One of the most common things I hear is an iteration of the following:
‘I don’t read the news anymore, it’s too depressing and/or it makes me too angry.’
As you can probably imagine, it is not the most encouraging statement a journalist could possibly hear. The other extreme also presents cause for concern.
‘On bad days, I can’t tear myself away from it.’
Most of us react to the news cycle in the same way our ancestors would have responded to a large predator in the woods. We are either scared into avoidance, spurred into action, or transfixed in place by it. There is no in between.
Of course, I’ll be the first to point out that the news industry itself is partly to blame for this unprecedented decline. Across the globe, newsrooms have had to face the fact that journalism is incongruent with capitalism. Like all kinds of public service, it does not fit neatly into the profiteer’s box.
Taking the safe route became the only profitable option. Stay neutral, give airtime to “both sides” (even if both of them are full of shit), and don’t offend anyone too hard. Ask the question you need to ask, and then report what they say. Their words are for the public to assess. Who are we to pronounce ourselves on matters of the state? That’s the government’s job, right?
Cowardly, but undeniably effective when it comes to ensuring long-term survival. Certainly much better for the bottom line than hitting the powers that be with a bag of hammers at every turn. Better to quietly take down a story than lose a chunk of advertising revenue.
There’s just one problem with this approach. Though this kind of deliberately bland reporting certainly helps advertisers sleep easier at night, it does not do the industry itself any favours.
We can talk all we want about how social media short-circuited people’s attention spans, how the internet forces us to compress everything into a 60-second reel that is algorithm friendly, and how the spread of misinformation has gutted public trust. All of these things are definitely true and they deserve as much scrutiny as we can muster.
Absolutely none of these things can cover up the fact, however, that every article that has as much as a whiff of dishonesty about it is simply inviting yet another reader to stop reading. Another pair of eyeballs, rolling away in evident disgust at the fact that a person who claims to endeavour to inform them is holding back from calling a spade a spade.
The other part of this argument is the fact that it is always easier to shoot the messenger. Even when we do deliver the news the way we should, it almost never feels like it has the impact it should have. The speed of the average news cycle means that a major scandal can be buried beneath an avalanche of new information within the same week, especially in a country in which the rule of law is as deeply compromised as it is in Malta.
So, the impasse presents itself.
If we deliver the news unflinchingly, hard-hitting investigations can easily end up joining the big, ugly scrapheap of bad news that nobody wants to look at, a massive investment that does not guarantee a substantial return.
If we deliver the kind of bland neutrality that keeps advertisers and content writers happy, we sacrifice time and resources that should have been used for real work.
If we clickbait with popular topics and trends for the sake of pleasing social media algorithms, we lose credibility.
In every instance: busted, busted, busted.
What we are left with is an alienated follower base that is increasingly avoidant of the truth, preferring instead to turn towards dubious sources of information which, rather than claiming to be ‘neutral and unbiased’, blatantly tell you what their bias is. The sheer volume of the internet and all the chatter that occurs online has cradled the birth of the unthinkable – there is shelter to be found in the vast, wild messiness of the virtual world, especially for the kind of amorality that thrives on closed feedback loops.
One terrifying example of this is the dramatic gender-based shift in the US presidential election earlier this month. I quote a VICE article on this very subject:
“Men aged 18-29—a group that has been politically unengaged in recent years—voted decisively for Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported a shift to the right of 28 points among this group. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, 56 percent of young male voters opted for Trump in 2024—a marked increase from 41 percent in 2020…
…on the day of the election, figures from across the vast and frequently depressing multiverse that is the online ‘Bro right’ gave their ringing endorsements of Donald Trump, and implored their fans to go and vote for him. Upon the announcement of his victory, John Shahidi of the Nelk Boys (online far-right promoters) tweeted: “I don’t care what anyone says, podcasts helped us win this election.” When the Wall Street Journal reported that ‘Younger Men Voted Decisively for Donald Trump,’ Shahidi reposted it alongside the message, “Shout-out to our entire team!”
This brand of media that pollutes factual discussion with manufactured shock value and an ‘everything-goes’ kind of approach effectively had a bigger impact on the minds of young American men than pretty much anything else in the industry.
In Malta, I am witnessing the same kind of shift. Legacy media is blander than ever, and credibility is hard to come by as a result. The space in general is saturated with content writers masquerading as journalists. The rise of shit podcasts with terrible hosts who know nothing about the topics they are talking about is happening apace, crowding out an overstretched market to the point of implosion.
As things stand, the odds are already impossibly stacked against the free press.
The brutish logic of capitalism, the instability of global democracy, the ongoing enshittification of the internet and every other means of communication, and the enduring influence of liars who sell nightmares for a living all contribute to this situation.
Now more than ever, journalists who ask the difficult questions are the only ones who will ever have an impact. The world is too far gone for anyone who skirts around issues to be taken seriously. In a world of extremes, only the extremely truthful or the extremely deceitful will carry any clout.
For any of us to have any chance in hell of surviving this era of normalised terror, there is no choice but to weaponise the undeniable truth and to wield it without equivocation or delay.
Anything else is a condemnation of everything we should be fighting for.