Reverses for Woke forces

The Mandarin Class are in a tizzy owing to a number of setbacks on the fields of the culture wars.

In academia, DEI appointments such as President Claudine Gay of Harvard and President Elizabeth Magill have had to resign because they were unwilling to condemn antisemitism and unwilling to ensure rule of law on their campuses and more such dismissals and resignations are on the horizon.  DEI is not dead but it is getting its first real pushback and there seems a real (yay!) risk of a preference cascade undoing more than a decade's worth of Marxist gains.

Government, another reservoir of the Mandarin Class, also seems in peril with the figurehead of DEI and ESG (and incompetence in general) receiving ever lower marks for his performance and the lawfare being conducted against his rival, Trump, seeming increasingly unlikely to keep Trump off the ballot.  

In the past week, the lamentations of the 4th Estate have come to the fore.  Perennial Millennial Taylor Lorenz has put out a four minute lamentation on the ills of the journalism business.  Nobody wants to employ journalists and they are being let go hither and yon.  She is lost and cannot see the forest for the trees.  

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It has gotten a lot of attention.  Journalists feel like she has articulated their woe and desperation well and are generally admiring of the piece.  Everyone else seems to feel like her four minutes are a micro-example of exactly what is wrong with the whole Mandarin Class journalism - elitist, Woke, anti-capitalist, self-regarding, privileged insiders claiming victimhood, abhorrent of objectivity, and completely blind to how little they know of America and Americans, and just how massively ignorant they are of the  current and recent past.  

Among the most striking things to me is her apparent complete unawareness of all the media blossoming around her.  It is her part of the media which is collapsing, not media in general.  The old mainstream media is dying but substack and podcasts and new outlets and channels are blossoming.  She sees the dying and not the blossoming.  She is an example of the intraindustry ignorance which is killing the legacy media.  

Glenn Greenwald, part of that new media ecosystem, has some choice words for Lorenz's lament.

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DEI, ESG, Victimhood, blatant deception - they are not dead yet.  They aren't even yet mortally wounded.  But they are wounded.  

Matthew Yglesias tries to catastrophize what is otherwise of straightforward commercial problem.  Demand for what the mainstream legacy media produces has collapsed.  From The two crises in the news business by Matthew Yglesias.  The subheading is One is bad for journalists, the other is bad for democracy

It is hard to make out the arc of Yglesias' argument or even which are the two crises he is talking about.  He has a bunch of interesting and even relevant factoids randomly scattered about along with a fair amount of dross.

I think it would be reasonably fair to argue that there are six main trend lines over the pst forty years which have dramatically changed the nature of the legacy media.

No more TV oligopolies

No more newspaper monopolies 

Increased Supply

Lower industry concentration

Greater choice

Unbundling of news

From the 1960s onwards, newspapers were exempted from anti-monopoly regulations which guaranteed local newspaper profits for at least four decades.  It was a profitable business federal regulations made it a profitable business.

From the 1950s onwards, TV was allowed to consolidate into the three national channels and regulated accordingly.  National TV news was a profitable business because federal regulations made it a profitable business.

With the internet and smart phones in the 1990s and 2000s, technology unlocked a new era of plentiful news content supply, at very low cost, and of new infinite variety.  

Profitable legacy news media saw their profitable oligopolies and monopolies dissolve.  Legacy media was not producing content people were willing to buy and people now had a choice to buy elsewhere.  Which they did.

We saw what we always see in newly competitive markets - an unbundling of services, increasing consumer choices, falling consumer prices, increased specialization, and lower industry concentration.  And there really isn't much to be done about it.  Legacy media has been lowering the quality of their brand year by year.  The error rates keep climbing, the outright abuses keep proliferating, the destruction of trust is endemic.  

As I have mentioned in the past, I was a prolific purchaser/subscriber of newspapers and magazines.  I loved that old epistemic ecosystem and miss it greatly.  But it has not existed for a long while now.  It has been perhaps at least five years since a major newspaper could be considered reliable, even longer since TV news was anything but paid propaganda.  

We are witnessing the wittering among the pseudo cognoscenti remnant journalists of the withering legacy mainstream media.  They long for the old days of easy money, plenty of reporting time, foreign bureaus, the heroic status of Woodward and Bernstein, and captive audiences.  

Now people have a choice and they are choosing better to the detriment of legacy media.  It is a long suffocating death and the new media landscape, exotic though it currently is, is also unfamiliar and nerve racking.  

There are only three certainties.  The legacy media model will not survive in its old form, the woke media version will not replace it, and it will take a while to get to a new model that is both meeting the demand for news and is financially viable.  What exactly it will look like is anyone's guess.  Just not anything legacy.