Sacrificing your soul to be a hanger-on with the cool kidz
Journalism’s Original Sinners were Heard on the Street
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 6
In the Bible, mamma, Cain slew Abel and East of Eden, mamma, he was cast
You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past
Well Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
Adam raised a Cain (yeah)
Adam raised a Cain (yeah)
The Sunday Reader, June 8, 2025
This has been the best of times and the worst of times for Jake Tapper.
His new book, the unfortunately titled Original Sin, is Number One on the New York Times Best Seller List. The best of times!
But critics are lining up to dunk on him, and he’s become a punching bag for comics. Jon Stewart tore into Tapper on the Daily Show, stacking clips of Tapper promoting his book on CNN with the words readers "will not believe" what the coauthors found. Then Stewart shoved in the knife: Don't news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out? Isn't that the difference between news and a secret? 'You won’t believe what we found out.' No, that's why I'm watching you.
While our journalism culture wallows in the admittedly fun game of What Did Jack Tapper Know, and When Did He Know it? Here’s a question for you:
How much have you read about Trump v. Wilcox?
It’s only arguably the most important change in the federal government in a century. Why waste reporting on that?
Who says it’s important? How about Associate Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan: …if that is what the majority means, then it has foretold a massive change in the law—reducing Humphrey’s to nothing and depriving members of the NLRB, MSPB, and many other independent agencies of tenure protections. And it has done so on the emergency docket, with little time, scant briefing, and no argument.
We’ll come back to Wilcox. Our interest here is less in the law itself, and or even in the editorial judgement that relegated Wilcox coverage at the New York Times – once the nation’s newspaper of record, back when newspapers were a thing – to an online piece on the decision, and then an opinion piece that Sunday.
On page A18.
What was on the front page? The Spy Factory-deep cover Russian operatives…in Brazil. Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex. As the Soviet Union Fell, Did the K.G.B. Leave a Gift in Brazil for Today’s Spies? Pivoting From Tax Cuts to Tariffs, Trump Ignores Economic Warning Signs. How the Right Has Reshaped the Narrative Around George Floyd. Lifestyle to Reverse Alzheimer’s Carries High Costs and, Many Say, False Hope.
Wilcox didn’t even make the page bottom briefs.
It’s pointless to dunk on editors for skipping over eat-your-spinach serious stuff like Wilcox and choosing instead fun James Bond style stories like The Spy Factory.
Or fun high-school meanie style gossip stories like Original Sin, where we’ve moved past Amazing Scoops to Whose Fault Is All This? Tapper and other reporters are accusing the Biden White House of lying to them. Biden aides are saying Spinning Is Our Job, and Boy Are You Guys Gullible!
It may have been the best and worst of times for Tapper, but no worries, right? All publicity is good publicity, and a CNN anchor like Tapper needs to draw those eyeballs. And after all that sturm und drang…
Tapper’s ratings cratered to a 10-year low.
The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. And as Tapper in particular, and CNN, and the Washington Post…pretty much all that’s left of what was once the Main Stream Media has now learned the hard way, it’s not that Americans think they are wrong or incompetent or biased.
It's that Americans no longer think about those media. At all.
Consider: Tapper’s show, The Lead with Jake Tapper, averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 to May 25, a drop of 25 percent from a year prior, and his lowest ratings since August 2015.
Meanwhile it took 1.9 million views per episode just to make the Top 10 podcast list on Spotify alone. And that’s just one outlet; almost all these podcasts are available all over the place. For example, The Joe Rogan Experience held the number one spot with 3.6 million viewers per episode on Spotify. But The Joe Rogan Experience is also available on Apple Podcasts, where it is Number 3 in podcasts; Amazon Music; and YouTube, where the podcast channel has 19.9 million subscribers.
The future has arrived, but it is still distributed unevenly. The old Industrial Age world shudders, some edifices collapsing while others still stand, albeit on increasingly shaky foundations.
The giant media institutions of the 20th Century are shattered into irrelevance. But they are not the only ones. The military is undergoing an even bigger revolution.
Next up: the tech giants.
In the 1980s and 90s tech companies tended to be small fleet things, a herd of nerd plus maybe one guy who could kinda sorta talk to normal people. Software products tended toward the bespoke.
That all changed with the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit, which put the techies on notice that they’d better have lobbyists and publicists and lawyers, oh my! Even the biggest guns of the tech industry could no longer get their pet projects done. Mitch Kapor was a tech god who had founded Lotus Software, whose 1-2-3 spreadsheet dominated businesses in the 80s and 90s. Lotus then launched the Notes collaboration platform, after which IBM bought them for billions.
Kapor decided to spend some of that money reviving a little information manager he’d developed in the 1980s. The Chandler project was such a spectacular failure that it became a cautionary tale and inspired a book: Dreaming In Code-Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software.
Even Kapor, who had build Lotus 1-2-3 and Notes and all sorts of other big commercial software, couldn’t get a little project like Chandler done.
Tech was going through the same phase that media had gone through a few decades earlier. Any maturing industry hits a point where its market has grown about as much as it is going to grow. Think of smartphones. How many people had a smartphone 20 years ago?
Do you know anyone who DOESN’T have one today?
So when companies can no longer grow by reaching new customers, they take the only road open to them and grow by swallowing competitors, just like Kapor’s Lotus was swallowed by IBM. This consolidation phase goes on until there are just a handful of bloated giant survivors.
Who are generally no longer nimble enough to react to new competitors.
How many smartphone manufacturers were there 10 years ago? Can you name one today besides Apple and Samsung?
We’ve all seen the results in media, where what’s left of the old guard is at best irrelevant, and entire legacy networks like CNN cannot put up the numbers of individual podcasters like Rogan.
And now AI coding tools are enabling the same opportunities for tech startups.
Tech startups have traditionally been a couple of coders willing to work endless days and nights launching some new software concept. Sometimes there was a business guy with an idea; sometimes not. To the point that tech incubators regularly hold Startup Speed Dating matching business types and coders.
No more. In March, tech incubator Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wrote on X Twitter) For 25% of the Winter 2025 batch, 95% of lines of code are LLM generated. That’s not a typo. The age of vibe coding is here.
What do you do when you’ve invested so much work and time and learning and training in a career that is dying?
The process tends to unfold just the way it did in the media. First the people with options take advantage of those opportunities and leave. As things get worse, more follow them out the door. This makes everything worse, of course, because those people with options who left tend to have been the top performers and had the most ability to meet changing conditions.
At some point all that’s left are people with no other choices. And then things get ugly. Those left start looking for reasons to vote each other out of the few jobs that remain.
Freddie deBoer chronicles this, wondering why The New York Times would publish a glossy profile of Rusty Foster and his Today in Tabs blog, a chronicle of the thought of the dwindling number of folks working at major publications.
Many people in the biz have demonstrated considerable investment in the types of petty squabbles and grubby controversializing that Foster aggregates, while refusing to ever admit that it means anything to them. This is my “in or out” thing, again. If you’re going to be in that world, you might as well be of it. And I genuinely do admire Foster for his unfussy openness about his interest in the sweaty efforts of the front-of-class set to impress each other; Foster is an honest merchant of something I don’t want to buy. Many of the people in the industry we sort-of share are deeply interested in his wares but would prefer to appear not to be. This is a recipe for producing conditions everybody understands but can’t talk about.
This explains the hapless Tapper, who now argues that the White House lied to him. In response to which generations of city editors have arisen to recite the very first thing taught to every prospective reporter: If your Mom says Good Morning! Get a second source.
But Tapper is not the original sinner here. That would be R. Foster Winans, the Wall Street Journal columnist convicted of insider trading in the 1980s for sharing advance copies of his Heard On The Street column with traders, who proceeded to make bank buying and selling before the paper was published.
A columnist job at the Wall Street Journal has always been one of the most sought-after pinnacle positions in media. Why would someone who had such a job risk their career?
Winans was jealous. In the go-go 80s Manhattan of Gordan Gecko and Greed is Good, the Wall Street bros were the Masters of the Universe. They took Winans to spectacular restaurants he could never afford and the most exclusive clubs that never would admit someone like him.
And after he took a cab back to the little apartment that was all he could afford on his salary.
Winans wanted in with the Masters of the Universe.
At the time he was seen as an anomaly. Journalism was still largely a trade craft; people apprenticed and worked their way up. They tended to be scruffy, have a bottle of whisky somewhere in their desk, and didn’t expect to hang with the glitterati, or even want to. It’s amazing to remember that Pete Hamill, one of the most important and influential journalists of the 20th Century, was a high school dropout.
That tradecraft has been abandoned for college credentials. And those college graduates all want to sit at the cool kids table.
It’s not just Tapper.
Perhaps the ultimate commentary on the state of the media is that Tapper, with his own 4-6 pm show on CNN, had to go on The Megyn Kelly Show to promote his book. Kelly was driven out of network television in 2019; today her top 10 podcast has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube alone.
Oh, and that more important issue? Trump v. Wilcox? On May 22 the US Supreme Court issued a two-page opinion staying lower court rulings that President Donald Trump could not fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The decision prevented those fired from returning to work.
Normally this would be just one more step in a long process still a long way from resolution. But the opinion, passed 6-3, said this: The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.
As Justice Kagan argued in her dissent, that means the Court is neutering or overturning Humphrey's Executor, a 1935 case that said then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt could only fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. And not because the commissioner opposes the President’s policies, which was the case in 1930s and again now in Wilcox.
Humphries has prevented presidents of both parties from clearing house of previous administrations’ appointees in agencies like the NLRB, MSPB and FTC. But since the ruling, a school of thought has arisen among legal scholars that Humphries is an unconstitutional intrusion into a president’s executive power; hence the mention of executive power in the Supreme Court ruling.
If Humphries is neutered or overturned, every new administration will be able to purge agencies. It will return the federal government to state last seen during the administration of President Herbert Hoover.
Who is right here?
Well, that is going to require some reporting, isn’t it?