Why isn’t anyone covering this?
Semafor’s Max Tani on a common Twitter gripe
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Can someone tell me why no one has interviewed Max Tani?????—Kate
News looks like many things these days. It’s not just an article or TV segment, but a tweet from a creator, or a push notification, or even a fancam. The vehicle for news may change, but the root is the same: the reporters who sourced it. And yet, the distrust in media first stoked by the Trump administration has since become a bipartisan belief. Neither side seems to think the mainstream media is covering the right things.
This is the Roman Empire of Max Tani, a media reporter for Semafor, who has been valiantly using Twitter these past few weeks to push back against these narratives ahead of the election. Notably, the rise of people on the left claiming the mainstream media is not covering certain news events.
Bias in media absolutely exists, and the framing of stories and the voices outlets amplify can betray a slant. But the idea that stories are being flat-out ignored by the media en masse is more about our misunderstanding of modern media, Tani says, and is the fault of our algorithms, says I. In this conversation, Tani and I share our theories about this phenomenon, and why a distinctly Republican talking point has migrated left.
Can you describe in your words what this phenomenon that we're discussing is?
It's one of the most interesting consequences of the new, fragmented media landscape, that there's this large group of people at all times, during any major news event, who seem to be convinced of the fact that some other group of people or themselves are not seeing very much information about said news event, when the reality is that most of the time, if you think that it's big news, it's probably being covered in some way by a major news outlet. I think it's a consequence of the fact that news has become really optimized to reach or not reach very specific audiences, and there's fewer people than ever who look at a front page of something to give them a mix and a rundown of whatever the most important stories are of the day. They're being served stories kind of piecemeal or they're seeing them shared in a text message group, something like that. So a lot of times people are convinced that they're not seeing coverage of things that are indeed being covered quite a bit.
I feel like this has origins in the Trump era. Would you say it's gotten worse?
I think that it's worse now that most people get their news from different places and that stories don't go viral in the same way that they did eight years ago or whatever on Facebook. A lot of this is basically the consequence of internet news being served to people. So if they're not served it specifically, they are under the impression that it's not being covered. I think that's the one main thing, and the second thing is that for a while Facebook was one of the biggest ways that people got news. There were stories that did really well that were optimized to do incredibly well on Facebook. And so once Facebook got out of the news business, I think it increased news media fragmentation to the point that it siloed people even more. So people have become even more convinced that they are not seeing certain things that are being covered in different places, especially as news continues to be something that is distributed to people instead of that they seek out or browse in a kind of a casual way.
My theory is very similar, and then there's also this culture of how people behave online now. It's very passive and so you expect that everything you need to know is gonna get given to you and people will feel like it's the fault of something else when they don't get the news or are not being served something they want. At a certain point when you're like, “I'm not seeing anything about this,” you're kind of telling on yourself.
Right. Unless before you've tweeted you've searched the New York Times and every other major news outlet and digital news outlet and you still don't see it, it's a reflection of your feed. I think it works the opposite way too, it also convinces people that certain things are the world's biggest news stories
If you got your news only on Twitter, you would think the biggest story in the country today is the Timothée Chalamet look alike contest.
Yes. My dad [for instance] has not asked me what I think about the Timothée Chalamet look alike contest.
It does feel like no one is going into Google and typing the news item. Like, what this learned helplessness about consuming news? What's weird is that the idea of distrusting the media was really big in Trump's presidency on the conservative side, and it feels like recently the left has adopted that. It's a horseshoe theory kind of thing.
That's the thing that I'm particularly obsessed with, is the emergence of the distrust of legacy media outlets on the left. I have been really interested specifically in the idea that the media has not been covering Trump statements and comments and various, what these people perceive as, misdeeds. And that they have not been covering it with sufficient magnitude. I do think that that is something that is new and it's super interesting. I think it comes out of two specific things. I think the first thing that it comes out of is that there's a general feeling of dismay and frustration among people on the left who thought that they beat Donald Trump, and yet here he is again, he may be president again in a week. I think that group of people is looking for someone to blame. I think a lot of times those folks are partisan Democrats and some are less willing to blame people in the Democratic Party than they are members of the media. But it is a really interesting and unique phenomenon that I think has grown out of this election cycle. And I think the root of it is just general frustration at Donald Trump's endurance as a political force.
When people say the media, I'm curious who it is they're blaming. Like, is it the individual writer? Is it the editor or the owner?
One of the things that I think is part of it is just that media has changed so fast, at a rapidly increasing pace to the point that I think people don't really understand that if they are seeing a story somewhere or they know a piece of information and they're like, “Why isn't the media covering this?” The reality is, they have seen that piece of information and it has been delivered to them via media. It's this inability to grasp the way in which media has changed that tweets and videos and whatever piece of news that's reached somebody is media and that's just what it looks like now. It doesn't always look like a traditional evening news broadcast.
As far as the who to blame situation, there's two classes of people. There's the folks who are just generally mad at amorphous institutions and feel frustrated. And then there's folks who have specific gripes. You see this in particular directed at Maggie Haberman, right? The Times tries really, really, really hard to make her stuff as bulletproof and dry as possible. And yet you see people tweeting things calling her like “MAGA Haberman” and stuff.
I know people banging on about media literacy is so rote at this point. But whenever someone is killed, having worked in newsrooms, we know you can't immediately say "murdered." You can't confidently say that in an initial headline before there’s been an arrest, a trial, a conviction. But that's another common gripe, where people will be like "fixed the headline" and change it to "murdered." I understand what they're doing and why it can feel egregious, but it's mostly likely a legal issue and not a personal choice.
Right. It's like, people basically want you to put like, "and that's bad" at the end. There are conflicting desires among people who are like, “why is the media so biased in certain regards?” But there are also a lot of people who wish that the media would go further and would say, "It's a fact that Donald Trump is a fascist." It's a much more complicated thing to write if you are someone who's at a major mainstream media organization than it is if you are someone on the street or if you're a political figure or if you're not someone whose job really only exists to bring news to people.
Great interview!
Great interview, love the discussion around this growing phenomenon of fragmented media and passive audiences!