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The American Press Will Self-Destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2…
The rise of opinion journalism has degraded the industry beyond repair.
Spin is everywhere these days. It’s as common as click-bait.
Spin is so common, we don’t even call it spin anymore; but we rarely ever call it by its new name: Opinion Journalism.
Opinion journalism, and its evil twin “audience optimization,” has turned the American media landscape into something unrecognizable from 10 years ago. Too much opinion journalism has turned the industry into something fewer and fewer people trust.
Every day, corporate media outlets are bleeding subscribers and readers to independent media clearinghouses like Substack. Independent journalists and writers who have left the mainstream, rejecting as they do the groupthink which has become prevalent in media newsrooms, have been raking in the dough hand over fist.
Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss- formerly of the Rolling Stone, the Intercept and the New York Times respectively- have found a wide audience willing to pay for quality content they don’t feel they can get from corporate news outlets any longer.
It’s hard to blame media consumers for abandoning news sources which have so often led the public astray over the last five years in particular, sometimes with such…