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As Syracuse professor R. David Lankes writes, “There are simply more choices in whom to trust, and market forces have not come into play to limit choices. While this is true for virtually all media venues to some degree, the scale of choice on the internet make the internet particularly affected by shifts in authority.”

In his paper “Credibility on the internet: shifting from authority to reliability,” Lankes draws a distinction between authoritarianism and authoritativeness. Broadly, an authoritative source, when making a point, will say, “This is how it is—but don’t take my word for it, ask all these other sources who will confirm what I’m saying.” An authoritarian source, when making a point, will say, “This is how it is—because I say so.” But in a communicative environment like the Internet, says Lankes, authoritarianism doesn’t work, because it implies that readers don’t have any other choice, or are unable to do their own research to come to their own conclusions on a subject. Online, it is harder to assert unilaterally the parameters of a dominant mind—to define a community and its (best) interests—because the community itself expects to play a substantial role in the defining. Online, it is insufficient to explain a controversial editorial decision with a casual “this is how it is, and this is what we did, and we’re not responsible to anyone else out there—what’re you gonna do about it?”

Greenbaum’s phone call was a violation of trust, and would have been a violation in any era. But the ferocity of the response—the utter rejection of the Post-Dispatch’s authority to do what it did—was an entirely modern thing, and it’s a direct consequence of newspapers’ outdated and medium-inappropriate reliance on the authoritarian credibility model.