a circulation of 25,000 to 10X that, before shrinking again to whatever it is now. But for the most part, the old days were stacked against smaller and more niche publications.
The internet changed a lot of that and platforms such as Substack represent a means by which a whole new economics of writing is possible, activating Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans model. Old publications such as The Atlantic, which claims a million subscribers, is flourishing like it hasn’t since the 19th century and upstarts like
are too.A couple of decades into massive proliferation of news sources that also function as reality generators for their readers, more and more people seem to look back fondly on an era when there was less cacophony, fewer voices clamoring for attention and mindshare. Surprisingly (given his experiences), Mike Pesca is one of them. At one point in our conversation, he says,
The public was better informed when there were more recognized gatekeepers and when there was more of an idea of shared truth. And the shared truth wasn't always right..but, you know, more or less, we decided, well, this objectivity, this, objective description of the world applied.
This is an interesting and nuanced point, and one worth thinking about even if you disagree with it (as I do). He’s not saying that the media was necessarily more accurate but that the world functioned better when we agreed on a common reality or set of facts. In a moment when the country is arguing over whether Haitian immigrants are stealing pets in Springfield, Ohio and chowing down on them, it would be nice if we could adjudicate the truth and falsity of statements with appeals to some trusted third party. But we can’t—the people who insist that cats and dogs are being barbecued in Springfield aren’t going to change their minds despite the lack of evidence to support their claims. Neither will the people who still insist, with no evidence, that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. It wasn’t different in the past, we just papered over things, which created other dysfunctions.
In this part of the conversation, Mike talks about it being a good thing that there used to be figures such as Walter Cronkite, who were generally believed and trusted, who were capable of creating or certifying a consensus. I disagree, certainly with the example of Cronkite and the power of the mainstream media. You may be surprised to know that the chief proponent of the idea that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America was his employer, CBS, which relied on a bizarre poll of politicians to create the factoid. Writes Joseph W. Campbell, whose work exposing media myths is invaluable:
The “most trusted” epithet can be traced to a survey conducted in 1972 of 8,780 respondents in 18 states. The pollster, Oliver Quayle and Company, sought to assess and compare public trust among then-prominent U.S. politicians.
Inexplicably, Cronkite was included in the Quayle poll, which meant he was compared to the likes of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund S. Muskie, George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, and Spiro T. Agnew.
Cronkite topped the Quayle poll, receiving a “trust index” score of 73 percent. The generic “average senator” was next with 67 percent. Muskie was third with 61%.
Similarly, the oft-referenced idea that Cronkite’s reporting from Vietnam in February 1968 led Lyndon Johnson to declare some variation of the quote, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” is pure hokum. Campbell again:
Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. He was at a black-tie birthday party in Texas at the time (see photo nearby) and it is unclear whether, or when, he watched it afterward on videotape…. In the days and weeks afterward, Johnson was conspicuously hawkish in public remarks about the war — as if, in effect, he had brushed aside Cronkite’s downbeat assessment while seeking to rally popular support for the war effort. At one point in March 1968, Johnson called publicly for “a total national effort” to win the war.
It is tempting, especially among journalists, to look back on a time when the media were more trusted and ostensibly powerful enough to end wars simply by showing up in a combat zone and declaring the cause was lost.
But that has never been true and at least now, we recognize that we may all be living in pretty separate realities. This needn’t lead to nihilism or a Nietzschean will to power. But it can and should lead to better journalistic practices. We should cop to our biases, presumptions, and starting points and work at persuading the audience rather than browbeating, lecturing them, or worst of all, pushing for certain forms of speech to be banned under the banners of misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.
That’s the better path toward regaining trust, confidence, and audience. It’s more work and less glamorous than the way journalism gets portrayed in movies like All The President’s Men (whose most famous line, “follow the money,” doesn’t appear in the book of the same name, and whose most famous source, Deep Throat, is a deeply compromised character).
One of the people who is doing serious journalism in a post-truth world is Mike Pesca. You won’t necessarily agree with him on every thing, but you will know he’s not a bullshitter who is trying to manipulate you. He’s illuminating what he thinks are interesting and important stories and showing you why he thinks the way he does. Take a listen or watch my interview with him:
If you like this or my work generally, please check out Reason and think about subscribing or supporting us with a tax-deductible donation.
I've not watched (or listened) to any of the programming about which you write for nearly thirty years, as best as I can recollect. Could be longer. I recall buying a TV too watch film of the invasion of Iraq. That was when? Ancient history! Since then, I missed nothing; gained everything. Very pleased I washed them out of my hair entirely long, long ago.