Journalism will stop relying on exposure to hold the powerful accountable

The old model imagined journalism as a set of headlights that froze wrongdoing in the glare of publicity. But today, the information environment is constantly illuminated with infinite content. When everything is bright, nothing stops. Nothing changes. The spotlight has become ambient light.

For years, journalism relied on a simple chain of accountability: expose wrongdoing and someone would apply pressure. Public institutions, regulators, voters, shareholders, civic groups, or even social norms were expected to take the next step once the facts were visible. Journalism supplied illumination; others supplied consequences.

That mechanism no longer functions.

This is not about the quality of journalism.

It is about a tactic that no longer produces impact.

Work from Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on “Power to Truth: Journalism, Corporate Capture, and the Fight for Truth” describes how corporate power, political insulation, and hostile media ecosystems blunt even the strongest reporting. The actors that journalism tries to hold accountable now operate inside systems designed to absorb or deflect exposure rather than respond to it.

This fits the pattern I have written about for years.

• In 2021, journalism lacked business infrastructure.
• In 2022, the field misunderstood what business it was in.
• In 2023, structural consolidation forced a reckoning with scale.
• In 2024, the industry faced a no-win scenario that required rewriting rules, not adjusting tactics.

2026 is the logical next step: journalism must abandon the idea that illumination drives accountability and begin changing the environment in which its work operates.

A counteroffensive must emerge across these four fronts.

• Financial pressure becomes an operational tool. Other domains have shown that disrupting revenue is more decisive than arguing over content. PayPal cut off extremist networks, and entire ecosystems collapsed. Advertisers pulled their budgets from Breitbart and its revenue plunged.

  Journalism has rarely used this tactic. Sleeping Giants demonstrated what financial pressure can do by urging companies to pull ads from sites spreading misinformation and hate. Researchers found that most advertisers responded, often quickly, showing how brand decisions can effectively regulate which outlets remain financially viable. The lesson is clear: when the economics fail, the ecosystem fails. Newsrooms and press-freedom organizations can wield this leverage strategically, not as activism, but as a structural defense of the information environment they operate in.

• Technical enforcement replaces content disputes. Infrastructure has become a more effective point of intervention than debate. When Cloudflare terminated service for 8chan, the platform lost the protection it needed to exist. When AWS removed Parler from its hosting environment, the platform went dark. App store removals have repeatedly wiped out onboarding pipelines for fringe networks.

  These interventions are not censorship. They do not suppress opinions or restrict lawful expression. They are enforcement of existing terms of service — rules governing security, moderation, and safety that every platform agrees to when using infrastructure they do not own. The decision point is not “Do we like this speech?” but “Does this customer violate the operating standards required to use our network?”

  Journalism can adopt the same mindset. It already relies on infrastructure providers to safeguard its work; those same providers can be pressured to enforce their own rules when malicious actors exploit the network. This is governance, not suppression. It protects the shared information environment journalism needs to function.

• Audience interception replaces post-exposure correction. Other fields learned long ago that intervention works only when it happens before a user sees harmful content. Search and platform companies already apply this logic. The Redirect Method steers people searching for extremist or recruitment-related terms toward counter-extremism resources instead of letting harmful content define the discovery experience. TikTok interrupts searches for self-harm or dangerous challenges with crisis support links and verified safety guidance. These are discovery-layer interventions. They reshape the pathways people travel before exposure, not after.

  Journalism has operated almost entirely downstream, adding context or correction once users have already seen misleading or manipulative content. The next phase requires competing earlier in the attention cycle. If journalism loses discovery, it loses everything downstream.

• Mobilized communities become force multipliers. The most effective information actors today are not media companies. They are networked groups. BTS ARMY funded racial justice efforts and disrupted extremist hashtags. Swifties organized collective pressure that forced congressional scrutiny of Ticketmaster. K-pop fans overwhelmed QAnon hashtags. Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets showed how coordinated micro-actions destabilize entrenched institutions.

  These communities demonstrate what journalism has never built: a public that participates, not just observes. The bridge from fandom to journalism is not as far as it seems. Newsrooms already have supporters — subscribers, members, local residents, civic allies — but they are treated as audiences, not actors. The next phase requires building lightweight structures that let these supporters organize, signal-boost credible reporting, flag coordinated manipulation, and defend journalists under attack.