Journalism in America is slowly transforming as old institutions fall apart and old technologies fall into disuse or are taken apart and repurposed. We are in a privileged moment, since journalism in a conventional sense no longer exists—we can now look at the past and try to achieve something more impressive in the future.

Before turning to the past and future, it’s useful to understand our present in light of the collapse of this conventional authority. There are now no journalists of national importance; there is no institution that commands national respect. Not only is it the case that all attempts to persuade or educate through mass media are partisan, but they fail to summon partisan loyalties or reach a wide audience. Moreover, media institutions aren’t even trying to achieve popularity or prestige.

A related sign of this collapse is the crassness of attempts to reimpose authority. The latest example is the significant number of media institutions, both TV and print, asserting in unison that Vice President Kamala Harris was never “border czar” when those same institutions all used the term previously, as digital media like X (formerly Twitter) can easily prove. These stories foster political partisanship, but they also speak to deeper, more important oppositions than liberal and conservative or Democratic and Republican. With regard to the privileged audience, that is, the minority of people constantly concerned with politics, this struggle over authority represents a conflict between older outgoing elites and younger incoming counter-elites who often wear the guise of populism. With regard to the technology and businesses built on it, the struggle opposes older TV to newer digital technology. The very attempt to impose authority through journalism, however, reveals the impossibility of doing so, as well as the deep divisions in American society.

Self-Knowledge Under Democratic Conditions

We have three kinds of journalism in America. We can analyze them by the technology used to produce stories: print, TV and radio, and the Internet. These successively take us from the introduction of mass literacy to mass access to elite public activities, and now, with the Internet, mass access to the concern of the true elites, knowledge.

We can also analyze them historically as successive products of the democratic revolution of the last two centuries—from the pamphleteering of the Founding Era to the mass democracy of the New Deal to the digital partisanship of the Obama-Trump years.

We can judge the minority of non-liberal institutions by looking at the major ones, like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Substack and (thanks to Elon Musk) X accounts. Their audience mostly consists of very old people (older than people as a generation have ever been), rich people (more comfortable than rich people have ever been), and especially young people (more removed from responsibilities than the young have ever been). In each case, we find different advertising and different ideals; all audiences are unified by their status as consumers, but they admire different things. In each case, we find different rhetoric, even when they appeal to the same passions. What it requires to persuade each audience depends on how that audience believes it is misunderstood and mistreated by the other institutions. The rhetoric is inherently polemical, asserting in each case a specific claim to preeminence in the political coalition by denigrating the coalition partners. So although we are talking about the three ages of men—understood politically as those who own the country, those who run the country, and those who will inherit the country—there is no way to bring them together. The business model of our media institutions depends on political dysfunction and social collapse.

One strange thing about the analysis is that, while the fundamental facts are quite obvious, they are studiously ignored. Why is that? It’s related to the shame that prevents public intellectuals from offering this analysis. Our postmodern situation has rendered us nearly ungovernable, which in turn raises questions about our very humanity. Our media, far from enhancing our powers to match the scale and complexity of modern technology, has crippled us and our elites, and the separation of the audience (which is the electorate constituted by another principle) is the key to its impotence—and who wants to bring bad news? The separation bespeaks a major failure in American organization, since it severs not just old, rich, and young, but it also severs speech and deed. The key to the problem of journalism is to look at the art of association and ask what good thing does writing about an event help people achieve: self-understanding.

From a business point of view as well as from a political point of view, this self-knowledge is now almost impossible to achieve. One can tell an audience what they are used to hearing, which is hardly better than flattery, or one can tell the audience what is happening in America. Talent and intelligence are split in a shocking way, resulting in the destruction of political knowledge. Political knowledge means both speaking to the American people in a persuasive, plausible way, while also demanding that they learn some of the major social and political facts about the situation in which they act. Those of us who are political and media insiders talk all the time about things that cannot be said, since they would be implausible; the effects are usually demoralizing, since the very process by which we acquire these secrets deprives us of public support. But behind the desires of insiders for advance knowledge of events lies a secret piety—the belief that the American people will wake up and act, if only they hear the right news.

Propaganda and Enlightenment

Modern morality is all about connecting the two meanings of argument, one of which points to learning the truth and the other to having a fight. Fighting for what’s right only makes sense based on the pursuit of truth—otherwise, it might be mere madness. Politics and journalism both fulfill this function, from their different positions within the modern state-society divide. The difficulty inherent in journalism is that it depends on access to the state for knowledge to offer us mere members of society, but it depends on our interest and indignation to have any success.

The three waves of journalism—the successive attempts to connect political technologies, that is, institutions, to the people, corresponding to the major communications technologies, print, radio/TV, and the Internet—have dealt with this in somewhat different ways. Originally, American pamphleteering was vicious, pompous, and nakedly corrupt—but it was also organized and practiced by the noblest Americans and therefore involved the most serious thinking and the deepest disputes of American politics. Journalism was at the core of the creation and management of the first-party system and also involved the spoils of party victory to feed it.

Elite Americans’ confidence in the imperative of Progress came to prominence with FDR; they promised to exchange all that corruption for expertise. The alignment of party, leader, government, and state in FDR’s presidency-for-life was supposed to also guarantee a permanent alignment of the elite and the people and create something like divine power—providence. This was supposed to give Americans what they had always wanted, which had only been prevented by popular prejudice in favor of obsolete institutions like the Constitution or private corruption among various elite groups who stood to profit from their privileges. Under this new dispensation, the media elite was no longer engaged in the rough-and-tumble brawl over serious political ideas, but saw itself as the “objective” purveyor of truth emerging from the providential alignment of people and state. In reality, it transformed political thought into the increasingly unpolished mediocrity we resentfully receive today. Thus journalism ironically became something increasingly hard to distinguish from the most vicious kind of partisanship, zealotry, with this remarkable innovation, that it would be zealously enforcing the state imperative of the administration of justice.

We have obviously returned to our ancient roots in partisanship and that is to the good, because we can face our problems politically instead of trying to predict the movements of an almost divine state. But we must next learn that to be properly political, journalism must do more than merely address partisans, it must help them achieve political victory in the constitutional arrangement that defines American conflict. It has to be about enlightenment more than propaganda, despite the silly boasting that parades as success nowadays, which is so ephemeral that we see it frittering away as soon as we applaud it. Digital technology allows us to identify with a political opinion and associate with one another on that basis, something the TV era had suppressed. However, we have yet to understand how digital maps of American opinions and interests can be used to encourage belief in leaders as they prove themselves to the public—the proper job of political journalism.

The Education of the Mind

The most interesting fact about journalism in our time is that, of all people, tech billionaires are now agents of Enlightenment, pointing the way to the future. Elon Musk wastes his time posting memes on X, but also does propaganda for Enlightenment by opposing DEI and other mad elite projects such as “transing the kids” (proposing jail for trans-surgery) and talks earnestly to mankind about collapsing demographics. He has become an editor of the first rank, put otherwise. It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish the important things from the inevitable gossip that spreads on social media, but since it reveals again the importance of public sentiment, I suggest judging it in relation to national character. The people don’t always love the truth, but often enough they do and they just need journalists to work out their suspicions of elites in particular cases. The people decide their interests, but cannot do the work of proving their case. His acquisition of Twitter and his transforming it into X have changed American politics—but since journalism doesn’t exist, there is little serious writing done about the transformation of the media landscape and what it suggests for the future. Nor is this simply a problem of intelligence—though journalists are woefully uneducated—since it is also morally abhorrent to most of them that so many people online think of Elon and others as ancient heroes rather than mere capitalist exploiters of the oppressed.

This new development has already become a trend and must later become a movement. Other less impressive tech billionaires are also on X, living not so much in the shadow of Elon as on his generosity. What is Elon selling on X? Reputation. An X account has two sides, depending on how you think of the users. For the ordinary American, there is a timeline—an algorithm has to fit user preferences (this could be judged by clicks, likes, reposts, replies, maybe even time spent, especially on articles or threads) to the available content. Obviously, this can never really work, not just because preferences and availabilities affect each other too much, change too readily, but because they are very vulgar images of more serious ways of achieving self-understanding.

Journalism is part of the project of the conquest of fortune—knowledge of particulars will help us make better decisions, serious reflection on it will help us predict the future, and turning our intelligent students of human affairs to this eminently practical concern is supposed to lend us some of their depth by transforming public discourse and thus public education. The twentieth-century model for achieving such Progress has collapsed; another project is now forming, requiring new leadership.

The secret of X is that for extraordinary Americans, they have a profile that gives them a roadmap for action. Their followers, impressions, and other statistics reflect an effort to assemble and motivate an audience, indeed an electorate. Every new achievement in popularity frees them from the vulgarity of the ordinary users, which becomes refined as a timeline curated by influential accounts, and also introduces them to similar accounts, a 1 percent of a 1 percent, where it becomes possible to associate for common purposes and thus to become representatives of a digital democracy. Success speaks for itself to a considerable extent, so major users can influence public sentiment instead of merely following it and, in some contentious moments, public opinion, by joining the people against elite media. Once they publish their opinions and publicly commit to supporting and opposing political activities, they also become publicly answerable, through community notes as well as ratios, and other mechanisms, and thus they will get the political education most of them missed when they turned to computers. America is the land of second chances, after all …

Maybe we should think of the most famous X accounts as America’s true Congress, hidden in plain sight. They’re certainly more intelligent than most congressmen and work a lot harder to understand what’s happening, so far as their followers are concerned. Elon’s transformation of the liberal seal of approval, the blue checkmark, into a subscription that gives popular accounts advertising money is not only a democratic revolution effected overnight, but also brings the platform closer to what a media business does, including Congress—after all, those guys spend a lot of time fundraising.

The three waves of journalism have led to an impasse and therefore institutional collapse rather than the construction of a forum where elite and public opinion can meet, negotiate, and find those agreements on which we can act. But we have also arrived at the beginning of a new project, to leave post-modernity behind and to use digital technology to help Americans associate again for common purposes, under freely chosen leadership and with a remarkable ability to improve on our worst institutional mistakes, substituting suppleness for the increasing rigidity of public discourse.