The Media Industry's Financial Problems Are Bad News for Democracy

The Miami Herald is one of America’s top newspapers—winner of a whopping 24 Pulitzer Prizes, renowned in its heyday for its extensive coverage of Latin America, and publisher of the epic investigative reporting that took down late financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein.

Checking it out Monday, I read the latest on the raids on hip-hop star Diddy’s Miami Beach mansions; a report from Haiti by its longtime, award-winning correspondent; and then on the fourth click I hit the paywall. A subscription would be 99 cents for the first month, then $15.99 a month for this out-of-towner to be able to read South Florida’s best journalism.

But you can still read the Miami Chronicle for free.

Bedraggled city editors lack the budget to send reporters out on a story, but apparently Putin, Xi Jinping, and their fellow dictators have millions of dollars to spend on their brand of “journalism.”

The Chronicle’s website is topped by a Gothic-style header that looks borrowed from the Herald’s fonts. A tagline reading “the Florida News since 1937” seems to have vanished since The New York Times reported the site actually didn’t exist before late this February. The Chronicle’s headlines link to stories from the BBC and other sources.

There’s no “about” page. You have to read the (also paywalled) Times to know that, according to researchers and government officials, the Chronicle and at least four sister sites like the New York News Daily (as opposed to the Daily News) or D.C. Weekly are part of a Russia-backed disinformation network. The paper called the new news sites “a technological leap” forward in the Vladimir Putin regime’s goal of fooling U.S. voters, with fears that more deceptive “fake news” will appear on these pages as the November election gets closer.

In 1984, Whole Earth Catalog hippie guru Stewart Brand said famously, “Information wants to be free.” The reality, 40 years later, is that for millions of internet readers, it’s disinformation—articles that twist facts; offer toxic opinions and; increasingly, include AI-generated deepfake videos, pictures, and audio—that wants to be free.

The truth? That’s probably going to cost you.

You’ve probably heard that 2024 has been an annus horribilis for the American media, even though we’re only 12 weeks into the year. Hard-working journalists—many of them young, and disproportionately people of color—have been laid off or taken buyouts at news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, Vice Media, Sports Illustrated, and The Messenger, which closed after just a year.

This happened as smaller local newspapers are shutting down at a rate of two a week, leaving as many as 200 “news deserts”—mostly rural counties with no working journalists—across America. The large Gannett chain of newspapers even announced it was dumping wire stories from The Associated Press so it could use the cash savings to fill “gaps”—which, based on history, could be gaps in Gannett’s top executive pay.The backstory is that the 20th-century business model for legacy newsrooms—monopoly distribution that was a magnet for advertisers—was obliterated by the World Wide Web. Trial and error, like the mere pennies from digital advertising, convinced leaders of most surviving outlets (including the Inquirer) that the digital subscription/paywall model is the only truly viable option. Personally, I agree with the strategy. Investigating corrupt public officials or sending an actual human to the school board takes money, and it’s better when the community supports this work, instead of either the government that needs investigating, or billionaires with an agenda.

Look, we all know that the big paywalled papers like The New York Times or Washington Postdon’t always live up to those high-minded ideals. True, it was a TV network (NBC, which was free, before you needed Xfinity or YouTube TV) that committed the ultimate sin this weekend of hiring GOP Big Lie promoter Ronna McDaniel for $300,000 a year. This as many large newsrooms have been marred by the tunnel vision of “both sideism” in an election that could end American democracy.

Yet it was also the Times that first told you about Donald Trump’s tax returns and secret meetings in Trump Tower. We criticize these large newsrooms because we need them to do even better. But now I’m worried that in the paywall era, the new business model will ensure that only wealthier people who can afford to be paying for news will be reading the best stories.

The great writer Sarah Kendzior got me thinking more about this problem when she replied recently to my X/Twitter post. “Articles containing damning factual information about Trump are paywalled,” she wrote. “Propaganda containing fawning information about Trump is free and often packaged as news. People will read the free article. Until this changes, nothing will.”

Bedraggled city editors lack the budget to send reporters out on a story, but apparently Putin, Xi Jinping, and their fellow dictators have millions of dollars to spend on their brand of “journalism.” Ironically, the Times reported that five mysterious new U.S. websites may be the vestige of Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, indicted for interfering in America’s 2016 election and run by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane was blown out of the sky after an aborted plot against Putin. The Times said the recent mix of news on the Chronicle website included a deepfake video of U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland appearing to say things she never actually said about U.S.-Russia policy.

Of course, the Kremlin isn’t the only player with an interest in promoting disinformation ahead of the 2024 election. The opportunities for our own politicized oligarchs or political-party apparatchiks to launch their own misleading websites have never been greater. And if creating the Philadelphia “Enquirer” or some other fake site is too much trouble, they can always post their deepfake videos to TikTok, where 14% of U.S. adults currently get their news. For free.

I think Stewart Brand got it sideways. The people do want information to be free, but free information wants to be manipulated.