Sorry Not Sorry: The Media's Hollow Year-End Ritual
Semafor's latest "mistakes" roundup proves accountability is dead.
Let's talk about Semafor's annual "The things we got wrong" piece, which manages to be a perfect case study in everything it claims to address about media mistakes and accountability.
The setup is simple enough: 48 media figures reflecting on their incorrect predictions from 2024. But what could have been a genuine moment of accountability instead reads like content creation wearing accountability's clothes.
Some responses were laughably self-serving, like that of Meta's head of Global Business Nicola Mendelsohn, whose idea of admitting a mistake was... checks notes... humble-bragging that their Ray-Ban Meta glasses were more successful than expected.
And there was Bari Weiss, the billionaire-funded “independent” journalist known for “anti-woke” positions, whose reflection was that she “underestimated, among other things, how quickly old media institutions would crumble. For those of us trying to build new ones the question is: can we go fast enough to meet reader demand?” These examples are both closer to advertising than accountability.
NOTUS founder Robert Allbritton used his response to chide former Washington Post subscribers who canceled their subscriptions following owner Jeff Bezos’s pro-Trump editorial interference as “‘resistance’ subscriptions” who demand bias in journalism. No, Robert. In fact, these people are very much against bias, as shown by their reaction to Bezos’s.
Others were borderline incomprehensible, like Daily Beast Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles’s “I was wrong when I said Lauren Sanchez was the perfect combination of Amelia Earhart, Brooke Astor and Jennifer Aniston. In fact she is a combination of Amelia Earhart, Brooke Astor and Beatrix Potter.” What?
But the one that irritated me the most came from NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein about “the enduring power of inflation on politics.”
As she notes, “unemployment rates were at historic lows and inflation subsided,” yet voters felt like that wasn’t true. My question is: if material conditions had improved (as Blumenstein says they had), where were people getting the idea that inflation was out of control? The answer, to an extent, is mainstream media.
Now, if you watch the segment, which aired in August on NBC Nightly News, you’ll see that it was largely fine. NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff interviewed a number of people at this bakery, and yes, one woman there said she makes the drive from Lincoln to Omaha to stock up on bread at dirt-cheap prices. I don’t know what that’s supposed to tell us about inflation, though. We don’t get enough background information to make a good judgment. Maybe this woman has been making the trek for years, and this is unrelated to inflation; maybe not. We’ll never know. Audiences will just have to fill in the blanks on their own.
I just wish that Blumenstein’s conclusion about “the enduring power of inflation on politics” included a bit more introspection about why narratives about inflation proved to be so powerful, what role mainstream news organizations had in shaping those narratives, and how they can do a better job moving forward.
Beyond that, I find the content-ification of accountability to be a bit gauche. Semafor assures us that "reputable outlets get most of their facts right, and correct fast when they're wrong." In fact, they argue, corrections are how you can tell the good guys from the bad guys in media!
But here's the real issue: This approach to accountability—treating it as just another year-end content opportunity—actively undermines actual media criticism. When media mistakes become cute confessional content, we lose the ability to have serious conversations about institutional failures and their real-world consequences.
Let's be clear: Getting things wrong in journalism isn't supposed to be endearing or worthy of celebration. It's supposed to be something you work to avoid, especially when your mistakes can shape public understanding of crucial issues.
The whole exercise reveals how modern media has turned accountability into just another vertical, complete with its own content calendar. But real accountability isn't about performing reflection once a year in a listicle. It's about the daily work of getting things right, correcting things when you get them wrong, and being honest about both.
Courting the input of Bari Weiss is always a mistake.
Matt Yglesias, one of our most brilliant political minds, was wrong about something? Please allow me to pick my jaw up off the floor.
In all seriousness, the point is well taken that most people seem to be identifying what they got wrong but are short on the why of it. As for the notion about this being an excuse for content, I feel like having a lot of executives talk about what they misjudged is easy for them to treat as entertainment or a creative thought exercise when they're not first in line to be targeted by the new administration. This is to say that most people on this list will not bear the brunt of their incorrect analysis, and the centering of the discussion on them and their reflections rather than on the real negative consequences for so many Americans just speaks volumes about legacy media and the country in general.