Politics & Power Quote by David Talbot

“Wallpaper” is a savage, domestic metaphor: magazines as decor, not debate. David Talbot isn’t just complaining about bad writing; he’s naming a media ecosystem that’s optimized to be glanced at, not grappled with. Wallpaper is designed to disappear into the room. It’s aesthetic consensus. By saying “they’re all the same, all the same celebrities,” he sketches the commercial logic behind that sameness: celebrity is the safest universal solvent for attention, the one subject guaranteed to offend almost no advertiser and trigger almost no costly backlash. It’s journalism with its risk removed.

The line “abysmal time in American journalism” carries the weary authority of someone who’s watched a craft get hollowed out by consolidation, shrinking newsrooms, and the metrics tyranny of “what performs.” Talbot, a founder of Salon and an old hand of long-form reporting, is implicitly contrasting an earlier promise of magazines as agenda-setters with a present where they’re content pipelines. The repetition (“all the same, all the same”) isn’t rhetorical flourish; it mimics the numb scroll, the feeling of opening different covers and encountering the identical cultural script.

Still, he leaves a crack of light: “occasionally one story or two will pop out.” That verb matters. Good journalism, in this landscape, doesn’t arrive by institutional design; it erupts despite it. The subtext is both indictment and dare: the system rewards wallpaper, but the audience still recognizes a story with teeth when it breaks the pattern.