Yves here. This post is yet another exercise in pearl-clutching over how orthodox journalists are losing out to “social media”. This framing among other things poses a false dichotomy of traditional reporting undermined by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky and TikTok, as opposed to other venues that are regularly outperforming mainstream media, such as independent sites like The Grayzone and Dropsite, many many expert and/or insightful commentators on Substack, and the growing YouTube/podcast sphere.
This article completely ignores the collapse revenues at newspapers, once the bedrock of reporting, due to the Internet. The continued staff gutting at the Washington Post is yet another example in a very long-running trend. In the old days, about half of total revenues came from classified ads, save for a few big city papers like the New York Times that could charge handsomely for “display” ads. The rest came from circulation, as in subscriptions. Craigslist killed classified ads.
The Internet also killed the desirability of a print product for many. Even though I still very much like a physical paper (you can scan it much more completely and quickly than any website, where you wind up seeing only some of their stories), readers became quickly habituated to getting breaking stories during the day. Another reason many bought a print paper was to get stock prices. In the later 1990s, some sites began publishing price data on a 15 minute delay.
On top of that, corporations and governments got better at spin. I met the Wall Street Journal reporter who opened the Shanghai office. When he came back to the US after six years, in 1999, he was stunned at how much the practice of journalism had changed. Not only had the Internet accelerated reporting deadlines, but big business and government bodies had gotten much better at telling their version of events, to the degree that he said it was almost impossible to get to the bottom of a story in a normal news cycle. That would inevitably created omissions and errors, paving the way for narrowly-focused sites, expert commentators, and yes, those evil social media accounts, to show them up or at least raise legitimate doubts.
The gutting of news budgets further shifted the balance of power towards big institutions. They became adept at playing the “access journalism” game, of parsing out interviews and first notice of breaking stories among major players. And if a reported dared run a critical piece, he was at risk of being cut out of information flow, damaging his professional viability. And again, this effective neutering of major news venues harmed their credibility, boosting independent outlets.
Mind you, this process has deep roots. The New York Times and the Washington Post have long been too close to the intel state and have even regarded themselves as important instruments of US policy. The late great Michael M. Thomas argued that the New York Times was over as a serious journalistic organization when “Punch” Sulzberger joined the board of the Metropolitan Museum in 1968. “He would have to be dining with people he should be dining on.”
Nevertheless, this piece, by an officer at the Naval War College, makes a major admission against interest, that the early “Russia is fighting with meat assaults and shovels” reporting was wrong, but blandly attributes that to journalists feeling pressured to tell tidy stories. Not only does this gloss ignore the truism that truth is the first casualty in war. It also ignores how much even seemingly reputable media outlets have lived on planted stories. In his 1928 book Propaganda, father of the PR industry Eddie Bernays looked at the front page of a New York Times and deemed half of its articles to be propaganda.
By Charles Edward Gehrke, Deputy Division Director of Wargame Design and Adjudication, US Naval War College. Originally published at The Conversation
In the first weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a strange pattern emerged in Western media coverage. Headlines oscillated between confidence and confusion. Kyiv would fall within days, one story would claim, then another would argue that Ukraine was winning. Russian forces were described as incompetent, then as a terrifying existential threat to NATO.
Analysts spoke with certainty about strategy, morale and endgames, but often reversed themselves within weeks. To many news consumers, this felt like bias – either pro-Ukraine framing or anti-Russia narratives. Some commentators accused Western media outlets of cheerleading or propaganda.
But I’d argue that something more subtle was happening. The problem was not that journalists were biased. It was that journalism could not keep pace with the war’s informational structure. What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.
I serve in the Navy as a war gamer. The most critical part of my job is identifying institutional failures. Trust is one of the most critical and, in this sense, the media is losing ground.
The gap between what people experience in real time and what journalism can responsibly publish has widened. This gap is partly where trust erodes. Social media collapses the distance between event, exposure and interpretation. Claims circulate before journalists can evaluate them.
This matters in my world because the modern battlefield is not just physical. Drone footage circulates instantly. Social media channels release claims in real time. Intelligence leaks surface before diplomats can respond.
These dynamics also matter for the public at large, which encounters fragments of reality, often through social media, long before any institution can responsibly absorb and respond to them.
Journalism, by contrast, is built for a slower world.
Slow Journalism
At the core of their work, journalists observe events, filter signal from noise, and translate complexity into narrative. Their professional norms – editorial gatekeeping, standards for sourcing, verification of facts – are not bureaucratic relics. They are the mechanisms that produce coherence rather than chaos.
But these mechanisms evolved when information arrived more slowly and events unfolded sequentially. Verification could reasonably precede publication. Under those conditions, journalism excelled as a trusted intermediary between raw events and public understanding.
These conditions no longer exist.
Information now arrives continuously, often without clear provenance. Social media platforms amplify fragments of reality in real time, while verification remains necessarily slow. The key constraint is no longer access; it is tempo.
Granted, reporters often present accounts as events are occurring, whether on live broadcasts or through their own social media posts. Still, in this environment, journalism’s traditional strengths become sources of lag.
Caution delays response. Narrative coherence hardens fast. Corrections then feel like reversals rather than refinements.
Covering Real-Time Events
The war in Ukraine has made this failure mode unusually visible. Modern warfare generates data faster than any institution can metabolize. Battlefield video and real-time casualty claims flood the system continuously.
For their part, journalists are forced to operate from an impossible position: expected to interpret events at the same speed they are livestreamed. And so journalists are forced sometimes to improvise.
Early coverage of the war leaned on simplified frames, including Russian incompetence, imminent victory and decisive turning points. They provided provisional stories generated to satisfy intense public demand for clarity.
As the war evolved, however, those stories collapsed.
This did not mean the original reporting was malicious. It meant the narrative update cycle lagged behind the underlying reality. What analysts experienced as iterative learning, audiences experienced as contradiction.
The Acceleration Trap
This forces journalism into a reactive posture. Verification trails amplification, meaning accurate reports often arrive after the audience has already formed a first impression.
This inverts journalism’s historical role. Audiences encounter raw claims first and journalism second. When the two diverge, journalism appears disconnected from reality as people experienced it.
Over time, this produces a structural shift in trust. Journalism is no longer perceived as the primary interpreter of events, but as one voice among many, arriving late. Speed becomes a proxy for relevance. Interpretation without immediacy is discounted.
Although partisan bias certainly exists, it is insufficient to explain the systemic incoherence Americans are witnessing.
Can Journalism Adapt?
Institutions optimized for one tempo rarely adapt cleanly to another. Journalism is now confronting the risk that its interpretive cycle no longer matches the speed of the world it is trying to explain.
Its future credibility will depend less on accusations of bias or even error than the question of whether it can reconcile rigor with speed, perhaps by trading the illusion of early certainty for the transparency of real-time doubt.
If it cannot, trust will continue to drain. An institution that evolved to help society see is falling behind what society is already watching.
The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.
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Thanks for rhis post.
One tiny quibble re:
” This post is yet another exercise in pearl-clutching over how orthodox journalists are losing out to “social media”. ”
I would say it’s less the journalists than their editors and owners.
See: CBS under new editor Bari Weiss and new owner Ellison spiking reporting about ICE detention center in El Salvador. She pull the story segment from CBS’s 60 Minutes new broadcast. (The story got out anyway on other sites.)
The journalists did their job on that story, perhaps too well to suit the new owner’s and new CEO’s political or other biases. / my 2 cents.
Fair point.
But the writer is specifically lamenting the loss of perceived orthodoxy of “journalism” which is both the institutions and their professionals. So this is to some degree his framing.
But Gaza? Gaza isn’t lag. That’s ideology I’m pretty sure.
Cronkite was trusted but LBJ and Westmoreland were not. And of course journalism came under attack when the messenger expressed doubt about the message after Tet. It was a major theme of Nixon/Agnew along with Kissinger being obsessed over leaks and his image.
Back then some of us thought of the press as the only major institution that could be considered trusted and apart from the WASP-y warmongers of the establishment. But as is typical of power corrupted institutions the MSM declined after their triumph over Nixon. Up from the bottom reporters were replaced by ambitious Ivy League graduates and the publishers, who were part of the establishment, showed their true colors.
Of course back in that supposed golden age the MSM was rife with CIA influence so perhaps the big change would be the greater cynicism of we the consumers of news. After awhile you become sceptical of everything and become your own “gatekeeper” re what is credible. Some of us have landed here.
“After awhile you become sceptical of everything and become your own “gatekeeper” re what is credible. Some of us have landed here.” And some of us just don’t know what to think anymore. I’m afraid I have landed in the latter camp. Maybe I never knew what I thought I “knew.”
More trusted in those far off times were The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. And I. F. Stone.
Of course (many) changes of editors and ownership since.
Yes, Ed Bernays wrote the books on modern public relations and propaganda in more ways than one. The power to convince others to willingly act against their own interests, is something elites have coveted forever.
When it comes to foreign affairs, even he would be gobsmacked and in awe of the outright lies, perception management and power to misinform 10s of millions. People’s opinions must be “managed” by the “narratives” of the oligarchy-owned mass media. Every single day we see invalid, baseless claims or even outright fabricated lies repeated uncritically and pass for “serious journalism”.
We have seen famous works illustrate these things, example: Manufacturing Consent decades ago. And many argue, it is far worse now than back then.
We had great journalists like Robert Parry leave corporate news and found one of the first independent news outlets online in the 1990s: Consortium News. And now we have YT and other platforms hosting many independent journalists (Chris Hedges, Joe Lauria, the late John Pilger…). although they may be under attack. Julian Assange has been one of the most high profile publisher/journalists to be attacked.
Critical and disparaging terms for mass media journalists have gained popularity in recent years “presstitutes” “sycophant-stenographers”
But the flip side to all of this is that, despite being attacked, kicked off of PayPal, etc. we still have places like The GrayZone, MintPress, Consortium, The Cradle, and others who conduct independent investigations and not warmongering hypocrites like Democracy Now! who take money from oligarch “foundations” and State Dept. supported “human rights” organizations etc.
And right here on Naked Capitalism, we have some great independent journalism being done. I see here we have news aggregation, journalism, as well as analysis – it’s a one-stop-shop. And we don’t see no sycophant stenographers, presstitutes, partisan hacks, or virtue-signalling hypocrisy here.
JonnyJames
Can you provide some links to support this statement:
“not warmongering hypocrites like Democracy Now! who take money from oligarch “foundations” and State Dept. supported “human rights” organizations etc.”
They appear to take every opportunity to demonize Russia, China, Iran and use human rights organizations for sources. “…according to human rights groups…”? This is a common practice, there are many more.
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/2/headlines/iranian_authorities_arrest_oscar_nominated_screenwriter_mehdi_mahmoudian
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/15/jafar_panahi
They solicit funding from “foundations”
https://www.democracynow.org/ways_to_donate
https://www.parkfoundation.org/grantees/democracy-now-productions-inc/
Democracy Now’s Wikipedia profile lists the Ford Foundation, Park Foundation, Lannan Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund. Naming the Ford Foundation must have touched a nerve.
You know I’d almost believe him if I did not listen to “news” reports that contradict history, other information sources, and my own, admittedly imperfect, memory.
The Azov brigade is no longer a bunch of murdering Nazi thugs but elite troops. Journalists seem to have forgotten little things like “Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis”
If one remembers, various media outlets have had Russia running out of munitions. Moon of Alabama published a list of these headlines a couple of years ago. A 5-minute call to a military expert who knew something about Russia would have disabused the journalist of this “fact”.
I was less than impressed listening to reports giving “blow by blow” accounts of the battle for Mariupol and an early missile attack on Kiev by to different CBC reporters. Both were reporting from Lvov. The “Mariupol” reporter managed to locate Mariupul on the Black Sea.
Come to think of it, I saw a headline today about a US network (NBC?) not mentioning the US Vice-President being booed at the Olympics opening ceremonies. Canadian ones did report it.
I also get a little tired of the opening sentence in every mainstream article or Western think tank piece opening with “Russia’s provoked, full-scale, invasion”. Has the Ministry of Information issued a decree or are journalists to lazy to think up a better line?
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
– Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Truth. Thank you.
The claim that the Ukraine nonsense wasn’t and isn’t deliberate bias is absolutely laughable. And the same could be said for anything involving Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia in general. Or the anti-Sanders campaigns.
Or the voluntary participation in the contrived hysteria drumming up support for Gulf War part 2.
And much else besides. Lack of agility may be causing some of the bottom line problems, but the obvious mendacity is driving the squandering of credibility.
It’s not a matter of journalism being too slow as compared to social media but the fact that what they come up with is not news but just narrative control and spinning. I watch the news nightly and am disgusted how so much of it is either CIA talking points, Zionist propaganda or the product of the UK’s 77th Brigade. If that was your source of news then you would be hopelessly misinformed but when you track it against what you see and read on Naked Capitalism, the cognitive dissonance gets too much. It may be that over time that the main stream media will simply drift off into irrelevancy and what is happening to the Washington Post may be a forerunner here. The younger generation seem to be getting their news from different sources, especially social media, which accounts for the frantic efforts to bring it under main stream media control and we have seen this with Tik Tok of all things. reporters working for the main stream media literally boasted how they were the “gatekeepers” of what appeared in the news but now all they are left with is to ho to suppress the real news and protect their jobs.
I agree that here need of speed is used as a simple excuse for utter failure. Journalists turned scriptwriters.
Man, yesterday I saw an Op-Ed at El Pais, which in the past was believed to be progressive and later turned globalist-owned bul—-, with the following headline: “Draghi for President“. Vomitive!
Just blame the internet.
No mention of institutional capture. No mention of NATO propaganda. No mention of the billionaire owned press whose interests align closely with those of the defense industry.
The idea that then Internet has changed journalism has merit, but let’s not pretend this is a new idea.
Yes, there’s nothing new in this. George Orwell’s famous comment on the reporting on the Spanish Civil War comes to mind.
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.”
Unfortunately, the US MSM is a joke. The once hallowed NYT and WaPo seem to be distribuitors for the US Ministry of Propaganda. For whatever reason: money, time constraintants, laziness, fear, or narrative control; for the average individual, trying to get an in depth understanding of what may really be going on, is damn near impossible. E.G. I thought it would be straighforward to obtain an answer to whether NBC may have doctored some ‘boos’ at the Olympics. Lo and behold, the internet search response was either ” video deleted’ or the the same clip played with varying strains of background noise. In person reporters called the ‘boos’, but depending on their national origin, the intensity the descriptions might range from insignificant to prolonged and widespread., Whether the Israeli atheletes were also booed seemed to be ignored in a lot of accounts. The Olympic Committee says ‘boos’ occured, but then some independent blogger will provide evidence that they didn’t happen. What gives? On the other hand, a friend who has numerous oversea’s acquiantances says that he was sent videos with ‘boos’ clearly discerned by persons on site with cells phone footage. This same stuff occurs regarding the Ukraine, Gaza, etc etc etc. The spin doctors rule. Critical analysis is an anthema. The credibility and reliability of the MSM might as well be zero. After the autopsy, how can the 4th Estate regenerate?
A concern I have is that respected social media sites by commentators I trust are being compromised by AI generated Deep Fake videos. According to John Mearsheimer this has happened to him by over 40 “ghost” accounts, and YouTube puts the burden on him to track these down. He says this has also been happening to Yanis Varoufakis and Jeffrey Sachs. I see more and more very VÈRY good fakes every day. These Fakes also generate revenue from ads and In-house AI software subscriptions (e,g YouTube Crreator Studio). It’s a classic example of enshittification. Next big crisis I expect a lot of this disìnfo flack to neutralize social media’s effectiveness as a reliable alternative to the MSN.