Meditations in an Emergency

02/16/2026

Google has drained revenue from the news industry on a far more lethal scale, grabbing journalism’s advertising revenue and serving up the information gathered by news organizations. And it just got worse: Tech Crunch reports, “Now that people can simply ask a chatbot for answers — sometimes generated from news content taken without a publisher’s knowledge — there’s no need to click on Google’s blue links. That means referrals to news sites are plummeting, cutting off the traffic publishers need to sustain quality journalism.” How Google has sabotaged journalism’s revenue is complex, but there’s an excellent recent piece about that in the Atlantic here.

Three quarters of Google’s revenue ($400 billion in 2025) comes from advertising, and after getting much of the world to use its search engine, it has corrupted the workings of that engine by promoting paid stuff first and pushing users toward its wasteful gratuitous unreliable AI offering, meaning the reliable results that got so many of us to use Google are no longer so reliable. Too, online platforms like Google and Facebook harvested our personal information as we used them, and sold it to advertisers. This allows advertisers to target our interests and prejudices, as anyone who just saw a an ad for something they recently searched for knows. There’s no clear border between trying to sell you a hat or a vacation and trying to sell you a lie or a politician, as we saw in 2016, when both the Putin regime and Trump campaign targeted US voters with pro-Trump anti-Clinton propaganda in the form of social media ads. (Similar things happened with Brexit, while now-imprisoned former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro rose to prominence through Youtube’s algorithms that push viewers toward extremist content. Google owns Youtube, so you can blame the corporation for the far-right president’s destruction of thousands of square miles of the Amazon.) Privacy is essential to democracy; we need to be able to think and speak and act without Big Brother-style surveillance, and we’ve lost a lot of that privacy (though we can claw some of it back by being careful about our privacy settings; the Electronic Frontier Foundation has good instructions on that).

If you’re someone like me who has a lot of time to sift through it all and some training in sifting you can be gloriously well-informed. If you just read the most successful of the new-form independent media, Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, you’d be well-informed on the central issues in the USA. I’ve watched her rise in awe since she started writing her Letters from an American on Facebook in the fall of 2019. One reason is simply her reach, with 2.7 million direct subscribers and 3.6 million followers on her Facebook page, plus huge audiences for her streamed live conversations. That puts her at a scale comparable to a major newspaper (the Washington Post has been hemorrhaging subscribers; a year ago, its daily online readership was estimated to be 2.5-3 million; I suspect she’s bigger than the Post).

Another reason for my awe is, while many news outlets seem to operate on the basis that the American public is shallow and needs lots of juicy gossip, lifestyle content, short articles and dumbed-down news, Heather has demonstrated that there is a significant audience for thoughtful, longform, deeply contextualized news summaries and interpretations. She doesn’t just offer context; she offers a historian’s deep context going back to the founding of this country. Perhaps the commentator most akin to her is Josh Marshall who has, at Talking Points Memo, long written deeply informed and contextualized essayistic commentary on current events.

I don’t know where we go from here. I think the siloing of voices (including mine here) into solo newsletters is not an ideal solution, not least because it’s just too much for most people to sort through and too expensive to subscribe to more than a handful. I hope that we find ways to aggregate into magazine-communes of sort with likeminded writers (the UK’s great Carole Cadwalladr, a fierce critic of and reporter on tech, has founded a collective online newsletter recently, Broligarchy; maybe that’s the model; Talking Points Memo and The Ink are also collectives with a strong central voice). I hope that the reach and impact of these alternative voices and sources reach more readers and subscribers I hope that the oligarchs and Epstein class don’t completely destroy mainstream media. I hope that we wrestle forms of social media into existence that aren’t corrupted by billionaire owners and advertising-driven violations of our privacy.

Something striking about our moment is: everything has been destabilized since January 20, 2025, and a lot of it was pretty damn shaky or rotten before. We are in the mess we are in because of parts of our society, including the news media, that were not what they should be before the current rampage (I believe that a truly informed public could not have elected Trump in 2016 or 2024). So while there are ways in which we might want to return to the world before Trump’s second term, there are lots of ways in which we should and must not. We are going to have to rethink what this country should be, what our politics should be, and how we understand the world around us if we are to make a more perfect (or just functional) union, and good journalism that supports an informed public has to be at the heart of that project.