You'll be fine in the short term. But in 30 years, when there is no one even pretending to serve as a check against institutional abuses, when 0% of the electorate has any idea at all what is happening in the world, when if you find that something unconscionable there is absolutely no way to get people to know or care about it... what then?
In a world without press that is listened to, a bad actor could literally remount the Holocaust in plain sight and no one would stop it because no one would know.
Public officials act in the public interest because their constituencies read the news and demand that something be done about it. Sure, this isn't what they do all or even most of the time, but can you imagine a world where it doesn't happen at all?
Many facets of government and business cannot function without some sort of professional collection and analysis of facts about what's happening in the world. I expect that in our post-journalism society, public and private intelligence agencies will expand enormously and start doing something that looks an awful lot like journalism, except for very small and inordinately wealthy institutional readers instead of the public.
Journalists do not provide a check against institutional abuses. When the Soviet Union was literally staging a holocaust in plain sight, the NYT lied to cover it up[1]. Walter Duranty still has a Pulitzer to his name for reports from the Soviet Union.
Supposedly the greatest triumph of journalism, lionized in a movie, uncovering of Watergate was done by an insider who just told the journalists. Nowadays, they're not even necessary for this. I learned about Snowden leaks from here and Wikileaks. And then nothing happened.
The only reason I can see why people believe journalists are heroic fighters for truth, checks against tyranny, and so on is because they rely on journalists for stories about journalists.
In a world without press that is listened to, a bad actor could literally remount the Holocaust in plain sight and no one would stop it because no one would know.
Public officials act in the public interest because their constituencies read the news and demand that something be done about it. Sure, this isn't what they do all or even most of the time, but can you imagine a world where it doesn't happen at all?
Many facets of government and business cannot function without some sort of professional collection and analysis of facts about what's happening in the world. I expect that in our post-journalism society, public and private intelligence agencies will expand enormously and start doing something that looks an awful lot like journalism, except for very small and inordinately wealthy institutional readers instead of the public.