We Have Real Journalism Again. But the Rest of American Democracy Didn't Make It.

Here's what we do about it.

I started my journalism career as a staff writer at the Boston Globe in 1992, and was a staff writer there and at the Los Angeles Times for nearly a decade. Over that time, I saw the free press in this nation start to die, through media deregulation that allowed for massive media monopolies and an ever-thinner firewall between advertising and editorial.

I left institutional journalism in 2001 to write novels instead of news. I felt fiction was the only place left where I’d have the freedom to write the truth. I spent the next two decades writing fiction.

Last year, like many other refugees of the Death of American Journalism, I came back to the field on my own terms, as an independent journalist on Substack, where I now reach more than a hundred thousand people without a single editor, publisher, or advertiser between me and the story.

It has been glorious, in a way. To do what I do best, without the legal department or ombudsman or trust-fund baby editor breathing down my neck and pressuring me not to write important stories if they’d upset important people. I’ve been breaking news left and right, and it feels good, like taking a dusty basketball out of the garage, filling it with air, and shooting basket after basket at the park the way I used to.

But something major and important has changed in the past 40 years. American journalism is back, on Substack. But the institutions that used to do something about truths exposed are all dead now.

In the 1990s, when a reporter broke a significant story — real wrongdoing, documented, sourced, verified — something always happened next. Regulators acted on our findings. Congressional committees held hearings that were not purely theatrical. Courts moved. Corporate boards, fearing genuine reputational damage, occasionally removed people. The system was imperfect and often corrupt, but it retained enough structural integrity that accountability was a plausible outcome. Exposure created pressure, and pressure created change toward the better. That was the pipeline, just as the founding fathers envisioned it.

That last part isn’t happening anymore. American journalism is rising from the ashes. The public is finally being informed again, truthfully, of the injustices being done to them by power, and they are reacting with appropriate outrage. But it stops there, now.

The same corporate consolidation that captured the media has also captured our government and, to some extent, our culture. Gone is the integrity of the institutions that once held wrongdoers accountable after a functional free press exposed them. The regulatory agencies have been defunded, captured, or litigated into paralysis. Congressional oversight has been hollowed into performance — hearings exist to generate clips, but never accountability. Courts have been shaped with enough ideological consistency that the concept of an independent judiciary requires qualification. Local prosecutors with genuine independence from national political machines have become rare enough to be remarkable when they appear. Corporate boards discovered that in an attention economy, scandal has a half-life of seventy-two hours, after which the stock recovers and the news cycle moves on.

It makes me wonder why I’m doing this at all, because not only are the institutions incapable of knowing what to do with investigative journalism anymore, it seems readers are also largely unsure what journalism even is. What social media gave us in place of journalism and subsequent accountability is the appearance of accountability through the emotional release of online outrage. Digital outrage is now infinite, which means it is weightless. A story can reach millions of people, generate a week of intense engagement and even rage, but it dissolves without a single institutional consequence, and without readers able to maintain attention on anything for more than a day or two.

So, yes. Journalism is back. I am back. And exposure of wrongdoing is happening again. The documentation is better now than it was thirty years ago. The audience is sometimes larger.

And yet nothing moves.

So. Now what?

The answer is not to wait for captured institutions to remember their purpose. They won't. What we need — what is already beginning to emerge — are parallel structures that perform the functions government has abandoned. When the federal parks accounts went rogue on social media to preserve public information their bosses were erasing, they were doing exactly this: building a shadow infrastructure of accountability outside the captured one.

We need more of that, at every level. Shadow regulatory bodies. Citizen oversight networks. Independent legal funds. And if the courts fail us, independent new courts. We have already breathed life back into the free press they tried to kill.It’s time to keep going, to create new institutions to replace the old ones they stole.

But new institutions are only as powerful as the attention sustaining them. The other thing we must do — the harder thing, in an era engineered for distraction — is refuse to let important stories die after seventy-two hours. Real accountability has never moved fast. Watergate took two years. The attention economy wants you to feel the outrage and move on. That is its design. Resisting that design — staying with a story, following it, demanding to know what happened next, and if nothing is happening, create the institutions that will make something happen.

If this sounds like a call to revolution, that’s because it is. Friends, that is how free people have always responded to capture. By liberating ourselves.