By now, it’s a familiar and undisputed story. Journalism was once the profession of working-class people, unglamorous and interested in just reporting facts. Then came Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein in the 1970s. Journalism was suddenly considered sexy. The profession became overrun with elites who badly slanted their stories to push the narrative of liberalism. As a result, they lost readers. And now the legacy media are dying.
It’s all true. Still, in 2024 we seem to have reached a dramatic tipping point where the far-left Fourth Estate finally comes crashing down. Sports Illustrated is shutting down. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are losing millions every week and laying off reporters. CNN has no audience. Pitchfork, Jezebel, Gawker? Toast.
Just consider: In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned largely as the result of the reporting in the Washington Post. In 2024, nobody takes the Washington Post seriously. The modern liberal media reign lasted 50 years.
Still, it can be constructive to note what went wrong, and how easily the media could have helped themselves. In my experience, it came down to one word: monkeyfishing.
In 2001, a man named Jay Forman wrote a piece for the liberal website Slate called “Monkeyfishing.” It described a trip Forman said he took to Florida’s Lois Key with a “monkeyfisherman.” The monkeyfisherman, wrote Forman, casts a fruit-baited fish line onto the island where research monkeys were kept. A monkey takes the bait and is then pulled into the water.
“Monkeyfishing” was almost instantly revealed to be fake. Jack Shafer, the Slate editor who approved, edited, and ran the story, admitted that as soon as it went up, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal and others “gouged huge holes” in the piece.
Here’s the thing: I could have prevented “Monkeyfishing.” When Slate launched in 1996, I emailed Shafer asking to contribute. I was freelancing for the New York Press and getting good reactions to my stuff. Yes, I was conservative — a popular piece I had written was called “Confessions of a Right-Wing Rock Fan” — but this would be a plus because Slate was liberal and I could offer an entirely new audience.
Shafer rejected my offer, using profanity to describe my writing. Like other media liberals, he could not or would not comprehend that hiring a conservative could provide balance, drive traffic, and offer a safety valve against stories that were crazy. He would have been helping himself.
In rejecting me, Shafer signed his own autopsy. Had I gone to Slate, I could have prevented “Monkeyfishing” because like anyone else outside of the East Coast bubble, I had common sense. The story sounded absurd. On top of that, my father was a top editor at National Geographic. I knew a lot about monkeys. There was no way monkeyfishing was a thing. At the first editorial meeting where it came up, I would have loudly announced that the story was surely bogus. I would have insisted on proof.
It took Shafer and Slate several years and an investigation by some journalism students at Columbia University in 2007 for them to admit as much. Failing upward, Shafer went on to become the media critic for Politico.
In a recent analysis, Shafer argued there’s no crisis in journalism: “Yes, newspapers have contracted and laid off staff. Yes, more than a quarter of all U.S. newspapers (daily and weekly) have folded over the past 15 years. Yes, newspaper advertising revenue dropped 25% from 2019 to 2020. Yes, 42 of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers no longer publish daily. And yes, as you are well aware, the Washington Post has just announced 240 voluntary buyouts — nearly 10% of its staff — to correct for its unmet ‘overly optimistic’ business projections. Yet, the heart still beats.”
Shafer claimed that “the heart still beats” because of “the willingness of subscribers” to keep the Washington Post going.This is false. The Washington Post has lost 500,000 subscribers since 2020. It is being kept alive by owner Jeff Bezos.
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Two months later, Shafer — wrong again — changed his tune, writing in a new column that there was no way to stop “the newspaper death spiral.” He even defended Bezos: “After a decade of supporting and expanding the paper, Bezos must fear that his entire newspaper investment will be swept out to sea. That’s not fearmongering. Newspaper trend lines are cratering and may prove to be too steep for Bezos’ tastes.”
Fifty years is a decent run. Still, had the liberal media not walled itself off from the rest of America, they could have made it a century. That’s no monkey business.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author ofThe Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi.He is also the author ofGod and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators,andA Tremor of Bliss.
