If you listen to media criticism for long, you will hear a pair of words used over and over again: they and them. It is easy to take potshots at some anonymous bogeymen—they—who embody all evil. I even engaged in it at the beginning of this section series of posts with the title “The Seven Secrets About the Media ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know 2.0.”
So who are they?
No one.
Everyone.
A nonspecific other we want to blame.
Anytime I used they in a news story, my high school journalism teacher would ask who “they” were. And that’s what you need to ask whenever you hear criticism of the media. It isn’t that the criticism is not accurate. It very well may be. But it probably applies to a specific media outlet, a specific journalist, a certain song, or a particular movie. But we can make few generalizations about an industry so diverse that it includes everything from a giant corporation spending a reported $1 billion to produce Avengers: Infinity War and its Avengers: Endgame sequel to young people posting photos and messages on Snapchat. There are a lot of media out there, but no unified them.
See all of the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0