America’s media, long accustomed to being the worthy arbiters of global democratic values, is having quite a moment.
Not to encourage any sort of schadenfreude, but for those of us who have often resisted the sweeping generalisations about our nations in the U.S Press—a strange mixture of superficial and supercilious—it’s hard to resist a few ‘told-you-so’ emotions.
The very public crisis in the Washington Post, a newspaper where I’ve had a column for several years, is just one example of how a mirror is being held up to a media industry long used to judging everyone else around the world.
Whether it is how Jeff Bezos – the billionaire promoter of the paper – upended editorial policy, multiple resignations or plummeting subscribers; the paper has had to confront issues its writers may have assumed were challenges of ‘third world’ newsrooms.
Today, American exceptionalism, if it ever existed, has been conclusively called out. Whether it is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reversing years of fact checking diktats to cosy up to the Trump administration, the sight of all the billionaire tech barons falling over themselves to win brownie points at Trump’s inauguration or the broken revenue models and grating partisanship of media platforms; America could well be any number of other countries its journalists usually write about.