Thread by @dcwoodruff

I ran out of different ways to say this a while ago, but these people are playing an entirely different game now, it very often works for them, it’s only going to get worse and journalism as we know it can either adapt or die

https://twitter.com/alex_burness/status/1550553891179139072

There used to be two basic guardrails on the ability of even fairly powerful political figures to abhor and ignore the press: 1) the soft power of norms, decorum, the shared desire to live in a free, informed, small-d democratic society, and more importantly,

2) the hard power of communications technology and the access to mass audiences that media organizations could offer to — or withhold from, or use against — powerful figures.

Increasingly, both of those guardrails are gone. Right-wing politicians are often no longer bothering to pretend they value the role of a free, independent, adversarial press — or, indeed, plenty of other democratic norms.

And (probably again more importantly) technology has evolved and these figures no longer *need* media outlets to access large audiences. They’ve instead built parallel, massively successful misinformation networks on TV, radio and the internet.

And again, this is working! They’re running circles around us. They’re eating our lunch. Cory Gardner danced around the ring for an entire six-year Senate term and the press never laid a glove on him.

As always, I guess this is all just to say it’s completely insane to go on believing that the news media’s *function in society* is remotely the same as it was 30 years ago, and accordingly that its fundamental forms and methods should remain unchanged.