Keeping Up Isn’t Understanding

Growing up, I remember nearly every house on my street received The New York Times at its door each morning. I remember watching the deliveryman drive down the block in his dirty brown van. Every day, the papers would predictably land with a soft thud on the driveway, and would wait there until someone either picked it up or ran over it with their car. It simply arrived physically, with the same front page laying on hundreds of driveways up and down the street. 

Now the news reaches us differently. It arrives with a vibration in my pocket and a push notification that flashes across my screen and disappears just as quickly, swallowed by texts, emails, and Instagram updates. I can swipe it away without opening it, and I often do. That shift — from paper on a doorstep to notification on a phone — seems small. Today, the news feels optional, fragmented, and endlessly replaceable.

Over winter break, a push notification from The New York Times informed me that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a paper that had operated since 1786, had ceased operations. I have no connection to Pittsburgh. I have never read the Post-Gazette. A few weeks later, The Washington Post, which I also don’t read, announced it would lay off more than 300 employees, reducing its workforce by roughly 30% and making serious cuts  to local, international, and sports coverage. The headlines framed these events simply as business decisions — restructuring, downsizing, adapting to market conditions. But to describe them only in corporate terms misses what is actually being lost.

Local journalism is essential infrastructure. It is the reporter sitting through a three-hour school board meeting so the rest of the town does not have to. It is someone tracking zoning changes, budget reallocations, or quiet ethics violations that would otherwise go unnoticed. When a local paper disappears, those meetings still happen. What vanishes is the consistent, public record. Lucas Silva ’28 wrote about how local journalism is quietly collapsing, documenting the alarming rate at which small and mid-sized outlets are shutting down. 

What concerns me is what those numbers mean in practice. When a newsroom closes, nothing equivalent rises in its place. Social media may amplify outrage, but it rarely sustains attention on the mundane procedural decisions essential to daily life. The erosion of these institutions is not only about fewer headlines, it is about fewer witnesses. And when fewer people are systematically watching, accountability becomes thinner.

There is another reality beneath all of this: Good journalism costs money. Last year, I subscribed to the print edition of The Economist. Though I got it on significant discount, The Economist is usually $349 a year for print and online. I still read The New York Times that I’m lucky that my mom (and the college) pays for, and occasionally seek out other reporting from The Atlantic or The Guardian or some other random news site. Much of today’s content sits behind paywalls — from The Wall Street Journal to Vogue and countless others — though at Amherst College, we are fortunate to have access to many of these resources.

Each of these subscriptions comes with a significant price tag. For a broke college student like myself  (and many others), paying for multiple news sources is simply not feasible. And yet the most rigorous reporting — the months-long investigations, the foreign correspondence, the careful fact-checking — increasingly lives behind paywalls. That is not unreasonable. Journalists deserve to be paid. But the economic reality creates a divide: The most reliable information often requires disposable income.

So what fills the gap? Obviously free content. But “free” is rarely neutral. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Advertising revenue depends on engagement. Engagement depends on attention. And attention is easiest to capture through outrage, urgency, and emotional charge. News organizations must generate profit or at least sustain themselves financially. In a digital marketplace flooded with content, they compete not just with other papers but with everything else on your phone like TikTok, Netflix, texts from friends, games, shopping carts, and infinite doom scroll itself. 

In that environment, the question is not simply whether good journalism exists. The question is who can access it consistently — and what kind of information ecosystem is left for everyone else. Much of what I know about the world now comes filtered through Instagram unfortunately. I follow news accounts like Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC, The Atlantic, alongside more explicitly opinionated pages that frame events through sharper ideological lenses (i.e. @mattiv, @so.informed). I passively consume headlines rendered into graphics, short captions summarizing complicated events in a few sentences, and comment sections already ablaze with interpretation. I tell myself this is efficient. I am keeping up. I am informed. But what I am mostly consuming are headlines without any depth.

Another problem is bias, but newspapers have long had editorial slants, regional perspectives, and political leanings. What feels different now is fragmentation. There is no single layout of stories that millions of people encounter in roughly the same order. Each feed is personalized, assembled in real time from past behavior, predicted preferences, and engagement patterns. Two people can both believe they are “following the news” and yet inhabit almost entirely different informational environments. The question is no longer whether bias exists, but whether a platform-mediated, headline-level understanding of events can meaningfully substitute for a shared civic narrative. Can a stream of curated posts, sandwiched between vacation photos and sponsored content, provide the depth and continuity necessary for democratic life?

Many of us would say yes — or at least act as if the answer is yes. We consume more headlines than any generation before us. News is delivered constantly. But the increase in volume has not necessarily produced an increase in understanding. We feel informed because we are rarely out of contact with information. In theory, the internet should have made us the most broadly informed generation in history because for the first time,  no longer necessarily determines access. A student in Massachusetts can read newspapers from London, Mumbai, or Johannesburg in seconds — though I concede this is an American privilege enabled by wealth, infrastructure, stable power grids, broadband internet, and freedom of press freedom that many readers in rural areas, poorer regions, or censored states do not share. Barriers to publishing have collapsed; anyone can write, record, analyze, or critique. That was the promise at least: a democratized public sphere. We would have distributed voices correcting, challenging, and enriching one another. In theory, the decline of print should have expanded the range of viewpoints we encounter. But the reality has been more complicated.

X, previously known as Twitter before the platform was purchased by Elon Musk, has rebranded itself around a more absolutist vision of free speech. Some moderation policies have changed. Certain accounts once suspended have returned. The cultural tone has shifted. Whether one views that as corrective or destabilizing, it illustrates how the character of a platform — and therefore the information circulating on it — can change depending on leadership and incentives. Meanwhile, Meta Platforms — which owns Facebook and Instagram — curates feeds through recommendation systems designed to maximize engagement. You do not see a chronological list of everything posted by every outlet you follow. You see what the system predicts will hold your attention. Over time, that means more of what you have previously lingered on, liked, or shared. The process is incremental and largely invisible. No one tells you that your feed is narrowing — it simply becomes more aligned with you.

Another uncomfortable layer beneath all of this is ownership. The “town square” for public discourse is privately owned, and its norms are not fixed. The modern public square is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals. X is owned by Elon Musk. Meta Platforms is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. These are not marginal players. They preside over the platforms and publications through which millions — sometimes billions — of people receive information. This does not mean they wake up every morning plotting which stories to suppress. It does mean that the infrastructure of public discourse is shaped by the priorities, philosophies, and financial interests of a tiny class of individuals.

What does it mean that so much of our collective conversation depends on the preferences, investments, and worldviews of a few extraordinarily wealthy men? Even if they act in good faith, the imbalance is striking. A democratic society requires a broadly distributed public sphere. Ours is increasingly centralized — not by the government necessarily, but by market dynamics. And markets, unlike democracies, do not operate on one person, one vote.

All of this fragmentation and concentration would be troubling enough on its own. But layered on top of it is something even more destabilizing: collapsing trust. A recent Gallup poll found that just 28% of Americans express confidence in mass media as of 2025. Fewer than one in three people say they have confidence in the institutions meant to inform them.

The phrase “the media” is invoked as a monolith, even though the ecosystem is vast and diverse. Some skepticism is healthy. Journalism should be questioned. Power — including media power — should be scrutinized. But when skepticism hardens into blanket distrust, something else happens. If every source is biased, if every outlet is compromised, if no institution deserves confidence, then all information begins to feel equally unreliable.

And when people distrust all sources equally, they often default to the source that flatters their worldview. That is the danger. A story is “true” if it reinforces prior beliefs and “fake” if it challenges them. Under those conditions, shared reality begins to dissolve, not because there are no facts, but because there is no agreed-upon mechanism for validating them. Trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild. It depends on consistency, transparency, and time — the very qualities undermined by the speed and volatility of the current media environment. In a fragmented landscape owned by private interests and filtered through engagement-driven algorithms, rebuilding that trust becomes even more complicated.

The result is a public that feels simultaneously overexposed and underinformed: saturated with updates, yet uncertain what to believe. And when confidence in journalism erodes to this extent, the consequences extend beyond newsrooms. Democracies rely on a minimally shared understanding of reality. Without that, disagreement shifts from policy to perception itself.

In all, the real danger isn’t that journalism is dying, or that billionaires own platforms, or even that trust is collapsing. It’s that we are slowly adjusting to all of it. We are getting used to thinner local coverage, to headlines built for clickbait engagement, to feeds that reflect ourselves back to us. We are adapting to a world where being “informed” feels more like keeping up and less like understanding. The more normal that feels, the harder it becomes to remember that a shared, stable, public reality was ever something we expected in the first place.