Is the Media Alright?

LARB Radio Hour presents excerpts from the February 2025 live discussion and podcast taping on the current challenges facing the media.

By Eric Newman, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, Leslie Berestein Rojas, Oscar GarzaMarch 24, 2025

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

TODAY, WE FACE a watershed moment in the American media landscape. Between the breakdown of traditional journalistic conventions and standards, the rise of conservative stakeholders, and the addition of social media figures as “trusted” news sources, the foundation of media as we know it is crumbling before our eyes.

On February 21, 2025, our signature podcast LARB Radio Hour took the stage at a private home in Baldwin Hills to record a live discussion on the current state of the media. For this conversation, Radio Hour hosts Eric Newman and Kate Wolf, along with LARB’s editor in chief Medaya Ocher, were joined by veteran journalists Leslie Berestein Rojas and Oscar Garza to interrogate these trends and explore their implications for the future. The discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

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KATE WOLF: We’re all seeing unprecedented threats from the current administration to the media. We’ve seen a barrage of online threats, threats of imprisonment. We’re seeing more frequent libel lawsuits, restrictions of press access. Just today the AP lost access because they deemed to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of Mexico” instead of the “Gulf of America.”

There are funding cuts to nonprofits because the FCC is now going to be run by the current administration. There’s also censorship in terms of the bill that passed even before Trump came into office, that people could lose funding if they’re a “terrorist” organization, which means only just calling the genocide in Gaza a genocide, and standing up for the rights of Palestinians.

At the same time, the problem is also coming from inside the house. The call is coming from within the house right now. That’s where we should start in talking about how we got to this place, where some of what’s happened to the media is not just from the current administration. Clearly, there’s a degradation that has led to this consolidation of right-wing power, and part of the reason we’re here is because of what has happened to the power of the press. It’s death by a thousand cuts, I’m sure, but I would be interested, just to start: Leslie and Oscar, what have you noticed in these few years that you’ve been working in media? How have things changed just in a kind of experiential way that you can both speak to?

OSCAR GARZA: I want to say a couple of things quickly, Daya, about being a nonprofit, except that hopefully nobody’s threatening to throw out [LARB’s] fundraising completely.

MEDAYA OCHER: Well, that’s true, yes. But I can speak to that more at length later—the threat for nonprofit internet magazines is really intense.

But I want you to answer the question first. Then we can talk about it.

OG: To your question, “is the media alright?” The short answer is no. But, you know, hope springs eternal. I think the resourceful and dedicated journalists will continue to do their work. Where they do it and how they do it is a big question. That’s kind of up in the air.

The thing that we’ve seen in the last few years was The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, and others being bought by entrepreneurs who initially were thought to be the saviors of these newspapers. Marty Baron, who is the former editor of The Washington Post, is a former colleague of mine at the L.A. Times, and I remember having dinner with him in Washington, DC, right after Trump was first elected. It was like three or four months into that first administration, and Marty already looked like he had been through the ringer.

But he said that they were just going to do their job. They did, and they did it remarkably well. If you have not read Marty Baron’s book, it’s really, really good. It came out a couple years ago, mostly about his time at the Post, and Jeff Bezos was really supportive in that first period.

And then, you know, the same thing with, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who was believed to be the savior of the L.A. Times. Of course, in due time, they showed their colors as businessmen. It’s hard to say where that’s going to go, with both of those newspapers. I worked there for 15 years, and I still have colleagues and friends at the L.A. Times. They are really good, dedicated journalists, but they’re as demoralized as they’ve ever been. They’ve been working for three years without a union contract, even after the paper agreed to recognize the union. No meaningful negotiations from the owners.

LESLIE BERESTEIN ROJAS: Yes, people are demoralized throughout the industry. We both teach young, rising journalists. So, what do we tell them? Sometimes it’s tough to give an answer but I say, “Don’t go away.” Especially right now, with this administration, there’s a lot against us.

ERIC NEWMAN: Another thing I wanted to talk about is the dramatic changes in how and where people get their news. There are some astounding Pew research stats: 54 percent of US adults get their news from social media. A full third of those respondents receive their news from Facebook or YouTube. How has that shift changed the news business? Has it changed how your students are taking it up today?

OG: Institutions, like the L.A. Times, invest a lot into marketing and social media distribution. Everyone consumes their news in their own ways, figuring out what your pattern is, what you’re going to do next on a daily basis, and where you’re going to go on a daily basis. Those habits, I think, are hard to change, so once you go down a road, you tend to stay on that road in terms of the information you get. Yeah, I didn’t know the numbers were that high, but that is disconcerting. Facebook in particular—is there a bigger weasel on this earth than Mark Zuckerberg? I don’t think so. He’s completely spineless.

KW: Elon Musk, no? Just slightly worse.

OG: He’s in a league of his own. The other problem is that these social media companies are not fact-checking anymore, basically. It’s just this black hole of information, and often bad information. You’d like to think that right-minded people would see the light.

KW: I’m curious about the L.A. Times, because so much of what’s going to happen in Los Angeles is being interfered with by Patrick Soon-Shiong. The paper has become a mouthpiece for developers. Beyond his larger national interest and his support of Trump, the L.A. Times will be a part of how redevelopment happens, and you already see him trying to take down Karen Bass. To go back to the questions around corporate ownership—is it just the opinion sections that are being meddled with? Or do you think this is actually suppressing news stories? The Chandlers used to own the Times and a lot of the same thing was happening in the 1950s. It’s not like this has never happened before.

OG: I teach a pretty small cohort of graduate journalism students, and most of them are not from L.A. or California, so I wanted them to really understand the city. I had them read a chapter from a Joan Didion book, about Harry Chandler, who was the son-in-law of the founder of the L.A. Times. Chandler, in the 1920s and ’30s, used the newspaper as his mouthpiece to entice voters to vote for the passage of the aqueduct, to bring water down to Southern California. There’s a long history of L.A. Times publishers interfering.

LBR: We know that this is not just at the L.A. Times. At every newspaper, stories depend on your audience, but politics are also important.

EN: This past year, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post announced that they were not going to endorse a presidential candidate. That was seen by many as bet-hedging, as not wanting to be on the wrong side of the incoming administration. Then we saw all those tech guys on the inauguration stage—men worth billions and billions of dollars lining up behind the administration.

Is there a way in which some of these very powerful forces are going after the media as one more level of control in a democratic society?

LBR: We’ve seen it with Twitter already, right? A company that shares and disseminates information.

EN: Which is a source of news.

KW: And is now one of the larger sources for people. More than half of Americans from the 18–29 age range get their news from social media.

OG: I’m a little verklempt.

EN: What threats does this type of increased corporatization and consolidation pose to investigative reporting?

OG: Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong did not buy those newspapers because they wanted to preserve journalism. They saw them as any businessman would. They saw them as an opportunity, some way to create synergy with everything else they’re doing.

So far, I don’t think you’ve seen a huge decrease in that kind of work, certainly not at The New York Times. I don’t think you’ve seen a decrease in that work at the Post or the L.A. Times. On the contrary, they are leaders in investigative journalism. There are newspapers all over the country that have done really wonderful work, like The Philadelphia Inquirer, so I think that kind of work is going to be okay.

The decrease in the number of people who are consuming it—that’s a bigger issue. One of the rays of hope is that the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation are among some philanthropists who have started to fund local, small, nonprofit news operations. There are probably at least four, if not closer to a half dozen, in Southern California. They’re small operations, but they’re doing really good work. They’re really looking at what the Times is not doing, and they’re saying, “Where can we fill in these gaps?”

LBR: [Some of these foundations] also just announced a partnership with newsrooms for more investigative journalism and resources. The hope is that there is going to be a recognition that this is one thing that we can provide.

MO: Could you explain what these organizations are? What is the difference between The New York Times, or The Washington Post, and ProPublica and other nonprofit organizations? What is the distinction between a nonprofit and a traditional newsroom?

OG: Some of these nonprofits are geography-based. There’s the Boyle Heights Beat, which has actually existed for a few years in Boyle Heights. There’s L.A. Taco—though I’ve always had a huge problem with that name. Only because they do food journalism and they do news journalism, and I’ve always thought it was a little difficult to take them seriously with that name. That’s my new crusade.

LBR: It started out as food, but it changed.

KW: We’re called “LARB,” so I can’t really argue.

OG: There’s an alliance now of these small news operations. They’re sharing news and they’re sharing stories to magnify the reach. Los Angeles Public Press is fairly new. It was started by—and this is a kind of smart entrepreneurship that is going to happen—a former colleague of ours at KPCC, a young reporter, Matt Tinoco. Increasingly, these operations are taking up the gap left behind by the demise of LA Weekly and the death of alternative weeklies, pretty much around the country. LA Weekly—I think it exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.

KW: It’s owned by right-wing cannabis businesspeople. It’s really sad.

OG: Maybe it’s not as high on the list, but the thing that concerns me about what’s been lost is arts and culture reporting and journalism. The LA Weekly, in its heyday, was a remarkable publication. These new start-ups are really focusing on news rather than culture. That’s why what LARB does is really important in terms of books and literary coverage.

KW: It’s all of a piece. Free expression is under attack. Anything that diverges from their program is threatening.

OG: This isn’t like last time. Last time, there were guardrails and people were working overtime trying to keep their car on the road. That’s not the case now. He’s only going to fill his cabinet and his staff with loyalists. There is, even still, a sense of how bad can it get?

KW: We’ll find out. Leslie, I’d be curious to hear from you. Do you think it’s a failure of the press if these stories are published and no one cares? I mean, it’s not like there hasn’t been years and years of reporting on what Trump has done. Why didn’t people take it seriously? Does that have to do with the way people at-large, or a certain percent of the country, see the press?

LBR: We were talking earlier about flooding the zone. I think we’re really dizzy. There are so many floods coming at us and a lot of them are very sensational. Just yesterday, we were all up in arms about a photo of Trump wearing a crown, like a king. We get so much information coming at us right now, but we’re not really paying attention to the real things that are going on.

During the last administration, there was constant noise about things that weren’t really happening. There were a lot of headlines like “We’re Going to Deport Everybody, and Build This Big and Beautiful Wall,” and it was everywhere.

It was all over Fox News, it was all over social media. But the real changes that were taking place were very radical, right? There were changes that were being posted to the Federal Register that were taking place that didn’t get those flashy headlines, because we were distracted by the flood.

I think one thing that we as an industry can do, even in a limited manner, is to try to parse out those more important things that are taking place, as opposed to all the horror that keeps getting thrown at us every day.

EN: We live in a dopamine-saturated culture right now. What you’re talking about, flooding the zone, is one strategy, but it is also true that, because of our thoroughly digitized lives, you are constantly being pinged or asked to do something.

I’m guilty of this. When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things I do is scroll through Instagram Reels. How do you get a story that matters, something that is very unsexy, something that is procedural, bureaucratic, but actually matters a great deal? How do you cut through the noise, if you even can? And how are your students navigating how to tell the stories that matter in an era when we seem to have no attention span?

LBR: One of the challenges a lot of reporters have, not just the young ones but the veteran ones too, is that you’re pressed for time. There’s not a lot of bandwidth because we are having to turn out a lot of things. You do a lot of things, not just a couple or three stories a week, and so you have to do this all piecemeal.

EN: And not just text. Reporters are now asked to produce videos, to produce podcasts. Not that there’s anything wrong with a podcast, of course.

LBR: Doing it is one challenge, but the other challenge is, who is going to read it? Is it going to get drowned out because there’s just too much?

OG: We all know what the defined audiences of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are. And newspapers are pretty similar. Newspapers have an identity and history—and in the case of the L.A. Times, they overcame some pretty dubious things in their history. The woman who resigned as the editor of the opinion section of the Times said, “We’re a liberal newspaper.” She didn’t make any bones about it. What they’re doing, especially with their editorials, is making sure that there’s an immediate alternative view available.

EN: So it’s like this choose-your-own-adventure thing. Social media does this to us all the time, because that’s how the algorithm is learning what you want, and it’s going to provide you with that worldview. If I lived only in the world of my social media, I would think that the world is 90 percent gay, and that everybody else was also in Palm Springs this past weekend.

OG: Apparently, it’s only 10 percent.

KW: Are you sure? What was the truth meter on that one?

EN: So much of our culture right now runs on vibes—oh, I don’t like that, that doesn’t match the narrative I want, so therefore I don’t want to engage with that. We only want confirmation of what we believe, and this is a really difficult thing for reporters, who are out there to tell not the story the way you think it is but the story as it actually is.

OG: I’m sorry to fixate about the L.A. Times, but I think there’s a real mystery here that no one has written about well. Can someone explain how a paper can go from being successful to struggling? Social media has a lot to do with it, but that doesn’t explain it all. There’s something else going on over here. Some of it has to do with history, and the fact that there are 88 municipalities in L.A. County. Along with social media, there is this closing-the-ranks about where you live, as if you should only care about where you live.

About 12 years ago, there was a little bit of talk about the L.A. Times becoming a nonprofit. David Geffen was kicking the tires of the paper around that time. There aren’t a lot of nonprofit newspapers in the country, but there are some. I don’t know that the Times has a valid future unless they become a nonprofit.

KW: How much do you think it would cost to buy the L.A. Times? Because we’re going to start tonight, guys. Would Patrick even sell it? He paid $500 million or something—we don’t know—but is that the price of a newspaper these days?

OG: Yeah, probably still. I mentioned that we still have a subscription to the paper. It is so expensive. It’s crazy. Does anybody else get the paper daily? Only me?

KW: I’m an online subscriber.

OG: Well, I tell my students I still get the newspaper at home every day. Think about how ludicrous that process is, right? There’s this whole machinery that happens to get the news together, then it gets sent to this printing press, then it gets printed, then people in trucks come and pick it up, and then they come, and they throw it on your doorstep. By the time you get it, that news is, what, 12 hours old?

KW: Might as well be 12 years.

MO: Let’s take some questions from the audience.

KW: We’ll take two questions. And they must be questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: For me, one of the most interesting developments in this election cycle is Gen Z’s shift towards the right wing. It seems like a lot of that has been driven by their media consumption habits, and specifically podcasts. What does mainstream journalism have to compete with Joe Rogan, and does that require them to abandon certain norms? Try to become more entertaining?

OG: There’s been some pretty good reporting since the election about the Democratic Party being really at a deficit in that regard, having young voices to appeal the way that Joe Rogan and others do. I hope that there are people in the party who are trying to figure that out.

There’s a lot of disillusionment among Gen Z. I have a 29-year-old son who, I know he didn’t vote for Donald Trump, but I don’t know if he voted for Kamala Harris either. And part of me didn’t want to know.

LBR: There is a lot of disillusionment with the Democratic Party among Gen Zers. It’s seen as not left enough. So where does that leave all the young people?

I mean, you also mentioned podcasts. Those personality-driven podcasts just do really, really well. You have a lot of left-wing podcasts, but Rogan just does really well, so …

OG: A lot of that on both sides, though, is also speaking to the converted. The difference with what happened with Republicans was that they reached people who weren’t voting. Like young men who aren’t voting, who hadn’t been voting. That made a huge difference.

Short answer? The Democrats have to figure that out. And they haven’t figured it out yet.

KW: Is that the media’s responsibility, to be more entertaining, to become cults of personality? I personally don’t think so. That’s not their responsibility, and they should uphold standards.

OG: It wouldn’t hurt them, I think, especially on the culture side. There were so many reasons why the vote on the Democratic side happened the way it did. They’re going to have to try a lot of different things next time around, you know, and see what sticks. Something’s got to change though, absolutely about their approach to young voters.

EN: I can’t speak for younger people. But in some ways, this gets back to the entertainment question, that it’s more about meeting people where they are, right?

It used to be that we had a culture of reading the newspaper; we had a culture of watching the nightly news. I think now, most people log in to their apps, and that’s where they’re seeing the news.

It becomes a hard habit to break. If one generation’s habit was reading the newspaper, another generation’s habit is checking social media.

Maybe it’s important to respond to your question about the news media by asking, Is it going to the places where people are? It seems, to me at least, that one of the biggest missed opportunities for Democrats in the last election was not going where the voters they needed to reach were. It may be the case that, well, you gotta go to the watering holes where the horses are drinking.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about the problem of flooding the zone. And part of what we’re dealing with is the mainstream media normalizing fascism and treating Trump like a normal political candidate, when in reality it’s a fascist regime that’s come to power, which is never legitimate. [These organizations need] to get to the essence and help people see that what is required [for fascism] is not acting within the normal political channels but [instead engaging in] massacres, violence, and noncollaboration, which all of the mainstream outlets have so far ignored.

LBR: I think about this all the time. So, in the student newsroom, in which I teach, we have a giant circular display of about 15 wall screens, and each one has something different on it, right? This was driving me nuts the other day, because of course everybody heard about Donald Trump claiming that Ukraine started the war, in so many words.

But then you saw the headlines. It’s all silence. You’re just seeing these tickers going. Donald Trump calls Zelensky a dictator. It gets repeated and repeated, and it’s out there in the public space.

People are just going to look at the headlines. We need to be mindful of the language that we’re repeating, as we repeat, because right now Donald Trump is on the world’s largest stage and can say whatever the heck he wants.

KW: So, what should the headline be—Donald Trump lies and says that Ukraine started the war. How would you make that a more accurate headline?

LBR: I liked how NPR covered it: Now, this is false. He is falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war. This is not true.

It was interesting, and that’s just one way of doing it. If you were to write the headline, let’s see, how would I write that headline?

KW: Or do you just lead with the fact that he lied?

LBR: Yeah, “Trump Makes False Claims About Who Started Ukraine War.”

EN: Part of the problem the first time around was that it took so long for the mainstream news media to call them lies. You’d get it at the very end of the story and, you know, people aren’t reading to the end.

LBR: We come from this tradition of, let’s give everyone space, and, you know, a full-size, very balanced—that eventually led to a kind of false equivalency. We still struggle with that.

OG: What we don’t have anymore is a common respect for journalism. I hate to use this example, because it’s so old, but it’s the best one I can think of: Walter Cronkite was, at some point, the most trusted man in America. You can’t imagine someone today holding that amount of influence.

I’m still hopeful though. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Times; they’re losing tremendous amounts of money. Jeff Bezos isn’t losing as much money, but he’s losing money. But I’m hopeful about these other things that are springing up.

MO: What do you think failure or success looks like in the current scenario of media organization?

KW: Some amount of sustainability, being not in debt, having a very high standard, and producing compelling reporting, criticism, or journalism. If it means making the reach smaller because of finances, then making the reach smaller but keeping exacting standards.

EN: To me, it’s a combination of transparency and commitment. As Kate was saying, holding down all of these high standards of what you’re reporting but also communicating how you are reporting stories. One of the things that tends to get lost, especially in influencer culture, is that you’re not seeing what’s going on behind the camera. Being more transparent about the reporting of news would be helpful.

OG: Success would, for me—I think about it in my own career, but something’s going to have to give regarding to labor. The traditional business model of a newspaper—as much as they’ve tried to change and do things differently—that model just doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t even work online. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty easy to train yourself not to look at ads anymore. I can’t even tell you how much stuff I look at on a daily basis on my phone. I could not for the life of me remember one ad I saw today, and probably a thousand of them crossed my eyes. So, there’s a problem with that model too. That’s why I keep thinking about the nonprofit model. Maybe it can be the thing that makes the most sense.

You know, there was a time about six, seven years ago, when it was like, everybody has to do a podcast, right? Every industry, we’ve got to start a podcast. Now is the only time. So, they built these huge studios and these buildings—you know, the building that Soon-Shiong owns—and they abandoned it downtown. I’m really bitter about that. They built this huge department to produce podcasts. Flatline. It’s all gone. They fired everybody. But now they’re staying in the game because they hired freelance producers to help them make podcasts, but the investment that they initially made really went under. There was a time when they were probably producing 12–15 podcasts. That’s not the case anymore.

So, short, short answer is, just look at the reality of what’s happening and figure out a better way to do it. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s not going to be as painful as watching this steady decline. But I think it’s perilous. I think the Times is in peril.

LBR: Nonprofits struggle too, they do. But at least the last nonprofit we put forth is still around, even as it’s struggled quite a bit. The money does come in. There are supporters. The economy affects everybody. These people right now aren’t willing to donate as much as they can right now. Of course, you have the threats of public media being cut off from funding. But look at the promises. There are some bright spots, and I don’t want to give up hope.

The media is not okay, but it’s still here. Hopefully, it will be here for a long time.

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Featured image: Event photos by 1390photo.