The End of an Era: Conventional Wisdom is Dead

Media layoffs and a continuing stream of disclosures reveal an unprecedented collapse of the American political consensus

END OF AN ERA? Clockwise from top left, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, CBS late show icon Stephen Colbert, Washington Post gadfly Philip Bump, and Pulitzer-winning columnist Jonathan Capehart

Over the weekend it was announced that a gaggle of well-known Washington Post opinion-makers, from Philip Bump to Jonathan Capehart to Catherine Rampe to Karen Attiah, were taking buyout offers from Jeff Bezos and the Post, amid news of a 250,000 plunge in subscriptions. This comes on the heels of the recent firing of CBS icon Stephen Colbert, the vote to defund NPR, and previous overhauls at MSNBC (which let go most of Rachel Maddow’s staff as well as canceling The ReidOut), CNN (which let go 6% of its workforce in January), and ABC (which shuttered 538.com and laid off 75 employees in March), to say nothing of recent staff reductions at Vox Media, HuffPost, and other companies.

The Conventional Wisdom machine is coming apart in chunks. News dropped that fact-checking celebritoid Glenn Kessler took the buyout just moments ago; he was lampooned here last week. If you shut your air conditioner off, you’ll hear screams and revving chainsaws from 30 Rock to the CNN Center. With apologies for bluntness, the mainstream press fucked around, now the mainstream press is finding out:

The Post whackings come amid a slew of revelations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the biggest botched story of our generation, the misreported/invented Trump-Russia scandal. I can already hear former colleagues pshaw-ing at the idea of a connection, but Gabbard’s releases examplify how news media as a reactive institution disabled itself. The companies now in peril are the same ones that have no ability to describe, even critically, new details from a Russiagate story they themselves made famous, as all the new information leads back to their own failures and complicity in an epochal scam. As Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth put it to Paul Sperry, “The media isn’t looking for Russiagate scoops, nor will they fairly present the ones others get if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting.”

In any other era, the news business would be hopping. The rest of Washington is buzzing with rumors of more long-suppressed documents coming out this week. Ask yourself: when has the press ever been uninterested in disclosure of secret documents? It’s rare, but here it makes sense, as what’s rumored to be coming will accelerate the obliteration of years of deceptive narratives. No one wants to admit it, but the consensus-building mechanism has cornered itself, and is now suffering a rapid implosion, in the manner of a financial bubble.

The people with the most to lose, namely owners like Bezos and the executives at CBS, CNN, and ABC, naturally started the rush to the exits. They’re scrambling for a “path to profitability,” as the New York Times put it, to cut huge annual financial losses, like $100 million for the Post (up from $77 million the year before) or $40 million just for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert*. The press is a trust business, and these monetary losses are symbolic of a plunge in confidence caused by a critical mass of revelations about their horrid performance from “Crossfire Hurricane” to Covid.

In private, executives all year have called this what it is (“A massacre,” an ABC exec told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, comparing the lay-off merry-go-round to Squid Game). In public however pundits are continuing to play out a hollow charade, acting as if these collapses are a confounding Scooby Doo mystery, or explained by an evil political conspiracy surrounding an upcoming Paramount merger. Poor Willie Geist — I have a soft spot for the guy despite his longstanding role as the Ed McMahon of Morning Joe — went on Today to do a feature about how, yes, The Colbert Report is losing assloads of money, but the political “context” is “impossible to ignore”:

NPR, which may itself be vanishing from the media landscape after Congress voted to cut $1 billion in funding for NPR and PBS, ran an inevitable All Things Considered piece decrying the “Paramount error” CBS is making in “muzzling its best voices.” Mother Jones, the outlet that introduced to America the erroneous “Russia can ‘blackmail’ Trump” story and ran over a dozen pieces of the “Here’s What Pro-Russia Trolls Are Promoting Today” variety sourced to the bogus Hamilton 68 dashboard, claimed the demise of one of the “crown jewels” of late night signals a “dark new chapter” in an “authoritarian slide.” Chris Hayes of MSNBC preposterously tweeted that it’s “not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions”:

Many factors are converging to cause these changes, from the overall decline of big-budget TV variety shows (TV in general, really) to changes in the political weather, but those outraged responses reveal the biggest: an epidemic sense of entitlement. It’s true that media companies were once happy to support news shows that lost money, as a way to fulfill their federal mandate to broadcast content in the “public interest.” But the Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t written to ensure revenue from sports and sitcoms endlessly bailed out the dimwit producers of error-factory news programming. People like Colbert and Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudly display all these qualities to audiences without consequence. Try that on television for ten straight years, and life really will come at you fast.

As someone effectively exiled from this world for issuing gentle warnings at the start of Russiagate, I’m tempted to gloat at the “massacre,” but this may be more than a little karmic payback. I‘ve never seen American conventional wisdom in such a state of abject surrender. Not just the media but the Democratic Party and its attendant posse of opinion-grinding NGOs is barely fighting back. Former CIA chief John Brennan went on MSNBC at the end of last week to call Gabbard ethically challenged and a liar, but came across as desperate and panicked. Brennan’s former subordinate Susan Miller likewise ran to NBC to pooh-pooh Gabbard’s disclosures, but her idea of a strident denial was to argue that the CIA never had evidence of collusion:

We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected… At the same time, we found no two-way collusion between Trump or his team with the Russians.

Possibly Miller really feels that way — the documents don’t show supporting evidence for the first claim, but that’s another subject — but the fact that NBC ran this story at all is remarkable. The network spent the bulk of 2017 and 2018 pumping out “collusion” stories, and now parades the unsupported nature of those tales out of reflex, not realizing the damage this does with audiences. Eventually in this business, you have to write checks that don’t bounce.

Nate Silver wrote an interesting column saying all of these media firings show “there’s really no mass culture anymore,” but is that a cause, or an effect? To me it seems obvious that high-profile failures on the biggest stories are what punched the hole in the hull in the first place, making mass consensus impossible. The next claimants to the public’s trust should anyway listen to the carnage this week. No matter how much money or how many influential friends you have, nobody gets to screw up forever.

*A previous version of this column incorrectly identified the show as “The Colbert Report.” Apologies for the error.