Transcript: Ryan Zickgraf

My interview with the American journalist and Compact Magazine columnist

On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve spent much of the past year investigating the collapse of the news media and the decline in public trust. My guest on this week’s program argues that the industry is at a crossroads, but media bosses are unwilling to meet the moment, and seem determined to continue on the same trajectory — even if it means the death of their institutions.

Ryan Zickgraf is an American journalist and a columnist at Compact Magazine. His new essay is “Journalism’s Slow Death Threatens Democracy.”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: I was excited to read your latest column for Compact Magazine. In that piece, you write that the news business’s slow death spiral should alarm us across political divides. You outlined several crises that have converged to create a pretty dire moment. Walk us through the situation that newsrooms in America find themselves in right now.

RZ: The crisis that's getting a lot of attention right now is the business of news, which has been failing slowly for the last generation. In the last few years, it has hit a new low. The lack of ad dollars, the lack of subscriptions — and just capital in general being invested elsewhere — is causing a lot of layoffs in the industry and a lot of news outlets to shutter altogether. A lot of the places that we know on the web from the 2010s are gone, and a lot of the big outlets like The LA Times, NPR, all sorts of outlets nationally, are losing staff. We just don't have as much news as we did even a few years ago.

TH: You write in the piece that the media's big bosses seem unwilling to meet the moment. What do you mean by that?

RZ: I just mean that 2023 and then going into 2024 is a real crisis moment, I think, for the state of news. We should be rethinking a lot of the things that we do. Instead, I find that a lot of journalism's thinkers are relying on the same, you could call it progressive or liberal, take on how to adjust to the changing news landscape. 

A lot of it is [the argument] that the news has to get more diverse. Not the news itself, but the people that work on it — the reporters and the editors should be more diverse. And then also, that we should be more partisan, mostly towards Democrats. We should be more liberal. We should really tell the truth about Trump, which apparently we hadn't been fully doing for the last seven years. [Laughs] Now we have to really go after him. So there's this sort of obsession with these two sort of planks, to get the media back to where it was. I just don't think it's really working.

TH: I would agree. Let's unpack that. So, the diversity issue. You start with the diversity issue and you say that there is an “over DEIing” going on. What is that?

RZ: The DEI administrations that have popped up in the last five, 10 years — a lot of them actually started out with a point. A good point, in that the media was dominated by a lot of white guys like myself. There has been a correction to that since I've been a journalist, for 25 years now. The way that the media looks from when I started has definitely changed. A lot of it is for the better. 

But there's this obsession with what a lot of people will call “marginalized communities.” These progressive news organizations don't see a stopping point, necessarily, in DEI. Like, “Okay, we have a certain group that's represented and once we hit this goal, then we can sort of loosen that. We don't have to make sure that our hiring is just women or just people of colour.” We can sort of relax that.

But for a lot of these organizations, they don't know when to stop. As I mentioned in my column, there's no George Bush on the aircraft carrier doing mission accomplished. They're not like, “We did it.”  So, you have these progressive media organizations that are suddenly 75% women. Or they're hiring more than 70% people of colour. For all the talk about diversity, it's actually becoming less diverse than it was. These organizations have these DEI [administrations], they're not going to say, “Well, I'm not needed anymore.” These DEI executives aren't going to retire. So there's continued pressure on them to keep hiring. But what are you actually getting out of it?

TH: We just saw something from Neiman Lab showing that the masthead of The New York Times has a very high proportion of people coming from the Ivy Leagues. As we're diversifying more racially, which is a good thing, we're becoming less diverse in terms of class.

RZ: Another point I make in my column is that a disproportionate amount of the media is coming from certain big cities, New York City, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta. All of these cities are overrepresented in the media. Part of that is because local news itself is dying way faster than these national and regional publications. You and I used to rely more on local news to tell us what was going on in the world. These publications tended to be nonpartisan, for the most part, except for the editorial page. But what's happened, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, is that because local media has shrunk or died, regional and national media take more of the airspace. They're made up of people that tend to be Ivy Leaguers. They tend to live in these big cities. So what they report on tends to reflect their interests.

TH: Returning to the Trump point that you made a few minutes ago, and unpacking that, I just want to read a section from your piece, which was really striking to me: “Rather than calling for more trustworthy institutions reflecting a national consensus, too many in the mainstream are responding the same way they have since 2016 — by demanding more diversity.”  As we've just spoken to, “and more overtly anti-Trump rhetoric to match the combative tenor of right-wing media, the equivalent of cutting off their nose to spite their face. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, for example, has essentially called for news media's equivalent of martial law due to Trump's anti-democratic tendencies. To fix this, he says, you would have to call a halt to regular journalism, suspend your routines.” As you joke, “Can't we just call Trump a fascist liar in every headline?” Talk about that dynamic, particularly as we go into this new election season.