Former Politico Owner Launches New Journalism Finishing School To Try And Fix All The ‘Wokeness’

I’ve noted more than a few times that the primary problem with U.S. journalism is the fact that most major media outlets are owned by out of touch billionaire brunchlords who genuinely don’t understand the modern media environment, can’t see their own gender, race, or class biases, and often have absolutely no earthly fucking idea what they’re actually doing.

You can see this very clearly at places like Politico, where political coverage often takes a feckless “both sides” approach to factual reality. This “view from nowhere,” as NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed it, presents everything from fascist insurrection to climate changes as a perfect symmetrical debate between two valid sides.

It’s a timidity and aversion to the actual truth, born from a fear of upsetting sources, advertisers, event sponsors, and those in power. And, because this kind of journalism is incapable of clearly calling out fascism and bigotry, it’s being broadly abused and exploited by authoritarians.

Current Politico owner Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no idea this broken media paradigm even exists, much less any inkling on how to fix it. The same appears to go for former Politico owner Robert Allbritton, who recently started a new journalism finishing school profiled last week in the Washington Post.

The underlying organization is called the Allbritton Journalism Institute. AJI in turn runs what they’re calling a “teaching hospital for journalism” dubbed NOTUS, or News of the United States. Journalists I know tell me NOTUS is doing some good work, though WAPO kind of buries a claim that the nonprofit may have been launched as a way for Allbritton to get back into media without violating his noncompete.

But the Washington Post report on the project raises a few red flags, beginning with a claim by Allbritton that he created the project because there apparently just aren’t any good journalists out there to hire:

“Allbritton believes there’s a dearth of good reporter candidates out there, and a need for the real-world training once provided by places like Politico, which he sold in 2021.

“Talking to a ton of senior-to-mid-level execs in media, the constant refrain is: ‘I can’t find great people,’” he said in an interview. “It’s really hard to hire good people.”

There’s actually an over-abundance of quality journalists out there thanks to record layoffs caused, in large part, due to rampant misspending and incompetence among the brunchlord set (see the Vice and The Messenger shitshows as just the latest examples). I’ve lost track of the number of phenomenally talented editors and journalists I know who have been shitcanned in recent years.

Later in the article, Allbritton starts to explain in detail precisely what he thinks is wrong with most modern journalists, and while he couches his language a bit, it starts to become pretty clear that his primary concern is all the damn wokeness:

“There was definitely a kind of a woke kind of shift that took place within newsrooms,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s radical. It’s not. But there’s some social-warrior believers in there. I’m not sure they use their voices, but definitely believers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have an opinion. But it does make it a little harder to get to the truth if you’re coming in there with either a liberal bias or a conservative bias.”

There’s some nice tap dancing there, but the use of “woke” and “social-warrior believers” (SJWs) as pejoratives indicates that the real thing Allbritton doesn’t like about modern journalism is all the damn class, gender, and race awareness. Albritton claims he wants a journalism finishing school that reflects “a variety of political ideologies,” and yet here’s the kind of folks WAPO says are getting fellowships:

“This year’s cohort of fellows is diverse and includes students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the news industry, including a fellow who attended a Christian college and one who served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army for seven years.”

Yes Christianity and the military, two woefully underrepresented segments of American society.

So, look, any money being doled into journalism is good. And I’m sure the NOTUS fellows are doing some decent work. I hope they’re being paid a living wage with high-end luxuries like health care and time off, and I also hope that this entire effort isn’t shuttered in six months after it’s revealed that Allbritton blew the entire budget on outsized compensation and lavish brand parties a la Sports Illustrated.

Here’s the thing that annoys me.

There’s an ocean of problems with journalism, but the idea that there’s just too damn much woke progressivism is utter delusion. U.S. journalism generally tilts center right on the political spectrum. It’s generally corporatist and pro-business to a comical degree. Often it’s too feckless to meaningfully critique wealth and power. Routinely it traffics in engagement-chasing distraction, not knowledge.

The tech press, in particular, operates basically as an extension of tech company marketing departments. There certainly is occasionally good journalism (ProPublica’s exploration of the Supreme Court, Reuters’ investigations into Tesla), but by and large the folks in charge of major U.S. media institutions are building a badly automated ad-engagement ouroboros for which the truth is a pretty distant fucking afterthought.

This all directly reflects the bias and interests of an out of touch billionaire extraction class that’s either blind to its own biases, or desperate to pretend they don’t exist. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and COVID there was some fleeting recommendations to the ivy league establishment media that we could perhaps take a slightly more well-rounded, inclusive approach to journalism.

In response, the trust fund lords in charge of these establishment outlets lost their fucking minds, started crying incessantly about young journalists “needing safe spaces,” and decided to double down on all their worst impulses, having learned less than nothing along the way. Reading Allbritton’s lamentations about the wokes you don’t really get the sense he learned much of anything from the voyage either.

There’s a reason U.S. journalism is falling apart. There’s a reason journalists are increasingly crafting their own newsletters or building smaller, journalist-owned news outlets. And (unless you’re a Matt Taibbi type looking to exploit the modern right’s bottomless victimization complex) it has very little to do with diabolical wokeism, or the handful of progressive voices begging for journalism that doesn’t suck.