When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced final week that his firm can be ditching its fact-checkers, he left little ambiguity round his causes for the change. “After Trump first obtained elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a risk to democracy,” Zuckerberg stated in a video. “We tried in good religion to handle these considerations with out turning into the arbiters of reality. However the fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed extra belief than they’ve created, particularly within the U.S.”
Zuckerberg claimed he began Fb to “give folks a voice” and felt it was necessary to “shield free expression,” however lately “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor increasingly.” It was a canny alternative for a wrongdoer, because the CEO sought to justify an immediately controversial determination. For years, the media has been a preferred punching bag, however these days the time period “legacy media” has turn into downright poisonous. It usually interprets as an alternative to “geriatric media,” “irrelevant media,” or worse.
Every disappointing flip from an entrenched journalist as of late is an opportunity to disavow the whole apparatus. “‘Legacy media’ is extra of a pejorative now than it ever has been,” says Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, media critic, and writer, most not too long ago, of Magazine.
“Legacy media” has not too long ago been blamed for all the things from covering up Biden’s decline to memory-holing January 6. As Elon Musk is fond of claiming lately, “You don’t hate the legacy media sufficient,” and it “must die.” Even Taylor Lorenz, who left a high-profile place on the Washington Put up final fall to launch her personal publication, User Mag, agrees with Musk on this level, if on little else. As she instructed The New Yorker not too long ago, “Legacy media sucks; it’s crumbling, and, by the way in which, I’m going to bop on the grave of a whole lot of these locations.”
When legacy media turned legacy media
The time period “legacy media” first entered the zeitgeist at first of the digital media period. Jarvis remembers utilizing the time period within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, when he labored as an editor for the web arm of Advance. As information retailers first started to determine an web presence aside from their print incarnation, and in style early blogs just like the Drudge Report started to emerge, they confronted an uphill battle to being taken significantly. Print and broadcast media have been extensively thought-about reputable; something printed solely on-line would possibly as properly not have been printed in any respect. In line with Jarvis, the “legacy” label got here from a want to reframe this distinction.
“As a result of legacy media was sneering at us, we sneered again at them,” he says. “It was our manner of claiming, ‘You’re outdated farts.’”
Legacy media encompassed print, TV, and radio—in all places aside from the white-hot on-line world. By then, conventional retailers now not held a monopoly on reputable journalism. If a weblog like Drudge Report may publish a scoop that shook the world—the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—the New York Occasions and its friends must share their luster with unprinted media. It paved a path for an period when “new media” retailers reminiscent of BuzzFeed News could win a Pulitzer.
But when legitimacy may now come from any nook of the web, maybe it may be stripped away from any nook of the media’s outdated guard.
When legacy media turned “pretend information”
The 2016 election was plagued all through by viral hoax stories, the overwhelming majority of which have been both pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. (Many of those circulated, it have to be famous, through Facebook.) After the election got here rampant speculation that each one the pretend articles had helped Trump win. Quickly sufficient, nevertheless, the president-elect began using the term “fake news” to wave away unflattering tales about himself. By reclaiming the time period, and making use of it as an alternative to tales his supporters have been to dispute or ignore, Trump successfully shut down the sooner narrative. Within the course of, he additional fractured what might be thought-about reputable information.
Trump’s supporters rapidly glommed onto the president’s terminology. By 2018, in accordance with a Gallup survey, 4 in 10 Republicans thought-about correct information tales that solid a politician in a destructive gentle to at all times be “pretend information.” Their mistrust prolonged far past so-called hit items on Trump, although, coalescing into an ambient hostility towards “mainstream media” or “MSM.” At that time, the time period “legacy media” had solely simply began to bear its present weight.
Pejorative utilization on X appears to have an uptick towards the top of Trump’s first time period—on each side of the aisle. Former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, as an example, went from pitting legacy media against new media in 2012 to casting it as Trump’s antagonist all through 2020; in the meantime, Dan Pfeiffer, a cohost of the left-leaning Crooked Media’s podcast community, tweeted in 2019 that legacy media “cared extra about showing balanced than really informing the general public,” which lent a “structural political benefit” to Republicans.
These cases foreshadowed a fast-approaching future the place disregard for legacy media can be a bipartisan situation. Legacy media turned both synonymous with pretend information or with an lack of ability to correctly adapt to a political local weather the place half the nation perceived it as pretend information. Over the following 4 years, haunted by misinformation flashpoints just like the arrival of COVID and the January 6 riots, many on the left turned outraged at how legacy media covered Trump’s political comeback, whereas many on the suitable cheered on the candidate’s pointed rejection of legacy media throughout 2024’s so-called podcast election.
Who owns legacy media
It’s unclear what formally counts as legacy media anymore. Do publications want two or extra centuries underneath their belts to qualify? Is the Drudge Report, which turns 30 later this yr, thought-about legacy media? The Week not too long ago lumped Vox into the class, regardless that Vox is barely 13 years outdated. (Vox’s chief rivals within the vanguard of latest media—BuzzFeed Information and Vice Media—both folded during the Biden period.) The official definition might fluctuate, however legacy media now appears to imply “any vaunted information group many individuals are mad at.”
Another excuse folks are usually mad at legacy media is due to who owns it. Non-public fairness companies have been on a tear shopping for up newspapers all through the twenty first century, growing their share of the business from 5% in 2001 to 23% in 2019. Hedge funds reminiscent of Alden International Capital will purchase and then gut distinguished native papers together with the Chicago Tribune, leaving information customers to query their editorial course thereafter. That skepticism round who owns legacy media has solely ramped up not too long ago, after the Washington Put up and Los Angeles Occasions quashed their endorsements of Kamala Harris for president simply earlier than final fall’s election.
In line with Jarvis, the time period’s current reputation as an insult can also owe one thing to its utility for anybody rooting in opposition to the institution, or in opposition to establishments normally.
“Legacy media implies entitlement,” he says. “You’ve got a legacy, so that you’re just like the nepo child of media. You inherited this place of prominence moderately than having earned it.”
The time period now appears to hold the identical stigma as legacy admissions at Ivy League colleges, one among standing quo-enforcing privilege. However villainizing retailers that have been grandfathered into prominence doesn’t simply imply praising worker-owned media outlets like Defector and 404 Media, whose creators constructed them from the bottom up—it confers one thing like heroism on roughly each data supply that wasn’t borne into print. It valorizes a pool that features the fervently pro-Trump One America Information Community, varied substacks, podcasts, and, not less than in accordance with Musk, “you”—as in anybody who makes use of X.
The new “new media”
As Zuckerberg’s dismissal of fact-checking suggests, some tech CEOs now view social media because the prime various to conventional journalism and legacy media. They’re not the one ones both. A legion of TikTok customers additionally appear to view it that way, trusting their favourite web personalities to maintain them knowledgeable.
As legacy media and new media cede floor to what is perhaps termed the new new media, Elon Musk has aggressively latched onto legacy media as a target. All through his tenure at X, he has deprioritized links to outside articles whereas terraforming the house into a house for citizen journalists. Simply final week, throughout a keynote at CES, X CEO Linda Yaccarino hinted at making a information portal for the platform and compensating its newbie reporters.
“The way forward for information will not be legacy media,” Yaccarino stated. “Legacy media information has turn into virtually like a fan service to be sure you’re chatting with a distinct segment viewers to satisfy your price range.”
As People of all stripes turn into fed up with both a facet of legacy media or the nebulous class altogether, its survival has come into query. Audiences have shrunk, and so have revenues alongside them. In an ever-shifting digital panorama the place a shift in Facebook’s news algorithm can have huge penalties, media has turn into a particularly powerful enterprise mannequin to maintain. Layoffs have ramped up lately, with more than 500 journalists laid off final January alone, and layoffs hitting the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Vox simply final week. (The latter for the second time in as many months.)
On the daybreak of 2025, it appears neither farfetched nor alarmist to think about a world with no Washington Put up or another once-invulnerable outlet. Legacy media is flailing inside what The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel memorably dubbed “the choose-your-own-adventure actuality” of infinite information assets. In chaotic moments like the continued L.A. wildfires, nevertheless—moments the place readers urgently want dependable data—the retailers with boots-on-the-ground reporting, vigilant fact-checking, and a number of ranges of enhancing proceed to show their unbelievable worth.
Now, these information hubs simply need to discover a approach to show worthwhile (and reliable) sufficient to outlive being the dinosaur boogeyman of our present data ecosystem. As decision-makers at venerable publications troubleshoot and evolve into new varieties, the legacy of the business’s lengthy historical past is at stake.