After four years of being incessantly marginalized as “fake news” from the highest office possible, America’s mainstream news media rose to the occasion in what would have been a difficult year for publishers and newscasters by any standard. They had to contend with not one, but a “perfect storm” of events that challenged the very newsrooms needed to cover them, including:
- A life-threatening pandemic
- A disastrous economy
- An explosion of civil unrest sparked by racial injustice
- An epidemic of conspiracy-infused disinformation campaigns
- The most politically contentious election year in recent memory
Despite the economic, social and logistical adversity, some of America’s best news organizations dug deep to keep the world a clean, well-lighted place, not just for consumers, but of the advertising brands that depend on consumer trust amid what may well be the worst info war the world has ever seen. While the political one alone would have been enough to foment cynicism and disbelief, the tributaries of disinformation appeared to have infected every facet of society, including infections, spawning what was dubbed as an “infodemic” of mistruths and false facts about the COVID-19 pandemic, its spread and treatment.
It would have been easy to single out plenty of individual organizations as MediaPost’s supplier of the year — newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post for investigative journalism rivaling their Watergate era benchmarks, magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker for digging even deeper, or network news organizations for keeping the light on, but in the end we felt it was the overall class of 2020 mainstream news outlets that worked as a whole, albeit competitively, to counterbalance a year of epic misinformation.
