Bring Back the Gatekeeper, Please
The article argues that the decline of traditional gatekeepers in media and culture has flooded audiences with low-quality content, empowering algorithms and misinformation instead of democratizing culture. It calls for restoring expert curation to help navigate today's information landscape.
Background
- The article critiques the erosion of editorial gatekeeping in media and culture — the editors, critics, and tastemakers who once decided what was worth publishing or promoting.
- It argues that the internet and social media have replaced professional curators with algorithmic feeds and crowd-sourced popularity, flooding attention with low-quality or harmful content.
- "Gatekeeper" here is used positively: not as a censor, but as a quality filter. The piece reclaims the term from its negative association with censorship or exclusion.
- Background context: Ongoing debates about misinformation, content moderation, the "attention economy," and the decline of legacy media institutions (newspapers, magazines, record labels) that once shaped public taste.
- The author likely draws on decades of media criticism, from the "death of the expert" to algorithmic amplification of outrage.