Year in Review: 2023

Trump once again loomed over the political media scene in 2023, blotting out the sun (or, at least, Biden)—recently, Meghnad Bose, Matthew Danbury, and Dhrumil Mehta reported for CJR and the Tow Center that, per data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive, Trump had been mentioned in 38 percent more clips than Biden on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News since January. Another political and media object blotted out by Trump? Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who started the year as a rising star in the Republican presidential primary but quickly fell to earth. In July, Bob Norman attributed DeSantis’s struggle to gain traction, in part, to his “exclusionary and combative strategy” vis-à-vis the press. He deployed it “when he made his technologically disastrous announcement to run for president on Twitter, a place he and his state-funded press office have routinely used to troll and browbeat reporters,” Norman noted. A few days after we published that piece, DeSantis went on CNN and tried a different strategy: making nice with Jake Tapper. You can judge for yourself whether that revived his campaign.

One big media debate—which involved Trump (77), if not to the extent the White House might have liked—revolved around the advanced age and mental acuity of America’s politicians, not least Biden (81), but also Mitch McConnell (also 81), who twice froze up in front of news cameras, and Dianne Feinstein (90), who passed away in September. Lucy Schiller visited Schenley Gardens, a personal care home in Pittsburgh, and asked residents what they thought of that debate, and of the news in general. They showed “far less interest in the subject of aging—or even the way that candidates approach politics and policies around old age—than in how the news has changed in their lifetimes, LGBTQ rights, and immigration,” Schiller found. “Coursing inside Schenley Gardens were opinions and beliefs that reflected the complex selfhood of the residents, and eluded whatever filter age might suggest.”

If Trump blotted out the sun, other characters at least had their moment in it. George Santos lied and lied, including, we reported, about his supposed past employment at the Brazilian network Globo; if anything, the press covered his story too much. Ditto Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ditto Vivek Ramaswamy. Right-wing media (in some ways inadvertently) helped take down House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but failed to install Jim Jordan as his successor. If you had “Speaker Mike Johnson” on your 2023 political bingo card, well, I don’t believe you.

Even by the terrible standards of recent years, 2023 was a horrid one for media job losses: at one point, Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, an employment firm that tracks labor-market trends, reported the highest rate on record for the industry—17,436—and it was only June. Not that this was the whole story—journalists and news leaders at numerous organizations came up with new ideas and strategies that they hoped could pave a path to sustainability, or at least offer a modicum of security in turbulent economic times. In our Business Model Issue, Feven Merid asked fifteen people with expertise in different facets of media what they’d advise newsrooms to do in order to survive. Elsewhere in the issue, Emily Russell spoke with audio journalists who are finding new ways to produce, distribute, and monetize their work; Mary Retta explored how Ebony, a magazine that chronicles Black life, has recently rebranded itself; Megan Greenwell examined the foundation money pouring into local news; and Hamilton Nolan grappled with AI.

Some media projects founded on noteworthy premises have now entered maturity. In May, Danny Funt reported on Defector, the worker-owned site that launched in 2020 in pursuit of a journalistic utopia. “No one who owns a bar is thinking, ‘I can’t wait for NBCUniversal to come offer to buy my bar for a hundred million dollars,’” Tom Ley, the editor in chief, told Funt. “If you think of it as a business that you’re running with your friends, it becomes a lot easier to just be like, ‘Yeah, we’re having success, and that’s all we need.’” In July, Adam Piore checked in on Air Mail, the online magazine that Graydon Carter founded in 2019, which now has an e-commerce vertical where “a reader drawn to the Carter aesthetic will find a $495 cashmere scarf, a $289.99 pickleball set, a $3,450 Prada belted silk shirtdress.” Whether or not Air Mail “presents a viable new business model for magazines, it has, at minimum, kept Carter in their midst.”

Our other issue this year focused on the global spread of authoritarianism. “Democracy seems to have hit a breaking point; authoritarianism has crept in,” Pope wrote—and that was just in the US. In the issue, we spotlighted places around the world where journalism is under siege—from India, whose clampdown on documentaries Zainab Sultan charted in a documentary of her own, to Myanmar, where, as Ali Fowle reported, much of the independent press has been driven into exile following a coup—and some of the people who are fighting back. Runa Sandvik (profiled by Maddy Crowell) is working to protect journalists against cyberattacks. Eron Kiiza (profiled by Sophie Neiman) is a human rights lawyer in Uganda who defends the press against the government. And Valeria Ratnikova (profiled by Annie Hylton) found herself exiled…

…from Russia, where she worked for the independent TV Rain, following that country’s invasion of Ukraine and the crackdown on domestic press freedom that accompanied it—then bounced between different European countries, including Latvia, which initially welcomed TV Rain but came to regard it with suspicion. Indeed, in 2023, journalists exiled from Russia confronted repeated reminders that their new homes couldn’t necessarily guarantee their safety: Galina Timchenko, the cofounder of the Latvia-based Russian news site Meduza, revealed that she was hacked with Pegasus, perhaps by a European democracy; Elena Kostyuchenko wrote about her suspected poisoning in Germany. Meanwhile, inside Russia itself, two American journalists were jailed on bogus charges and remain behind bars: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for the US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (I covered all four of these worrying developments in our newsletter.)

The war in Ukraine has slipped down the news cycle somewhat, but continues to ravage the country—and its own press. There, too, reporters continued to fight back. For our Authoritarianism Issue, Merid spoke with Svitlana Oslavska, a journalist who joined the Reckoning Project, an effort to gather testimony from eyewitnesses to war crimes with the goal of holding perpetrators accountable via the courts. The project “was a way to still do journalism but make a different type of change,” Oslavska said. Last month, Charles McPhedran checked in with four Ukrainian journalists who have covered the war even as it has upended their lives. One—Pavlo Kazarin, a prominent TV and radio host—decided to enlist in Ukraine’s military, seeing that task as more important than journalism for now. Among other things, he has helped his unit with media literacy.

If the Ukraine war has slipped down the news cycle, that’s in part due to the war in the Middle East taking over the headlines: on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel, murdering over a thousand residents and taking hundreds hostage; in response, Israel slammed Gaza with air strikes and conducted a ground invasion. So far, the fighting has claimed the lives of dozens of journalists—mostly in Gaza, but also in Israel and Lebanon—making it the deadliest war for members of the press in at least thirty years. The conflict had a knock-on effect on existing proposals that many Israeli journalists feared would muzzle broadcasters—part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broader challenge to democratic norms, which, prior to the Hamas attack, was the dominant story out of Israel this year, and which I covered twice in this newsletter. And the coverage of the war was instantly, hotly debated in the US and around the world, as Yona TR Golding reported for CJR. Merid spoke with Max Freedman, whose podcast, Unsettled, has sought to fill what it sees as gaps in the coverage. Ultimately, as the war reporter David Patrikarakos told Kevin Lind, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is probably “the most mediatized conflict in the world—and certainly the most emotive.”

Ukraine and the Middle East have not been the world’s only hot spot this year—wars have raged elsewhere and gotten, on the whole, much less attention. Bloody fighting is still underway in Sudan. In June, Merid spoke with Hiba Morgan, who has been covering that conflict for Al Jazeera. Beyond war zones, the world of media remains a wide one. I’ve chronicled media news and debates—many with clear echoes of America’s own media scene—everywhere from the Czech Republic to the Solomon Islands in my weekly international newsletter, while my colleagues have spoken with journalists from Nicaragua, Malta, and the UK. And Merid wrote about Jacaranda Nigeria Limited, a group of Black journalists who traveled from the US to Nigeria in the early eighties—and whose trip did not go according to plan. Some of those who made the trip “had Pan-African ideals about unity among Black people globally. It was kind of a shock to many when they learned that much of what they believed wasn’t actually the case.”