Most people don't understand what editors do. Or what they used to do. These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. But when editors do their job properly, they are part quality control, part coordinators, part peer review. The notion that all of that is just a waste of time is quite misguided, since it's the lack of those exact things that caused modern corporate media to go to shit. But in the short tem fleeing traditional publications to something like Substack does make sense right now, precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic.
> These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement.
> ... precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic
Could you provide some evidence about what you mean? In these two sentences, you seem to be implying that there's some observable trend where editors have gone from:
1a. Not enforcing the political stance of their paper and
2a. Being indispensable to the writing process
to:
1b. Enforcing the political stance of their paper and
2b. Becoming adversarial to the writing process
This is very interesting. Could you provide some examples?
Thank you for taking the time to provide links! I read through the Weiss article, and I'd already read the Greenwald one. However I don't believe either can credibly used to point to any kind of historical trend.
The Weiss article isn't even about any local editorial change: the paper found someone to provide a contrarian voice; that contrarian met frequent disagreement with the editors; that contrarian resigned--regression to the mean.
The case of the Greenwald and Reality Winner is much worse. But at the end, it's just a case of an editorial board taking control of story, nothing historically unprecedented.
I've been politically conscious since 1996 or so, and I don't think I can ever recall a single time where editorial boards didn't work to push through the position of their publication. I think I became acutely aware of "position" in 2003, with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and Fox news, etc. But using the media to hype up war on false pretenses is a venerable tradition in the history of journalism, which, at least in the US, is a business and a political enterprise.
Everything I've described in the last paragraph is socially harmful, and I think it's very important to have underground media and alt media as a counterweight to the mainstream. But there is also a strong need for professional, organized journalism, and I'm sure it still exists in at least some pages the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc, and even local Tribunes throughout the country.
I don't think the proportion of quality fact checkers and editors has somehow degraded in the last x* years. The only things that I think have changed are the _widely-held perception_ that journalism is somehow terrible now, and the explosion of news being distributed in social media. The first is just standard tongue-clucking about the decline of democratic society; the second is about information being distributed at a totally new velocity and availability. I have no idea how the future will deal with that, the effect is only just beginning.
* I'm not sure over what time period your proposed decline is supposed to have taken place.
I provided examples of high-level resignations with detailed explanations as to their reasons. A famed founder of the paper leaves it because he's stopped from publishing a major election story. A decidedly left-wing opinion writer is attacked by peers as if she's some sort of right-wing extremist and decides to resign. Both say this sort of thing couldn't happen just a few years ago. If you claim that this was commonplace since 1996, where are your examples of such occurrences?
A lot of these examples have nothing to do with political ideology. Some that do point in the direction of the problem I was talking about.
2014: Sharyl Attkisson worked for CBS for two decades, heavily criticized Obama administration and yet left on "amicable" terms (according to that article).
2020: Bari Weiss (who isn't exactly a pro-Trump Republican) faced "constant bullying" from colleagues at NYT, attacks from them on Twitter and on internal Slack. Less you think it's her personal problem, James Bennet was forced to resign from NYT for allowing a republican senator to publish an OP-ED.
Does it not seem like there was a shift of some sort? Well, apparently Attkisson herself published several books claiming that things have changed:
