In the wake of the news of the failure to prevent the sale of a chain of newspapers of good repute, including the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel, to a hedge fund of ill-repute, Alden Global Capital, Karl Bode has an observation:
we're slowly replacing a functional press with PR spam, hedge fund dudebros, trolling substack opinion columnists, foreign and domestic disinformation, brand-slathered teen influencers, and hugely consolidated dumpster fires like Sinclair Broadcasting https://t.co/oKyDCCNn2K
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) May 21, 2021
I’m a little fascinated by the swipe at Substack, an entity that has become a haven for dissident thinkers, such as Andrew Sullivan, who (at least claimed) that expressing doubts about the woke community’s intellectual grounding resulted in his having to leave New York Magazine and what passes for the conventional journalistic/intellectual community, which he claimed had become infected with an illiberal intolerance based in the woke community. Bode’s is the sort of ad hominem swipe that greatly reduces the credibility of those who use it; his characterization of it as a home for opinion writers, while perhaps a bit limited, validates it, as opinion, informed and reasoned, is what the liberal intellectual world runs on.
But his larger point is, I think, something to legitimately worry about. For me, it’s the difficult-to-remedy problem of substituting the private sector metric of financial success for an organic measure of success in the free press sector, best characterized as acknowledgments of journalistic excellence. After all, money is easy to count; awarding Pulitzer Prizes, not so much; the common citizen is a poor judge of journalistic excellence, given the popularity of the inferior Fox News. Thus, financial success becomes a pathological and existential metric of success.
Regardless, the larger question of whether Bode (and Tumulty at WaPo) are right to bemoan a free press in deep trouble, or are merely concerned about their world changing out underneath them, is worthy of meditation. While the final answer will only come from post-change measurements, subjective or objective, the motivations for predicting and heading off changes deleterious to the benefits of the free press to society are obvious. While I distrust Bode’s personal judgment on the matter, the matter itself remains important, even critical, and I hope individuals and entities capable of the feat will step forward and offer Alden the opportunity to offload the entities they’ve just acquired before they can gut them.
