How ‘legacy media’ became a toxic brand

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How ‘legacy media’ became a toxic brand

By Joe Berkowitz

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that his company would be ditching its fact-checkers, he left little ambiguity around his reasons for the change. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said in a video. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”?

Zuckerberg claimed he started Facebook to “give people a voice” and felt it was important to “protect free expression,” but in recent years “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” It was a canny choice for a culprit, as the CEO sought to justify an instantly controversial decision. For years, the media has been a popular punching bag, but lately the term “legacy media” has become downright toxic. It often translates instead to “geriatric media,” “irrelevant media,” or worse.?

Each disappointing turn from an entrenched journalist these days is a chance to disavow the whole apparatus. “‘Legacy media’ is more of a pejorative now than it ever has been,” says Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, media critic, and author, most recently, of Magazine.?

“Legacy media” has recently been blamed for everything from covering up Biden’s decline to memory-holing January 6. As Elon Musk is fond of saying lately, “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” and it “must die.” Even Taylor Lorenz, who left a high-profile position at the Washington Post last fall to launch her own publication, User Mag, agrees with Musk on this point, if on little else. As she told The New Yorker recently, “Legacy media sucks; it’s crumbling, and, by the way, I’m going to dance on the grave of a lot of these places.”

When legacy media became legacy media

The term “legacy media” first entered the zeitgeist in the beginning of the digital media era. Jarvis recalls using the term in the mid-1990s, when he worked as an editor for the online arm of Advance. As news outlets first began to establish an internet presence apart from their print incarnation, and popular early blogs like the Drudge Report began to emerge, they faced an uphill battle to being taken seriously. Print and broadcast media were widely considered legitimate; anything published exclusively online might as well not have been published at all. According to Jarvis, the “legacy” label came from a desire to reframe this distinction.

“Because legacy media was sneering at us, we sneered back at them,” he says. “It was our way of saying, ‘You’re old farts.’”

Legacy media encompassed print, TV, and radio—everywhere other than the white-hot online world. By then, traditional outlets no longer held a monopoly on legitimate journalism. If a blog like Drudge Report could publish a scoop that shook the world—the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—the New York Times and its peers would have to share their luster with unprinted media. It paved a path for an era when “new media” outlets such as BuzzFeed News could win a Pulitzer.?

But if legitimacy could now come from any corner of the internet, perhaps it could also be stripped away from any corner of the media’s old guard.

When legacy media became “fake news”

The 2016 election was plagued throughout by viral hoax stories, the vast majority of which were either pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. (Many of these circulated, it must be noted, through Facebook.) After the election came rampant speculation that all the fake articles had helped Trump win. Soon enough, however, the president-elect began using the term “fake news” to wave away unflattering stories about himself. By reclaiming the term, and applying it instead to stories his supporters were to dispute or ignore, Trump effectively shut down the earlier narrative. In the process, he further fractured what could be considered legitimate news.

Trump’s supporters quickly glommed onto the president’s terminology. By 2018, according to a Gallup survey, four in 10 Republicans considered accurate news stories that cast a politician in a negative light to always be “fake news.” Their distrust extended far beyond so-called hit pieces on Trump, though, coalescing into an ambient hostility toward “mainstream media” or “MSM.” At that point, the term “legacy media” had only just started to bear its current weight.

Pejorative usage on X seems to have an uptick toward the end of Trump’s first term—on both sides of the aisle. Former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, for instance, went from pitting legacy media against new media in 2012 to casting it as Trump’s antagonist throughout 2020; meanwhile, Dan Pfeiffer, a cohost of the left-leaning Crooked Media’s podcast network, tweeted in 2019 that legacy media “cared more about appearing balanced than actually informing the public,” which lent a “structural political advantage” to Republicans.

These instances foreshadowed a fast-approaching future where disregard for legacy media would be a bipartisan issue. Legacy media became either synonymous with fake news or with an inability to properly adapt to a political climate where half the country perceived it as fake news. Over the next four years, haunted by misinformation flashpoints like the arrival of COVID and the January 6 riots, many on the left became outraged at how legacy media covered Trump’s political comeback, while many on the right cheered on the candidate’s pointed rejection of legacy media during 2024’s so-called podcast election.

Who owns legacy media?

It’s unclear what officially counts as legacy media anymore. Do publications need two or more centuries under their belts to qualify? Is the Drudge Report, which turns 30 later this year, considered legacy media? The Week recently lumped Vox into the category, even though Vox is barely 13 years old. (Vox’s chief rivals in the vanguard of new media—BuzzFeed News and Vice Media—both folded during the Biden era.) The official definition may fluctuate, but legacy media now seems to mean “any vaunted news organization many people are mad at.”

Another reason people tend to be mad at legacy media is because of who owns it. Private equity firms have been on a tear buying up newspapers throughout the 21st century, increasing their share of the industry from 5% in 2001 to 23% in 2019. Hedge funds such as Alden Global Capital will purchase and then gut prominent local papers including the Chicago Tribune, leaving news consumers to question their editorial direction thereafter. That skepticism around who owns legacy media has only ramped up recently, after the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times quashed their endorsements of Kamala Harris for president just before last fall’s election.??

According to Jarvis, the term’s recent popularity as an insult may also owe something to its utility for anyone rooting against the establishment, or against institutions in general.

“Legacy media implies entitlement,” he says. “You have a legacy, so you’re like the nepo baby of media. You inherited this position of prominence rather than having earned it.”

The term now seems to carry the same stigma as legacy admissions at Ivy League schools, one of status quo-enforcing privilege. But villainizing outlets that were grandfathered into prominence doesn’t just mean praising worker-owned media outlets like Defector and 404 Media, whose creators built them from the ground up—it confers something like heroism on more or less every information source that wasn’t borne into print. It valorizes a pool that includes the fervently pro-Trump One America News Network, various substacks, podcasts, and, at least according to Musk, “you”—as in anyone who uses X.

The new “new media”?

As Zuckerberg’s dismissal of fact-checking suggests, some tech CEOs now view social media as the prime alternative to traditional journalism and legacy media.?They’re not the only ones either. A legion of TikTok users also seem to view it that way, trusting their favorite internet personalities to keep them informed.?

As legacy media and new media cede ground to what might be termed the new new media, Elon Musk has aggressively latched onto legacy media as a target. Throughout his tenure at X, he has deprioritized links to outside articles while terraforming the space into a home for citizen journalists. Just last week, during a keynote at CES, X CEO Linda Yaccarino hinted at creating a news portal for the platform and compensating its amateur reporters.

“The future of news is not legacy media,” Yaccarino said. “Legacy media news has become almost like a fan service to make sure you’re speaking to a niche audience to meet your budget.”

As Americans of all stripes become fed up with either an aspect of legacy media or the nebulous category altogether, its survival has come into question. Audiences have shrunk, and so have revenues alongside them. In an ever-shifting digital landscape where a shift in Facebook’s news algorithm can have massive consequences, media has become an extremely tough business model to sustain. Layoffs have ramped up in recent years, with more than 500 journalists laid off last January alone, and layoffs hitting the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Vox just last week. (The latter for the second time in as many months.)

At the dawn of 2025, it seems neither farfetched nor alarmist to imagine a world without a Washington Post or any other once-invulnerable outlet. Legacy media is flailing within what The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel memorably dubbed “the choose-your-own-adventure reality” of infinite news resources. In chaotic moments like the ongoing L.A. wildfires, however—moments where readers urgently need reliable information—the outlets with boots-on-the-ground reporting, vigilant fact-checking, and multiple levels of editing continue to prove their incredible value.?

Now, these news hubs just have to find a way to prove profitable (and trustworthy) enough to survive being the dinosaur boogeyman of our current information ecosystem. As decision-makers at venerable publications troubleshoot and evolve into new forms, the legacy of the industry’s long history is at stake.

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