How Do We Measure Media Impact?

That test is on my mind as the commentariat reacts to longtime journalist Craig Unger’s recent cri de coeur, “Nothing Moves the Needle.” “Not that long ago,” he writes, “the press could root out corruption, topple presidents, and end wars. Now, even the biggest scoops have little impact.” Gone are the days when dogged reporters exposed secrets in a way that moved the needle: the My Lai Massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate.

We know what happened since. Technology detonated the shared public square into infinite shards of information. Big Media consolidated, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and a president with a genius for attention discredited the traditional press at every turn. “Our so-called free press can no longer do what it used to do,” Unger writes, “because it presumes an audience that shares the same factual reality most of us see. And that audience... no longer exists.”

I appreciate that Unger doesn’t claim, as reporters have been known to, that the press has the power to make or break a presidency. That’s the province of voters — more so now that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has narrowed the judiciary’s role as a check. So the question of where and how voters get their information becomes more important, not less, and it’s a central focus of our research at Shorenstein. More on that in the coming weeks.

But let’s stay with impact for a moment, because the concept is doing more work than it can bear. Measuring what a single piece of journalism accomplished was never easy,, and it’s gotten harder as attention shifts from mainstream to independent media. If a reporter in a small local newsroom exposes graft at city hall and nothing follows — no further investigation, the accused politician cruises to reelection — has the story failed? Or consider the local reporter who finds substandard, dangerous construction work at a school. A mom blogger picks up the story, shares it in her network, and it goes viral across town; charges get filed. Who had the impact — the reporter who did the digging, or the person who made sure anyone noticed? Obviously both did work that served the public interest.

News media, literally the middle — a transfer point, a passageway — is now itself mediated by armies of individual creators. Who counts as a journalist? If “the press” can’t move the needle alone anymore, who or what can?

Or is that the wrong question?

Minneapolis last winter is a useful case, not because it proves Unger wrong, but because it shows why “did journalism move the needle” is increasingly unanswerable. When armed ICE officers descended on the city under “Operation Metro Surge,” residents took to the streets to protest, protect, and bear witness. They also swarmed the information battlefield: residents built encrypted groupchat networks to track ICE movements in real time; local reporters were joined by network anchors parachuting in; creators curated, commentators commented, and the images of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths spread nationally and internationally through every layer of that system at once. Public approval of the administration’s immigration enforcement fell. So did the president’s approval rating overall. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino was replaced; border czar Tom Homan announced a partial drawdown. Not a victory — people were killed, families uprooted, whole communities traumatized — but a turning point.

Something moved the needle in Minneapolis. But no clean line runs from any single scoop to that outcome, and no one actor can claim it. It took trained reporters, and it took what we used to call citizen journalists and now might just call people living their lives with a phone in hand. A clean, cause-and-effect impact framework is too narrow for the ways information flows now, and maybe it always was. (Watergate itself took two years, a special prosecutor, the FBI, and a delegation of Republican senators led by Barry Goldwater willing to act on what reporting had shown — Woodward and Bernstein broke the story, but the story alone didn’t break Nixon.)

There’s a second reason to be skeptical that the old test still applies, and it’s not really about algorithms or filter bubbles, as Unger suggests. . Political scientists have been finding since the 1950s that news coverage, like political campaigns, mostly reinforces what people already believe rather than converting them — the “minimal effects” problem, which recent research has only sharpened. People are good at discounting facts that are inconvenient. That’s a less comfortable explanation than “the algorithms did it,” because it means the problem is older than the robots.

So maybe the question isn’t why the press lost its power. Maybe that power was misunderstood from the start — and the impact test we’ve been applying was always a bad fit for what journalism actually does.

It’s worth changing the test, expanding the search. The promise of journalism, the reason it’s been defended since the earliest days of this democracy, was never that any single story could guarantee an outcome. It was that it creates the conditions for freedom — for people to have the facts they need to decide things for themselves. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel put it plainly in The Elements of Journalism: the purpose of journalism is “to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.”

Go back to Minneapolis. There will never be a way to measure journalism’s role in the thousands of individual decisions — to protest, to organize, to pay attention — that added up to a turning point there. But the combined force of trained reporters and ordinary people documenting their own lives drove it. That alliance is not a consolation prize for journalism that can no longer move the needle by itself. It may be what journalism’s power always actually looked like, once we stop insisting on being able to point to a needle and say: that one moved because of us.

Newsrooms under financial pressure to prove their worth to funders and readers might do well asking not what impact they can point to, but what difference they made possible.