The Vanishing In-Between
We’re not just debating issues anymore. We’re debating reality itself.
There used to be something—or someone—between us and the flood.
Editors. Fact-checkers. Anchors with Rolodexes full of sources. Institutions that filtered the noise, contextualized the chaos, and—if they did their jobs right—helped us understand the world, not just react to it.
I know a little something about that. Before I got into public relations, I was a newspaper reporter and editor—part of that fading class of intermediaries tasked with shaping stories into something coherent, credible, and, hopefully, useful.
But in the age of social media, that “in-between” is vanishing. The space once occupied by editorial judgment, civic responsibility, and a shared sense of truth has eroded. And what’s rushing in to replace it isn’t necessarily better. It’s just faster, louder, and algorithmically tuned to whatever grabs us by the throat.
This isn’t just a shift in how we consume information. It’s a textbook case of disintermediation—a term from economics that describes what happens when intermediaries get cut out of a process.
Think Amazon bypassing the bookstore. Uber skipping the dispatcher. Or, in this case, TikTok skipping the newsroom.
Disintermediation is efficient. It’s empowering. And in media? It’s destabilizing.
From Gatekeepers to Gatecrashers
Social media didn’t just disrupt journalism—it disintermediated it. Platforms like Twitter (or whatever it’s called this week), Facebook, and TikTok let anyone become a broadcaster. Politicians no longer needed press conferences. Celebrities no longer needed publicists. Conspiracy theorists? They went straight to the feed.
Journalists—once the connective tissue between the powerful and the public—found themselves chasing threads, embedding tweets, and trying to provide context in shrinking word counts before the algorithm buried them.
We didn’t just cut out the middleman. We replaced him with an opaque vending machine, designed to deliver whatever gets the most clicks.
The Crisis of Authority
Middlemen, for all their flaws, added value. Editors asked annoying but essential questions like: Is this true? Is this fair? What’s missing? That infrastructure, while imperfect, functioned as a civic buffer.
Now, we face a collapse of authority—and of trust. Pew Research data shows that public confidence in the media has eroded dramatically over the past two decades.1 It’s not just partisanship; it’s a loss of belief that anyone is minding the store.
And frankly, who can blame people? News today often arrives stripped of provenance, served up by influencers, AI, or nameless accounts with a blue check and a hustle.
We wanted unfiltered access—and we got it. But we also lost the shared context that professional journalism, at its best, once provided.
Look out the window. The sky is blue. There’s no arguing that.
But in the name of ‘balance,’ the media started putting people on-air to say otherwise.
All it did was weaken our grip on commonly accepted facts.
Rain is wet. The earth is round. The sky is blue.
Not everything needs a counterpoint.
The Both-Siderism Trap
Part of what weakened the authority of traditional media—and helped create the vacuum that social media rushed to fill—was a well-intentioned but corrosive habit: both-siderism.
That’s the reflexive journalistic impulse to treat every issue as if it has two equally valid sides, regardless of evidence, context, or proportion. Climate change denial was given equal airtime with climate science. Authoritarian rhetoric was balanced with fact-based analysis as if it were just a differing opinion. The goal was “objectivity.” The result was distortion.
In trying to appear neutral, many outlets unwittingly undermined truth. They became referees afraid to throw a flag. That eroded credibility, especially among audiences who saw this false equivalency not as fairness, but as failure. And it opened the door to influencers and partisan outlets who promised certainty, clarity, and conviction even if what they delivered was outrage dressed up as truth.
As media scholar Jay Rosen put it, “The press is not there to report both sides, but to inform the public.”2 When legacy media defaulted to both-siderism instead of doing the harder work of contextualized truth-telling, they left room for algorithmic gatekeepers and opinion merchants to move in.
The New Gatekeepers Wear Hoodies
Disintermediation didn’t remove the middleman. It just swapped him out. Now the curators of our information diets are engineers, designers, and machine learning models. Their goals aren’t truth or civic health. They’re clicks, shares, and time-on-site.
MIT researchers found that false news spreads significantly faster than the truth on Twitter—six times faster, to be exact.3 And platforms are optimized to promote what’s viral, not what’s verified.
In other words: outrage is scalable. Accuracy is not.
The Democratic Cost of the Shortcut
This isn’t just a journalism problem, it’s a democracy problem. When people no longer agree on the basic facts, meaningful civic discourse becomes impossible. A 2023 RAND report identified disintermediation of traditional media as a major driver behind the fragmentation of public understanding.4
We’re not just debating issues anymore. We’re debating reality itself.
To be clear, this new media landscape has empowered many who were once voiceless. It’s exposed corruption and abuse. But it’s also created a megaphone for liars, grifters, and extremists. We’ve replaced gatekeepers with gatecrashers—and in doing so, we’ve made the public square noisier, but not necessarily wiser.
Rebuilding the In-Between
So what now?
We probably can’t go back to the days when three networks and a morning paper defined the narrative. Nor should we. But we can start rebuilding the in-between: that essential space between the noise and the truth.
That could mean supporting journalism that still values verification and transparency. It might mean new media models that marry scale with standards. It certainly means teaching media literacy with the same urgency we teach financial literacy or civics.
But mostly, it starts with us. Slowing down. Asking questions. Being skeptical—not cynical—about who’s telling us what, and why.
Because someone is always curating your view of the world. The only question is whether they’re accountable to you—or to an algorithm optimized for outrage.
I'm not sure we can put this genie back in the bottle.