The TV show that destroyed journalism

A Very Serious post for New Year's.

What destroyed Journalism?

You’ll tell me it was the internet. Facebook and Google and all the Big Tech. The collapse of advertising. Evil populists and the revolt of a misguided public. Mobile phones and influencers, short-form attention spans and AI. Kids these days. Perhaps twenty years of compounding structural failures.

Sure. Some of these may have had a hand in it.

But I have a different theory. I think it was the hit HBO show, The Newsroom. I’m Very Serious.

For those of you living in blissful ignorance: Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom ran from 2012 to 2014 and it told the story of a fictional cable tv channel and its flagship evening news show. If it had a thesis, it was that if we just found a smart enough anchor (Will McAvoy/Jeff Daniels) to lecture the public from a high enough tower, order would be restored. It was the ultimate fantasy of the “institutional” era, a last ditch attempt to end history.

Maybe it was a love letter to a dying world or a eulogy to a corpse by someone who didn’t quite understand how it died. It was a series about serious people in serious rooms making serious decisions about what the public needed to know. There was also a lot of yelling, because it was okay to yell at your employees as long as you thought you were right. How far we have fallen...

Also, incidentally, it was romantically, famously, and completely wrong.

The business was the responsibility of some other people and those people were the enemy. Caring about what your audience was interested in was for sellouts. The internet was a joke, literally, the digital guy existed for comic relief. Moral clarity was the only game in town, and it was okay to compare a political group (Tea Party) to mass murdering extremists (Taliban) on prime-time television as long as you found their politics distasteful.

But more than any of these, the show really religiously, fanatically worshipped process and intentions above anything else.

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The mission to civilize

There’s a moment in The Newsroom where Jeff Daniels’ character describes his philosophy as “a mission to civilize“. He frames it as noble aspiration, Don Quixote and the Uncaring Brutes.

If only the public understood what the good, educated people wanted them to understand. If only they’d stop being so wrong.

No agency. No humility. No recognition that audiences might have legitimate reasons for their choices. Just a conviction that journalism’s job was to tell people what was Important, and that the audience needed to be scolded into caring.

“Is this information we need in the voting booth?” was the only relevant question. Entertainment, lifestyle, practical information, service journalism - distractions from the Holy Mission. Frivolous, unserious, beneath us.

Unfortunately, voting is an incredibly abstract way to exercise agency.

The connection between my vote and actual outcomes is tenuous at best. It’s mediated by layers of representation, coalition-building, compromise, and sheer chaos that no individual can possibly track. In most systems, I’m choosing between bundles of positions I only partially agree with. The world is so dizzyingly complex that no single vote maps cleanly onto real-world results. I check a box, and then... things happen. Somewhere. To someone. Probably. Eventually. Maybe not because of my vote specifically, but you know, in general.

I’m not saying political information doesn’t matter, of course it does. But journalism’s obsession with the voting booth and accountability, at times to the near-exclusion of everything else, is a spectacular own goal.

People make consequential decisions every day. What to buy. Where to work. How to manage their health, their money, their relationships. What to learn. Who to trust. Is that raspy sound my baby just made a sign of something serious? (Asking for a friend.) And the subsequent decisions are concrete, immediate, and actually responsive to good information.

Help someone make a better choice about any of these things, and you’ve done something real. Something they’ll notice. Something they might even pay for.

If journalism had spent less time lecturing people about their civic duties and more time being useful in their actual lives, we might not be in this mess. And if you help people navigate these choices well, they’ll trust you. And that trust might eventually extend to your political coverage too. But The Newsroom (and dare I say, some actual newsrooms) have it backwards: lead with civic duty, and the audience will follow.

[Sounds of crickets in an empty field - The audience did not follow.]

Trust the process

The Newsroom codified a very specific delusion: that the value of journalism comes from how it is made, not what it does for the user.

The editorial layers. The verification protocols. Two independent sources. The separation of business and the editorial and church and state. The principled arguments in glass-walled offices.

Don’t get me wrong, these things can be valuable. They exist for a reason, they tend to produce reliable information. But they have no inherent worth. Something isn’t good or trustworthy simply because it went through a process. It’s good if it’s actually true and useful. The process is supposed to serve that goal, not replace it.

This distinction matters enormously, and somewhere along the way, the industry lost sight of it.

Real, lowercase “n” newsrooms inherited the same confusion. We built elaborate systems and convinced ourselves that the systems were the point. We measured our virtue by our procedures. And when audiences stopped trusting us anyway, we couldn’t understand why. We were doing everything right. (On a related note: I spent dozens of hours hunched over my laptop re-watching The Newsroom and fact-checking for this Very Important Post, don’t believe Patrick Boehler, my suffering is actually a public service)

It turns out, and I’m hoping you are sitting down for this one: audiences don’t care about your process. They never did.

What consumers actually care about

Consumers, silly as they are, mostly care whether things work.

Take Chinese electric vehicles, which are flooding European markets. I think many consumers understand, at some level, that China is a geopolitical competitor. They’ve heard about working conditions, human rights records, strategic dependencies. The process by which these cars come into existence is, by many standards, problematic.

And yet: the cars are good enough. They’re significantly cheaper. They’re electric, which some buyers care about. So people buy them, because they need transportation, they have limited budgets, and the outcome (a functional car at a reasonable price) matters more than the production process.

This isn’t moral failure. It’s rational prioritization. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to audit every supply chain, evaluate every geopolitical implication, research every labor practice. They rely on outcomes as a proxy for everything else.

The same logic applies to information.

I had a debate recently with an editor I really admire about whether a reporter covering technology should ever write sponsored content in their area of expertise.