The Decay of American Journalism in a Disinformation Age

The media industry is just one American institution that’s been badly shaken. Its revival may be crucial to putting the world back together.

As a historian, I often have the opportunity to teach classes that speak to my research interests. I teach variety of courses on U.S. political history and immigration studies—a subject in line with my reporting background. However, I recently decided to bring together my love of journalism and history to teach a class I billed as “A History of Disinformation.”

Recently, as a visiting assistant professor of history at Oberlin College, I designed a course to ask a fundamental question: What is disinformation, and how long has it existed in American politics?

Disinformation is undoubtedly a hot topic in American politics. Since the Mueller Report’s findings on Russian disinformation campaigns in the 2016 election, scholars and pundits have spilled much ink addressing political disinformation amidst the rise of social media. Disinformation has existed as a political tool for centuries; as Richard Hofstader described in his landmark essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, disinformation—or the fear of it—has always been a staple of American political discourse and in other democracies like the U.S.

The past decade, however, has ushered in a new disinformation era – one where conspiracy theorist such as Alex Jones or demagogues like Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. develop wealth and power over the peddling of false narratives.

Yet the class is more than just about deception as a tool of political opportunists or hawkers of conspiracy theories. The subtext for the class is a history of American journalism. The history of recent disinformation cannot be understood without seeing how journalism has dramatically changed in the digital age. At its core, the question of disinformation is rooted in the movement of information and our faith in the institutions that disseminate it.

I have a deep interest in how history is presented to the American public—and journalism has often been a means by which historians offered lessons on the past to understand our present. Moreover, journalism offers scholars a unique opportunity to engage beyond the ivory tower and reach the public on important issues. At a time when the historical profession has been attacked by the far right, historians who can share their work with the larger public are urgently needed. For me, that means contributing to local journalism—and fighting the good fight to save it.

One of the challenges both shared by journalism and academia is the ways in which tech—specifically AI—has swiftly undermined the foundations of each profession.

Since the arrival of ChatGPT and other AI programs, historians have not only had to confront the reality that students sometimes use ChatGPT to complete their assignments, but also face the growth of disinformation such as deepfakes. If you were to ask a historian decades from now how to write about media discourse in the age of Trump, the pervasiveness of AI deepfakes on all social media platforms leads one to question which sources are valid and which are not.

American journalism, like education, has been shaken in the past decade by AI. Some of this can be attributed to the restructuring of the newspaper industry and choices made by media owners. Other aspects of the decline of American media originate from changes in technology and the advent of AI. But, most of all, what needs to be appreciated are the consequences of such changes. The rise of AI and deepfakes have not only produced a jaded public which believes that nothing can be trusted, it has led to a media market where conspiracy theorists and far-right media personalities have thrived. 

To some degree, this is what journalists and historians alike are trained to do: contextualize sources, decipher bias within records, and produce a fluent narrative of events. In some cases, journalism was influenced by media bias and corporate sponsorship. As historian Julia Guarneri argued in her 2017 book Newsprint Metropolis, several newspapers in Chicago ran articles in the 1910s that promoted products by sponsors—akin to “product placement” and “sponsored content.” Often because the newspaper relied on advertising for revenue, journalists faced the reality that writing a critical report on a company that........

© New Republic