"Perhaps the biggest problem in journalism is the cult divide between journalists and corporate owners"
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Auletta’s line lands like an insider’s diagnosis delivered without bedside manner: the real pathology isn’t shrinking newsrooms or fickle audiences, it’s a tribal split in the very institution that claims to arbitrate reality. Calling it a “cult divide” is a deliberate provocation. Cults don’t just disagree; they operate with different sacred values, different languages, different ideas of what counts as truth. Journalists are trained to treat independence as a kind of moral infrastructure. Corporate owners, especially in publicly traded contexts, are trained to treat everything as a line item that must justify itself.
The intent is not to romanticize the newsroom or demonize ownership, but to name the structural mismatch that keeps producing the same crisis in new outfits: editorial ambition colliding with business imperatives, then everyone acting surprised when trust erodes. The subtext is that many of journalism’s public failures are privately manufactured. When owners see journalism as “content” and journalists see the company as a necessary evil, the product becomes schizophrenic: hard-hitting investigations alongside traffic-chasing sludge, lofty mission statements alongside layoffs timed to quarterly earnings.
Context matters here: Auletta has spent decades reporting on media power, mergers, and the managerial logic of big institutions. He’s talking about an era where billionaires, conglomerates, and private equity increasingly shape what survives. The “biggest problem” isn’t a single bad actor; it’s governance. Until the people who pay for journalism and the people who practice it share a coherent definition of the job, the industry will keep fighting itself while telling the public it’s fighting for them.
The intent is not to romanticize the newsroom or demonize ownership, but to name the structural mismatch that keeps producing the same crisis in new outfits: editorial ambition colliding with business imperatives, then everyone acting surprised when trust erodes. The subtext is that many of journalism’s public failures are privately manufactured. When owners see journalism as “content” and journalists see the company as a necessary evil, the product becomes schizophrenic: hard-hitting investigations alongside traffic-chasing sludge, lofty mission statements alongside layoffs timed to quarterly earnings.
Context matters here: Auletta has spent decades reporting on media power, mergers, and the managerial logic of big institutions. He’s talking about an era where billionaires, conglomerates, and private equity increasingly shape what survives. The “biggest problem” isn’t a single bad actor; it’s governance. Until the people who pay for journalism and the people who practice it share a coherent definition of the job, the industry will keep fighting itself while telling the public it’s fighting for them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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