A Union, Not a Legacy

A Reaffirmed Mandate for Traditional News Media in the Age of New Media

Traditional (news) media, or legacy media, has faced severe scrutiny, giving way to a new age of information dissemination: new media. With that, a narrative of legitimacy has migrated to new mediums, one where truly anyone can be a journalist. I will reflect on legacy media holistically, analyze notions of credibility, and consider how we evaluate this evolution as consumers. Perhaps the most relevant contemporary narrative of increasing cynicism towards legacy media is the continued political success of populist figures such as President Trump and other right-wing populists in inciting a public inquisition and toppling of legacy media on the right through posts on new media sources such as X (formally known as Twitter).

Art courtesy of the Social Media Research Institute.

New media is best served not just through an example but through a working definition to formally establish the relationship between traditional media and assess their capacity for concurrence. The definition this article establishes is not fixated on the methods of information consumption, i.e., “Do you use a television or a cell phone?” Rather, it explicates the mediums with one guiding question: Who is able to produce media content? Examples under this journalism framework include, but are not limited to, social media influencers, podcasters, and even writers who publish articles on Substack. The impetus of new media and its advancement is that anyone is able to produce content. New media uniquely centers on the individual publications of its users and often wields mechanisms that allow for engagement with user-made productions.

The premise of this article is to contextualize both the analogous harms of legacy media and the unanticipated harms of new media within the ethical imperative that we’ve derived from aspirations for media literacy. Simultaneously, the scaffolding of my argument should indicate that traditional media continues to offer technical skills to consumers in this profound age of information asymmetry—defined as gaps in the narrative of rival media types, often leaving consumers with incomplete facts.

Traditional media sources function as a crash course in media literacy. While some may assert that they are institutional, the intervention this article makes is that traditional media not only requires the accreditation of journalists but also holds political interests that color the same story differently from news source to news source. Optimal media literacy, thus, is the vested interest of every consumer in evaluating the producer and the reasons for producing stories. The pinnacle of media literacy is grounded in the continual assessment of whether the information consumer can comprehend what is being conveyed and why it is being presented to them.

The indelible approach to this argument is outlining the disadvantages to consumers in a new age of information spread and conversely, rigorously testing the advantages of new media. It becomes apparent that new media faces increasing waves of no intention in actively credentialing the arguments of its users. Mark Zuckerberg posted a video on January 7, 2025, announcing Meta’s efforts to “restore free expression on [Meta] platforms” with the removal of fact-checkers. This sketches out a highly contentious debate that new media platforms face about what is rightful content moderation—if there is such a thing—and what censorship is. Further, the balancing act between rapacity to stay afloat as a corporation with the mission of anyone being a feasible producer of journalism is a tough task.

TikTok colors a similar challenge between First Amendment protections and a parallel concern that American citizens' data collection poses a national security danger. It’s a recurring theme on the record time and time again that lawmakers suspect this surveillance could exploit American citizens and be a means for “amplifying or suppressing certain content” that the public engages in. The dread of propaganda is not a relic from the archaic backroom workings of traditional media production but rather a concern at the forefront of policy discussions on U.S. access and consumption of new media. An agenda is not the workings of the past but present in both legacy and new media. The conundrum presented also highlights that consumption behavior may be a larger component of the free speech debate on new media, after all. It necessitates that media illiteracy is the issue and mitigates the harm of a media conglomerate's agenda. A function of this agenda is perhaps even higher network ratings that seem to diminish credibility.

The question unresolved is if a new medium for journalism, where facts are disseminated instantaneously, produces a regenerated form of journalism. Dr. Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, published a study examining our inquiry through successful citizen journalists on TikTok. From semi-structured interviews, she concludes that the values of entertainment and personalization were driving forces behind the stories deemed newsworthy, emphasizing that stories with a “funny or entertaining angle” moved up on the preference order. She highlights that these publications (posts) are the culmination of engagement with multiple mainstream news outlets. These contributing factors point to a continued sign that independent creators can offer new perspectives but will not completely usurp the importance of engaging with multiple reputable traditional media sources. Paradoxically, entertainment also informs the content creation of these independent journalists, who frame issues in a way that attracts an audience. This should realistically induce the same cynicism expressed toward the business model of mainstream news networks, which also work to attract attention.

Many study participants report finding the platform’s state-of-the-art For You Page (FYP) algorithm to be endogenous to viewer engagement and interests, though they do not let it dictate the content they believe to be worth reporting. Content moderation and FYP suppression were cited as reasons to refrain from vulgarity or violence in posts as citizen journalists. This raises the question posed by lawmakers: What authority do conglomerates have to regulate expression—for better or for worse—if a decision to do so is always perceived as partial? Conversely, is a lack of active content moderation a testament to impartiality and preferential policy, or is it the very incubator of misinformation and disinformation that citizen journalists and their consumers hope to curtail?

Whether utilizing TikTok, Meta, X, or whatever new media platform emerges after this is released, citizen journalism should not be misconstrued as an appropriation of credibility. Citizen journalism remains the bedrock of new media and its engagement to traditional media. Dr. Corrine Barnes, a current lecturer at the University of The West Indies, asserts the case that it is the collective of people without professional training that are unbound as storytellers and the limitless reach due to the internet. She references Gilmor in We the Media, who marks the earliest accounts of citizen journalism as stemming from opinion columns in legacy media papers, granting enterprise to reflect on events and spark a citizen-driven public discourse. In the age of the internet and digital cameras on our phones, citizens are the first capturers of crises and unanticipated events, shaping public opinion—at times irrespective of facts—if they are not in collaboration with a mainstream news source’s general veracity.

New media is not an alternative to traditional media but instead entrusts its producers to be the pallbearers of misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, it necessitates that new media sources be consumed with high competency in media literacy in a realm where content moderation is still a site of dispute and managed with the interests of each platform. Dr. Yuyue Zhang at the University of Sydney published an article highlighting that a fundamental sliver of the literacy pie will be stakeholders not only having the skills to determine what is disinformation but to understand the legislative efforts that are churning to regulate the interplay between data privacy rights to drive commercial and political ends, as well as the role of content moderation in shaping the public discourses we hope to achieve. It necessitates the same healthy skepticism that time and the entry of new media has induced on the publications of institutional journalists.

Though it seems that new media has existed in perpetuity, it continues to face a great deal of uncharted territory that requires diligence to improve our personal media literacy toolkit and to ask the second-order questions: Why is this appearing on my screen? Who has the authority to present facts, and what are their credentials or methods for reaching this conclusion?

There is a legitimate and ironically analogous fear that suppression or amplification agendas could be trailblazing the public endorsement of these tech and data platforms. We must stay steadfast in correcting the false counterfactual that because citizen journalists are not institutionalized actors, their methods are independent and uninformed by institutional sources—as though that is entirely a negative. We must also dispel the notion that engagement with new media’s personalized tailoring—and its decisions on whether to keep posts up or not—is distinct from the political staging of stories by a mainstream news source. The information overload Americans face is overwhelming, yet media literacy mandates that we not view new media as a form of convenience but as an emerging imposition, requiring us to conduct further research and verify knowledge gaps in narratives with reputable institutional sources that remain the lifeblood of accurate journalism.