So the New York Times, along with all digital media companies, switched from a business model that was based on mass subscription, right?

Advertisements to a mass audience to a metric that's usually called engagement, which means how many people engaged with your content online, how many people shared

it, how many people commented on it, how many people posted it to Facebook, right? How many people

posted it to Twitter? Did it start to trend on Twitter? And we know that the most extreme

people are always the most engaged. And the New York Times has been very explicit about this.

And if the elites, if New York

Times is doing this, right, you can imagine what everybody else is doing. But it's very much about

generating that sort of emotional connection to the news as opposed to trying to get the

broadest audience, which means really pairing back on the emotions and delivering something

that's a lot less delicious to share on

Facebook, right?

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. If you're a regular listener

of this podcast, you've probably heard me and my guests talk about our frustration and

sometimes wye amusement

with political bias in the news media, especially the kind of elitist left-wing bias that's in

heavy rotation in the opinion and culture sections of big news organizations like the New York

Times, the Washington Post, and public radio. We often talk about the social movements

that are driving this trend, but we less often think about the practical reasons and bottom-line

root causes. That's exactly what my guest, Batya Ungar Sargon, explores in her new book,

Bad News, how woke media is undermining democracy. In this conversation, she explains

how journalism underwent a status revolution, with the job of reporter going from an almost

blue-collar profession to the province of the elite. She also explains how the digital era

...