Hamilton Nolan - It's Not Looking Great

The slow assassination of the free press.

Hamilton Nolan
Jan 05, 2025



I worked for a media outlet that was robbed of its credibility once. It was, at one time, called Gawker Media. It was successful because of its almost deranged commitment to editorial freedom. The company allowed writers to say anything they wanted (as long as it was true), which attracted good writers, which spawned good publications, which attracted devoted readers, which allowed the company to make money. It’s social value and its economic value were both derived from its commitment to letting its journalists speak their minds.

Then, in just a few short years, the company was gutted and left as a hollow shell of itself. This did not happen because Hulk Hogan won a $140 million lawsuit that bankrupted the company; that was just the precipitating event. Gawker Media, which had always been independently owned, was sold to Univision, and then sold again to a private equity firm. Univision cared a little bit about editorial credibility, and the private equity firm cared not at all. They larded down all of the sites with ads to the point of unreadability; they shut down the left wing political site where I was working and laid us all off; they tried to tell my colleagues at Deadspin what they could and couldn’t write about, causing the entire staff to quit and reassemble elsewhere; and they incompetently meddled in the editorial operations of the company enough to cause almost all of the longtime writers to drift away. They were left with the brand names, but none of what had made Gawker Media successful or worth reading.

The private equity goons did not eviscerate the company because of their political beliefs. They did it because they only valued making money. This is the standard incentive in most industries, but in journalism, it has the effect of turning a publication into shit. Journalism is not a business that responds well to the usual American capitalist imperative to treat your customers as victims to be tricked and sucked dry. The overall health of the free press is therefore a handy barometer to tell how the balance of power between humanism and cutthroat capitalism stands at any given moment in history.

Right now, that balance is tilting in the bad direction. In the past few months, the billionaire owners of both the LA Times and the Washington Post quashed anti-Trump presidential endorsements. In LA, Patrick Soon-Shiong has made it clear he intends to meddle in, at least, the opinion section to make it more right wing. Jeff Bezos must be a bit more circumspect with the Washington Post because of its institutional heft, but it is equally clear that he has concluded that nothing about his newspaper is worth pissing off Trump, who could retaliate against Bezos’ other, real business. Yesterday the Post’s longtime editorial cartoonist Ana Telnaes resigned after a cartoon mocking Bezos and other billionaires was killed by her editor. The editor, David Shipley, claimed the cartoon was just too repetitive, but Telnaes, who has been at the paper long enough to know, said it was the first time in her career that she’d had a piece rejected “because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.”

We’re not really on the slippery slope at this point. We’re sliding. The only choice is when to jump off. What Telnaes did was heroic. Most journalists, regular people who need jobs to live, would (for good reason) think long and hard about quitting their jobs when they are unlikely to be able to land a comparable one. The important takeaway here, though, is: This is how it happens. This is how nations decline. You don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt strongman states where everything is kind of a scam and everyone is hustling to please the gangster in charge. That, my friends, is the path we are on here.



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