News Consumers Want Authenticity, Not Neutrality
Objectivity in journalism is a myth that normalizes fascism.
I was in Miami last week for the Knight Media Forum, a conference of journalists, civic leaders, and philanthropists who care about journalism’s role in uplifting communities and sustaining democracy.
One of the big topics this year was how Americans are replacing legacy media with news influencers who they view as more authentic. According to research by Pew, trust in national news has dropped 20 points since 2016 and the share of Americans who actively follow the news dropped from 51% to 36% over the same period. 1 in 5 U.S. adults regularly gets their news from influencers and that figure jumps to nearly 40% for Americans under the age of 30. Pew asked these folks why they gravitate towards getting their news this way.
Many cite each of the following as major reasons: Influencers help them better understand current events and civic issues (54%), they are quick in reporting on breaking news (54%), they are authentic (49%), and they offer different information from other sources (46%).
So, half of the tens of millions who get their news this way appreciate the contextualizing, authentic takes news influencers provide.
Journalism Acts In The Public Interest
I want to more broadly discuss this phenomenon by highlighting one of the speakers at the Knight Forum, Orlando Bailey, the executive director of Detroit’s Outlier Media. Though certainly not an online news influencer, Outlier represents exactly the type of newsroom behavior that we all want—journalism that is authentically connected to the community it serves.
Orlando told the Knight audience about an effort Outlier took to help its community. In 2024, a local data analyst wrote a blog post revealing that 2,400 former Detroit homeowners might be able to recover $20 million in tax foreclosure profits. The analyst worried the people who needed that information, the homeowners who were owed money, would never see it because the county government had no obligation to tell them. So he reached out to his local journalism outlet, Outlier Media, thinking maybe they could write an article about it. But Outlier did a lot more.
From a Nieman Lab piece on the effort:
Some in the newsroom began thinking about how they could contact these former homeowners at scale and get them the necessary information to file claims before the deadline. That kicked off a months-long community outreach initiative that complemented Outlier’s service journalism about how to file a claim.
Outlier’s team built a spreadsheet of all the people possibly owed money, trained over 200 phone bankers, and made more than 4,000 calls before the claim deadline expired. They ultimately reached 481 people who were collectively owed nearly $6 million dollars.
Journalism IS Activism
The old guard in journalism, the folks running the corporate newsrooms that Gen Z is abandoning, sees the work Outlier did to help its community and calls it activism, not journalism. Because the old guard values neutrality in its news product, not community outreach or involvement in the story.
But Outlier had information people needed and they made sure those people got it. That’s not activism. That’s what journalists call the Citizens’ Agenda—reporting that starts by asking what the community needs. There is nothing more disarmingly authentic than a reporter calling you up and saying, “Hey, there’s no catch here. You are owed money and I want to help you get it,” and then following through.
CEOs at corporate media outlets believe that a neutral presentation of the facts is respectable, that it is better to convey no viewpoint at all about the issues being covered. A view from nowhere, as journalism professor Jay Rosen calls it, is preferred to a view from somewhere.
But this type of thinking is precisely what’s causing corporate newsrooms to lose audience. As MAGA media tells its consumers what they want to hear (or what they want them to hear) regardless of factual accuracy, fact-based, mainstream journalism provides its audiences with a neutered rendering of reality, one treats an asymmetrical phenomenon—the Republican party’s lurch towards fascism—as a symmetrical, bothsides battle between two democratically-behaving political parties. It turns out normalizing fascism is bad for business.
Neutrality is the opposite of authenticity, it walls reporters off from speaking plainly about the very facts that they worked hard to gather. Journalists working under the outdated neutrality paradigm literally stop short of providing context. News influencers are stepping into the vacuum created by this mainstream timidity and are using the reporting of legacy media to draw helpful, fact-based, authentic conclusions that the old guard avoids.
At the local level, we want more Outlier Medias authentically working on behalf of our communities. And on the national level we want more New Republics, Mother Joneses, and Jacobins that proclaim their pro-democracy biases and political viewpoints while using factual, trustworthy reporting to back them up. News consumers see the folly in giving their precious attention to corporate newsrooms that pretend to have zero bias or agenda, that appear more concerned with chasing clicks and protecting the elite.
If you want to find public interest local journalism like Outlier in your own city, check out the Media and Democracy Project’s local journalism directory, linked in my bio. It exists to connect you with the outlets doing this kind of work where you live. And be sure to vote for this type of journalism with your dollars. Donate and subscribe. Non-profit newsrooms can’t exist without you.
And for national news with a bias towards providing fact-based context, get yourself a Bluesky account and head to my profile. I’ve created a list, The News, that features over 50 public interest newsrooms you can trust.
Here’s to healthier information.
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