WEDNESDAY: "Only when we share the same facts..."

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2025

But how can we hope to do that? Given the journalistic and cultural chaos within which our nation now flounders and flails, what sorts of problems would "brilliant [political / cultural] writing" surely have to address?

It's as we've noted in the past two days. In this interview with the New York Times, Tina Brown said that there surely must be some "brilliant writing" out there. But she said it can be hard to find, given all the dreck and the dross which "comes careening at you" under current arrangements.

Under the weight of current arrangements, we're not sure that any "brilliant writing" is actually out there! Consider Clark Hoyt's new essay in The Atlantic.

As part of a long journalistic career, Hoyt performed brilliantly in his three years as New York Times public editor, a stint which started in June 2007. As a tribute to ignoring water which has spilled over the dam, we won't revisit the long-overdue, aggressive critique he directed at one major New York Times columnist.

Hoyt is highly experienced and highly capable. That said, it seems to us that he skips a major beat in the key rumination with which he ends his new essay. The passage in question starts as shown, dual headline included:

Why Trump Gets Away With It
The institutional checks that got the country through Watergate are far weaker now.

[...]

Many explanations have been offered for how we got here, among them the hollowing-out of the middle class, which left millions of Americans angry and disillusioned with the political system and ready for a Trump to tear it down; a broad collapse of trust in virtually all institutions, including the news media; a president who stirs culture wars in an ever more polarized society, while diverting attention away from the threat he poses to democracy. For Trump, politics isn’t about principle or serious public policy. It’s entertainment—getting and holding attention through any means possible.

I’m not prescient enough to know if we will return to a healthier society with a properly functioning federal government. The most recent election results, which featured high turnout and led to Democrats sweeping into state offices in Virginia, New Jersey, and even Mississippi and Georgia, suggest that a backlash against Trumpism is under way. But one thing that my long career as a journalist tells me is that restoring civility and community will require rebuilding a trusted news system.

We need to rebuild "a trusted news system," Hoyt perhaps sensibly says. But as he continues directly, it seems to us that he blows past a very large obstacle which stands in the way of that goal:

Local media should be a particular focus. National media may have their problems with trust, but local news, where engagement with community and the larger world begins, is disappearing altogether. Over the past two decades, according to the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, nearly 40 percent of all local newspapers have shut down, leaving 50 million Americans with little or no reliable news about their communities. That includes Friday-night high-school football scores, official decisions at city-commission meetings, and data about local crime. The result is that people are disengaged from their communities. Politics is more polarized, voter turnout in local elections is lower, and fewer public officials are held accountable. Some initiatives are trying to fill the gap. The American Journalism Project, for example, gives grants to local nonprofit news organizations, helps communities start new outlets, and provides coaching for newsroom leaders.

Only when we share the same facts can we begin to have a healthy debate about what they mean and what should be done about them. And then, hopefully, we can start rebuilding the other institutions that have undergirded our democracy for nearly two and a half centuries, and that got us through the Watergate years...

We need to return to a world in which "we share the same facts," Hoyt says. But in that passage, Hoyt focuses on local media while blowing right past the enormous problem afflicting national media.

We refer to the so-called "democratization of media," and to the practice called "segregation by viewpoint." Almost surely, we will never return to a world in which Americans largely "share the same facts" as long as major media entities are devoted to the practice of preaching to one particular choir, while refusing to share the valid points being advanced by the other political tribe.

Also, Hoyt blows past the problem to which Brown herself seemed to allude:

Thanks to podcasts and web sites and blogs and the like, every nitwit and his best friend is now out there peddling content. As Brown seemed to suggest, people have a hard time knowing where to turn in the face of this blizzard of content.

Last night, at the start of The Five, the Fox News Channel's "recite-alike" hosts cranked out one factual misstatement after another. Viewers had no obvious way to know they were being misled. 

Tons of money are now being made by telling different groups of people only the things they long to hear. Misinformation is now big business, and it won't want to go away.

Brilliant writing will have to confront this huge institutional problem. Over here in Blue America, our stars tend to flee from this task.

In our view, Hoyt was superb in his stint at the Times. The leading authority on his career gives you the overview here.