With Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy ushering us into a whole new season of media loathing and media self-loathing, New York Magazine’s July 25–August 7, 2016, cover story looks inward to investigate just how bad the industry really is. In interviews with more than 40 journalists and in a survey of 113 others, we asked everyone from producers at cable-news channels and reporters at legacy newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to digital editors at BuzzFeed what they think the media’s greatest faults are.
“Americans have hated their media for a very, very long time,” says literary editor David Wallace-Wells about the inspiration behind the project. “Basically every working journalist can quote Janet Malcolm saying the whole job is morally indefensible, but one of our researchers found James Fenimore Cooper bitching about the press way back in 1838. And people in the media seem maybe to hate the media most.” Wallace-Wells says something had started to feel different this year to many of the magazine’s editors, “and, as much as we loved arguing about it ourselves, what if we could actually invite the world to tell us? So we started making phone calls.”