What Has Become of Serious Journalism?
By Ariana Huffington
Nov. 26, 2014
As the founder and editor-in-chief of a well-respected news outlet, I’ve always believed in the power of journalists to stand as watchmen for democracy. A healthy fourth estate is essential to a free and vibrant society, and yet when I look at websites like Uproxx, BuzzFeed, and UpWorthy, I see none of the serious investigative journalism that was a hallmark of previous generations.
As Americans, it is our patriotic duty to demand from these new journalists the same heights of political saliency reached by Woodward, Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, and HuffPo Politics’ Amanda Terkel.
My first critique of journalism’s new wave is an aesthetic one. The revolution will not be broadcast in eye-catching .gifs and clickbait headlines designed to be shared amongst the lowest common denominator. The past few years have seen unprecedented levels of journalistic prostitution, a far cry from the days of articles printed on recycled paper and wood pulp, or headlines written in bolded red 40-point font above a .jpg image.
Additionally, the prominent trend of “content mining” – in which a host site links to third-party content without any additional information or verification – would seem to mark the death of the public press. It may seem hard to believe, but there was a time when journalism meant a reporter risking his or her life to share a scoop with the American people, or at least an unpaid nineteen-year-old intern hastily summarizing an article originally published in the New York Times.
This is to say nothing of the ways in which writing about politics has been reduced to an absolutely toothless, unthinking liberalism, accepting everyone and accomplishing nothing. If reporting that confronts systemic injustice along the lines of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation still exists, it has surely been dwarfed by the kind of feel-good progressivism that argues about language and is content with everybody just getting along. Could this climate of privileged leftism possibly accommodate a radically nuanced article like Leon Acord’s “I Didn’t Choose to be Gay, but I Would!”?
I have faith that one day this millennial generation will rise up, tired of articles shared on Facebook and instantly forgotten, and will once again demand rigorous, hard-hitting journalism. Until that day comes, however, it would appear that we are stuck in a world of BuzzFeed quizzes and animated slam poetry videos, while complex, thought-provoking pieces like “The American InstaDream: Fame Over Talent?” are doomed to be relegated to the sidelines of public consciousness.
Ariana Huffington is a syndicated columnist and founder of The Huffington Post, as well as a former cast member on Seth MacFarlane’s The Cleveland Show.
