Yves here. This post is yet another exercise in pearl-clutching over how orthodox journalists are losing out to “social media”. This framing among other things poses a false dichotomy of traditional reporting undermined by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky and TikTok, as opposed to other venues that are regularly outperforming mainstream media, such as independent sites like The Grayzone and Dropsite, many many expert and/or insightful commentators on Substack, and the growing YouTube/podcast sphere.
This article completely ignores the collapse revenues at newspapers, once the bedrock of reporting, due to the Internet. The continued staff gutting at the Washington Post is yet another example in a very long-running trend. In the old days, about half of total revenues came from classified ads, save for a few big city papers like the New York Times that could charge handsomely for “display” ads. The rest came from circulation, as in subscriptions. Craigslist killed classified ads.
The Internet also killed the desirability of a print product for many. Even though I still very much like a physical paper (you can scan it much more completely and quickly than any website, where you wind up seeing only some of their stories), readers became quickly habituated to getting breaking stories during the day. Another reason many bought a print paper was to get stock prices. In the later 1990s, some sites began publishing price data on a 15 minute delay.
On top of that, corporations and governments got better at spin. I met the Wall Street Journal reporter who opened the Shanghai office. When he came back to the US after six years, in 1999, he was stunned at how much the practice of journalism had changed. Not only had the Internet accelerated reporting deadlines, but big business and government bodies had gotten much better at telling their version of events, to the degree that he said it was almost impossible to get to the bottom of a story in a normal news cycle. That would inevitably created omissions and errors, paving the way for narrowly-focused sites, expert commentators, and yes, those evil social media accounts, to show them up or at least raise legitimate doubts.
The gutting of news budgets further shifted the balance of power towards big institutions. They became adept at playing the “access journalism” game, of parsing out interviews and first notice of breaking stories among major players. And if a reported dared run a critical piece, he was at risk of being cut out of information flow, damaging his professional viability. And again, this effective neutering of major news venues harmed their credibility, boosting independent outlets.
Mind you, this process has deep roots. The New York Times and the Washington Post have long been too close to the intel state and have even regarded themselves as important instruments of US policy. The late great Michael M. Thomas argued that the New York Times was over as a serious journalistic organization when “Punch” Sulzberger joined the board of the Metropolitan Museum in 1968. “He would have to be dining with people he should be dining on.”
Nevertheless, this piece, by an officer at the Naval War College, makes a major admission against interest, that the early “Russia is fighting with meat assaults and shovels” reporting was wrong, but blandly attributes that to journalists feeling pressured to tell tidy stories. Not only does this gloss ignore the truism that truth is the first casualty in war. It also ignores how much even seemingly reputable media outlets have lived on planted stories. In his 1928 book Propaganda, father of the PR industry Eddie Bernays looked at the front page of a New York Times and deemed half of its articles to be propaganda.
By Charles Edward Gehrke, Deputy Division Director of Wargame Design and Adjudication, US Naval War College. Originally published at The Conversation
In the first weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a strange pattern emerged in Western media coverage. Headlines oscillated between confidence and confusion. Kyiv would fall within days, one story would claim, then another would argue that Ukraine was winning. Russian forces were described as incompetent, then as a terrifying existential threat to NATO.
Analysts spoke with certainty about strategy, morale and endgames, but often reversed themselves within weeks. To many news consumers, this felt like bias – either pro-Ukraine framing or anti-Russia narratives. Some commentators accused Western media outlets of cheerleading or propaganda.
But I’d argue that something more subtle was happening. The problem was not that journalists were biased. It was that journalism could not keep pace with the war’s informational structure. What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.
I serve in the Navy as a war gamer. The most critical part of my job is identifying institutional failures. Trust is one of the most critical and, in this sense, the media is losing ground.
The gap between what people experience in real time and what journalism can responsibly publish has widened. This gap is partly where trust erodes. Social media collapses the distance between event, exposure and interpretation. Claims circulate before journalists can evaluate them.
This matters in my world because the modern battlefield is not just physical. Drone footage circulates instantly. Social media channels release claims in real time. Intelligence leaks surface before diplomats can respond.
These dynamics also matter for the public at large, which encounters fragments of reality, often through social media, long before any institution can responsibly absorb and respond to them.
Journalism, by contrast, is built for a slower world.
Slow Journalism
At the core of their work, journalists observe events, filter signal from noise, and translate complexity into narrative. Their professional norms – editorial gatekeeping, standards for sourcing, verification of facts – are not bureaucratic relics. They are the mechanisms that produce coherence rather than chaos.
But these mechanisms evolved when information arrived more slowly and events unfolded sequentially. Verification could reasonably precede publication. Under those conditions, journalism excelled as a trusted intermediary between raw events and public understanding.
These conditions no longer exist.
Information now arrives continuously, often without clear provenance. Social media platforms amplify fragments of reality in real time, while verification remains necessarily slow. The key constraint is no longer access; it is tempo.
Granted, reporters often present accounts as events are occurring, whether on live broadcasts or through their own social media posts. Still, in this environment, journalism’s traditional strengths become sources of lag.
Caution delays response. Narrative coherence hardens fast. Corrections then feel like reversals rather than refinements.
Covering Real-Time Events
The war in Ukraine has made this failure mode unusually visible. Modern warfare generates data faster than any institution can metabolize. Battlefield video and real-time casualty claims flood the system continuously.
For their part, journalists are forced to operate from an impossible position: expected to interpret events at the same speed they are livestreamed. And so journalists are forced sometimes to improvise.
Early coverage of the war leaned on simplified frames, including Russian incompetence, imminent victory and decisive turning points. They provided provisional stories generated to satisfy intense public demand for clarity.
As the war evolved, however, those stories collapsed.
This did not mean the original reporting was malicious. It meant the narrative update cycle lagged behind the underlying reality. What analysts experienced as iterative learning, audiences experienced as contradiction.
The Acceleration Trap
This forces journalism into a reactive posture. Verification trails amplification, meaning accurate reports often arrive after the audience has already formed a first impression.
This inverts journalism’s historical role. Audiences encounter raw claims first and journalism second. When the two diverge, journalism appears disconnected from reality as people experienced it.
Over time, this produces a structural shift in trust. Journalism is no longer perceived as the primary interpreter of events, but as one voice among many, arriving late. Speed becomes a proxy for relevance. Interpretation without immediacy is discounted.
Although partisan bias certainly exists, it is insufficient to explain the systemic incoherence Americans are witnessing.
Can Journalism Adapt?
Institutions optimized for one tempo rarely adapt cleanly to another. Journalism is now confronting the risk that its interpretive cycle no longer matches the speed of the world it is trying to explain.
Its future credibility will depend less on accusations of bias or even error than the question of whether it can reconcile rigor with speed, perhaps by trading the illusion of early certainty for the transparency of real-time doubt.
If it cannot, trust will continue to drain. An institution that evolved to help society see is falling behind what society is already watching.
The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.
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