But Lately, I’m Getting the Feeling That I Came In at the End

Staley concludes that this apparent fixation on the show, particularly among young people, is because of how The Sopranos chronicles American decline, given The Sopranos’' "persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country." The essay is greatly informed by an interview Staley managed to secure with the show's creator, David Chase. Invoking Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Chase told Staley: "There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people's predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap." Chase then added that in the mid-1990s when the show was beginning to take shape in his mind, "... everything was for sale -- it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash."

Today, though different factions of American society may disagree on the particular cause or remedy, nearly everyone, from the political right to left, agrees that something is ailing the nation (only two in ten, according to a recent AP-NORC poll, believe the country "is heading in the right direction"), that things are not as good as they should be or, crucially, as good as they once were. And the news media's role in this, as either a contributing factor to it or an institution trying to adapt to new realities, is certainly much of the story.

Staley, in his essay, draws attention to a scene I think of often from The Sopranos. It comes from the pilot episode and though protagonist Tony Soprano is speaking in reference to the Italian mafia, his psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi argues a similar dynamic is happening to the nation at large, and I, in turn, would suggest that it is also affecting the news media. James Gandolfini, speaking in his Tony Soprano accent that he had still then yet to perfect, broods: "It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over … I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?"

Now, to be sure, every generation has its cynics and pessimists. As Kevin Mims wrote recently at Quillette while dissenting from Ross Douthat’s claim that American cinema today is quite lacking as compared to in decades past, "Declinists are an inevitable part of every generation’s commentariat, gloomily pronouncing that everything is bad and getting worse and that nobody else seems to notice or care," and I too have been critical of good-old-dayism. But the modern news media is not Hollywood, and, as I have discussed in this column in the past, the news media of today is nearly universally despised. The Sopranosmay have been the beginning of what some call "the second Golden Age of television," but few would argue that there has been anything akin to a golden age of journalism (second or otherwise) on this side of the new millennium.

The easy answer is to invoke partisan coverage and sensationalism, and that is certainly part of it. However, as I discussed with Kent Harrington when he appeared on the News-on-the-Record podcast in April, just as important has been the replacement of the editorial process with news content being posted directly to platforms. In years past, this has meant Twitter, but now it increasingly extends to websites such as Medium and Substack. Now, indeed the editorial process has spectacularly failed at various points in recent history, as I have written about previously in this column; however, a consistent danger in all fields, from journalism on down is that of "overlearning lessons." And despite its shortcomings, the editorial process ought to be preferred to its various alternatives -- namely, the creation of the journalist-cum-celebrity that building an individual audience presupposes.

In a world in which distribution is controlled not by publications but increasingly by the journalists themselves, it is all the more necessary (in order to reach the critical mass of followers needed to become financially viable) for said journalists to make themselves the story as much as their subject. And, secondly, when individual journalists (or even outlets now, too) need to cater consistently to their audience once finally developed, it can be most difficult to deviate from telling said audience what it wants to hear even when the facts lead elsewhere, a phenomenon that largely explains a previous subject of my criticism, what I have called "the Aaron Maté Club."

Finally, and in addition to the obvious financial squeeze that has affected news media since the advent of Big Tech, a key variable imperiling journalism as it was once better practiced is the declining collective attention span of the American readership and viewership. As Johann Hari chronicles in his latest book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, it is more difficult than ever to maintain focus, a reality confirmed by a brilliant April Fools' prank once perpetrated by NPR demonstrating that so many alleged readers don’t actually take the time to look past a story’s headline.

It is for reasons such as these that my recent pair of pieces reflecting on the life and writing career of Roger Ebert had the whiff of wistfulness that it did. In the era of the "content creator" rather than the journalist, is there even a place for one to write as he did? It is why I wondered in part two of that series if the literary critic was to become an endangered species. Perhaps, in turn, the same would happen for the investigative journalist or even the George Will-style 750-word biweekly columnist. So as talented writers and commentators make ends meet by hawking "merch,"  two-time Pulitzer Prize winners leave journalism because they simply "can’t make a living in it anymore," and journalists jump ship from one outlet to another based on comparative investment in distribution via TikTok, one cannot help but wonder if we "came in at the end." And though I am grateful for many of the various aspects of modernity -- most of all, in medicine -- not all changes have been positive. As for those that have gripped the news media over the past two decades and, in particular, in the post-2015 era, they appear now here to stay. And, finally, as I alluded to above, it is just about impossible to separate that aforementioned sense of national dread from the murkiness that the news media landscape has become.

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