Is Journalism in Its Own Psychosis?

I was watching a celebrity interview the other day — an actor from a movie I’d just enjoyed — and the conversation felt like someone had won a contest to be a journalist for the day, with no supervision. She opened the interview by showing him a PowerPoint presentation she’d made for her parents, trying to convince them to let her pursue acting and a degree, outlining how much she admired him for doing the same. To be months late to the lingo, I don’t think that was on his bingo card when he woke up that morning.

And look, I get it — we’ve all been the overexcited fan once. But if I were that actor? I’d want to be intentional with my time. I’d want the chance to bring nuance to a project I just completed — to speak with someone curious, not just excited. I’d want to attract the audience who cares, not the biggest crowd. Because what used to be a craft — an interview, a dialogue, an exploration — now feels like we’re watching strangers perform parasocial intimacy for sport. Not to get all diva, but what happened to boundaries? To curiosity? To the journalist’s ability to stand outside the frame and observe?

The whole thing left me wondering: is journalism in its own psychosis?

It’s as if the press forgot who it was supposed to be. A mirror turned back toward itself, endlessly refreshing for engagement, mistaking self-awareness for substance. It’s no longer about the individual or the interview; it’s about the collective performance of attention — the “us” in real time, the shared hallucination of connection.

The Parasocial Epidemic

There was a time when interviews felt like portals. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers — you could feel the tension, the reverence, the sense that something big was being uncovered. Even Anderson Cooper once embodied that rare blend of empathy and rigor, his silences carrying as much weight as his questions.

Then came the democratization era: Sean Evans with Hot Ones, Amelia Dimoldenberg with Chicken Shop Date, Emma Chamberlain at the Met Gala. They made interviews fun again — human, weird, oddly profound. I’ve had my fleeting obsessions with all three. I remember being so impressed by Sean Evans’ deeply researched questions — finally, someone acknowledging, “You’ve done a million of these. What are the most frictionless questions I could ask you during a very friction-filled challenge?” My little Grinch heart grew three sizes watching Andrew earnestly flirt with Amelia. And that unspoken moment between Emma and Jack Harlow — that flash of collective relatability that somehow said so much to all of us.

They were shooting-star moments in entertainment, and I adored them. But eventually, my stomach started growling. I realized I’d been living on cotton candy — sweet, fleeting, dissolving on contact. I wanted something on the journalism food pyramid that could actually stick to my ribs.

Somewhere along the line, that intimacy — the kind that started with the best of intentions — got industrialized. Every podcast now opens with a bestie energy that shouldn’t exist between two people who met five minutes ago. Every clip is edited for laughs, not listening. We’ve taken the warm rebellion of the amateur and scaled it into a genre of performance.

The problem isn’t that we like these people — it’s that we’ve stopped distinguishing between liking someone and understanding them. We don’t want to know what they think anymore; we want to feel like we’re sitting next to them. Journalism, the discipline that once asked us to step outside our biases, has instead joined the fandom.

We’ve entered the monkey-brain era of media — the limbic loop of micro-expressions and dopamine hits, where the journalist’s job isn’t to draw truth out of the subject but to simulate connection for the viewer. The interview becomes a mirror maze of projections: the interviewer trying to look likable, the celebrity trying to look normal, the audience trying to feel seen. It’s empathy as performance art — and attention as currency.

Monkey Brains and Manufactured Familiarity

There’s a part of the human brain — the limbic system, the old animal part — that can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s merely seen. The same neurons that light up when we experience intimacy light up when we watch it. Which means that somewhere in the primitive wiring of our collective consciousness, watching two people share a laugh on a podcast feels like being in the room with them.

That’s the trick of the modern media ecosystem: it gives us the feeling of connection while quietly eroding our ability to discern whether one ever existed. We’ve built an entire industry on parasocial energy, and journalists — once the professional boundary-keepers — are now the primary participants.

I don’t blame them entirely. The incentive structure is rotten from the inside. “Authenticity” is currency; “relatability” is branding. Journalists are no longer trained to build trust — they’re trained to be trusted. They need to perform approachability to survive. But this is how psychosis works in the metaphorical sense: a collective break from reality that feels like heightened awareness.

We’re all participating in a shared hallucination of access. The line between reporting and role-playing has dissolved.

The celebrity plays “human,” the journalist plays “friend,” and we, the audience, play “involved.”

It’s a triangle of projection — each side reinforcing the other’s delusion.

This isn’t journalism’s death; it’s journalism’s dream state. We’ve lulled it into a trance where eye contact replaces analysis, where laughter substitutes for insight, and where “good vibes” become the moral framework of entire conversations.

It’s not that empathy is bad. It’s that we’ve mistaken empathy for understanding, and conversation for connection. We’ve turned the pursuit of truth into a vibe check.

From Good Night and Good Luck to Good Vibes and Good Likes

Once upon a time, journalism was a smoke-filled boys’ club — a handful of white men in pressed suits deciding what counted as news. Objectivity was the mask; bias was in the bloodstream. The public trusted the voice of authority because they weren’t given another option. It was the era of the monoculture, and the journalist was its priest.

Then the internet swung the pendulum. The gates flew open. Suddenly, everyone had a microphone — bloggers, influencers, fandoms, citizen reporters. “Authenticity” became the new authority, and transparency replaced integrity. Journalism didn’t just democratize; it dissociated.

We escaped the monoculture only to build a thousand echo chambers. The smoke cleared, but now we can’t breathe for all the noise.

There’s something almost karmic about it: we traded elitist bias for algorithmic bias and called it progress. The problem isn’t that the field got too democratic — it’s that it lost its immune system. We handed the mic to anyone who could game the algorithm, confuse passion with expertise, or fake sincerity on camera.

Old journalism’s delusion was certainty.

New journalism’s delusion is intimacy.

One believed it had the truth.

The other believes it is the truth.

Both are forms of self-importance — one institutional, one emotional — and both make it nearly impossible to see clearly.

The attention economy didn’t just erode standards; it rewired purpose. The question used to be: What story needs to be told?

Now it’s: What clip will go viral?

But virality is not vitality. It doesn’t nourish the body politic; it floods it. And like any flood, it leaves us disoriented, treading water in a sea of “content” that never quite becomes knowledge.

Somewhere between Good Night and Good Luck and Good Vibes and Good Likes, journalism lost the plot. And if psychosis is a break from shared reality, then the press — that sacred bridge between the world and our understanding of it — is currently wandering around without its map.

The Missing Through-Line

Kaitlan Collins once said the news isn’t perfect, and that she reminds her staff of that every day. Fair enough — humility is a start. But what if the problem isn’t imperfection? What if it’s dis-orientation — a profession that’s lost its north star and is spinning the compass for clicks?

Every journalist has a bias. Every story has an angle. Pretending otherwise is a ghost from the past. The real skill — the one we forgot to pass down — is learning how to use that bias as a counterweight, not a weapon.

Imagine an article that could hit a 0,0 mark — neutral in tone, not sterile but balanced enough that my conservative dad and I could both read it and nod at least twice. That’s not utopian; that’s craftsmanship. It’s a writer knowing where their own gravity lies and using it to find the center of someone else’s.

Stories used to do that instinctively. They offered a spine, a through-line, a reason to stay in the room. But modern journalism traded narrative structure for the adrenaline of the scroll. We get fragments, quotes, side-eyes — but no synthesis. It’s like being force-fed raw ingredients with no recipe.

When did we stop building arcs? When did a lede become a tweet? The journalist’s job was never just to inform; it was to connect the dots — between the event and the emotion, the fact and the meaning. Without that, news becomes noise.

Maybe that’s the re-entry point: less performance, more pattern-making. Less “take” culture, more architecture of understanding.

Because the truth isn’t hiding; it’s scattered. Someone just has to care enough to pick up the pieces and string them into a sentence that makes sense again.

The Reorientation: Journalism as Collective Therapy

Maybe what journalism needs isn’t a reckoning but a rest. A collective breath. A return to its senses.

We’ve turned the daily act of witnessing into a content treadmill, mistaking velocity for vitality. Every headline, every clip, every “exclusive” feels like a cry for attention from a field that once had all of ours. But attention isn’t something you can demand — it’s something you earn, through rhythm, integrity, and respect for the reader’s bandwidth.

Maybe journalism’s next era won’t come from a new app or a new anchor, but from a new psychology — one that treats storytelling as collective therapy rather than collective hysteria. One that values slow metabolization over instant reaction.

Because at its best, journalism wasn’t just information; it was orientation. It told us not just what happened, but what it meant — and how to stay human while watching it unfold.

Right now, it feels like we’re on the hamster wheel, spinning faster, refreshing harder, hoping the blur starts to look like purpose. But it won’t. Not until someone steps off and says: wait.

Not until someone decides that depth is still worth the risk. That silence is part of the interview. That a good question is an act of faith.

We don’t need more cotton candy. We need something baked — messy, fragrant, made by hand. Something that took time, something you can taste.

Because we’re hungry.

Because we’re paying attention.

And because the only way journalism survives its own psychosis is if it remembers the one thing psychosis forgets:

the difference between seeing and knowing.