The social media platform’s new owner is trying to rationalize the thing he wants (defanged journalists) with bad arguments.
Why are you reading The right now?
For some of you — not many, I’d assume — it’s because you want to be mad about this subject. You don’t read The Post normally and are reading these words now because you’re looking for something to elevate and complain about. For most of you, though, I suspect the motivation is different. You’re reading The Post because you are confident in what it presents, having come to trust the institution over months or years.
Perhaps that’s not true of me personally, which is certainly fair. But you assume that if The Post is allowing me to write under its masthead that I deserve some of that accrued trust. I hope I do. I try to demonstrate that I deserve it.
And that, really, is what sets The Post and other traditional journalism outlets apart: a commitment to try to represent what’s happening honestly and fairly, to hold ourselves accountable when we make mistakes and to use our platforms to hold power to account. This is hard to do and the very process of trying to do it makes our jobs harder. When we announce and correct our mistakes, that becomes fodder for sowing distrust about all of the things we get correct. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson is more trusted than The Post by many Americans in part because he never admits the myriad things he gets wrong.
The effort to sow distrust in outlets like The Post often derives from the third focus of our work, the interest in demanding accountability from people given political or economic power. It is also that focus, almost certainly, that has led to Elon Musk’s effort to uproot the way in which news is shared and consumed on Twitter.
As I wrote last month, soon after Musk took over ownership of the platform, Twitter is unique in the social media space. It is centered on news (and particularly political news) in a way that other outlets are not. That’s in part because it is a place that many journalists have come to rely on for sourcing and community. I can attest to the utility of the platform as a place where information very quickly trickles up, where a person who stumbles onto a newsworthy event can quickly present it to reporters to be vetted and expanded upon.
