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The Media Industry's Financial Problems Are Bad News for Democracy
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.
Mar 28, 2024
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.
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Independent Journalism Is Vital to Our Future and We Must Help It Thrive
Campaigns to discredit news are especially dangerous in a changing media landscape—and as threats within our power to resolve continue to increase, from pandemics to climate disruption to authoritarianism.
Feb 26, 2024
As someone who has enjoyed a long media career, including 44 years hosting CBC TV’s “The Nature of Things,” I understand how important robust media is to a thriving democracy. An informed public makes better decisions about everything from healthcare to voting.
Some, unfortunately, see an informed public as a threat to their agendas. Consider that one of the first things authoritarian regimes do is crack down on journalists and independent news outlets.
Outright crackdowns are often preceded by campaigns to discredit news media, calling them “fake news,” for example—as we’ve seen in the United States. This exacerbates the spread of misinformation (incorrect or false information), disinformation, (deliberately misleading or false information), and propaganda.
Good public discourse contributes to healthier, functioning societies with greater equality and less exploitation.
This has become especially dangerous in a changing media landscape—and as threats within our power to resolve continue to increase, from pandemics to climate disruption to a worrying shift toward authoritarianism in many parts of the world, including the U.S.
Traditional media outlets have always reflected to some extent their owners’ (and advertisers’) biases, but journalistic standards, reader preferences, strong public broadcasting, and a range of outlets ensured that reliable information was relatively easy to find and assess. Even the amount of climate science denial in mainstream outlets diminished over time as journalists and readers challenged false information.
The range of news sources has shrunk considerably as traditional media outlets have increasingly been bought by a few large companies.
Internet growth has profoundly affected news and information media, for better and worse. In a world of online media outlets and streaming services, as well as social media platforms, the traditional model of selling ad space around articles is no longer viable. Advertising still supports TV and radio broadcasting and, to a lesser degree, online journalism. But companies must come up with creative ways to survive in a capitalist system and engage readers, viewers, and listeners.
As newer online outlets emerge, traditional outlets are disappearing, only in part because of the internet. Many newspaper and broadcasting companies have been bought up by hedge fund companies and other corporate entities that strip the assets, take the money, and close outlets. Community newspapers—incredibly important to areas not covered by big city media—have been especially hard hit.
Recently, Bell Media decided to sell many of its radio stations, lay off thousands of workers, and end much of its news programming—including its groundbreaking, long-running investigative program W5. Although parent company BCE had net earnings of $3 billion last year, executives claimed the move was economically necessary.
British Columbia Premier David Eby argued that monopolistic media companies’ “encrapification” of local news is partly responsible for audience loss. “Bell and corporations like Bell have overseen the assembly of local media assets that are treasures to local communities,” he said. “Like corporate vampires, they sucked the life out of them, laying off journalists.”
With so much information now available online, it’s often difficult to separate fact from fiction, truth from disinformation. But traditional outlets that adhere to journalistic standards and provide credible coverage on a wide range of topics still exist. The Guardian has led the way in reporting on climate change and other environmental issues, and sources such as the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Washington Post, and Reuters still offer credible reporting.
The growth in new media outlets, often with a focus on critical environmental issues, also gives hope. In Canada, sources such as The Tyee, National Observer, The Narwhal, Rabble, The Energy Mix, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and others offer a wide range of investigative reporting, news stories, and opinion. There are also many good online community news outlets.
Public broadcasting is also crucial, as its coverage is not dictated to as great an extent by the priorities of owners and advertisers. But we’ve recently seen increasing attacks against, and threats by politicians to cut funding for, broadcasters such as the CBC in Canada and PBS in the U.S. The CBC has already suffered from cutbacks and should be given more support.
Good public discourse contributes to healthier, functioning societies with greater equality and less exploitation. We can all do our part to help journalism thrive by supporting public broadcasting and donating or subscribing to the many new, credible outlets and dependable traditional outlets.
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Who's Really to Blame for Fake News? Look in the Mirror, America.
Nov 30, 2016
Consider for a moment the oxymoronic concept of "fake news," which we have been hearing so much about lately. This isn't your typical disinformation or misinformation -- generated by the government, or foreign adversaries, or corporations -- to advance an agenda by confusing the public. It isn't even the familiar dystopian idea of manipulated fact designed to keep people lobotomized and malleable in some post-human autocracy. Those scenarios assume at least an underlying truth against which nefarious forces can take aim.
Fake news is different. It is an assault on the very principle of truth itself: a way to upend the reference points by which mankind has long operated. You could say, without exaggeration, that fake news is actually an attempt to reverse the Enlightenment. And because a democracy relies on truth -- which is why dystopian writers have always described how future oligarchs need to undermine it -- fake news is an assault on democracy as well.
The American people are accessories in their own disinformation campaign.
What is truly horrifying is that fake news is not the manipulation of an unsuspecting public. Quite the opposite. It is willful belief by the public. In effect, the American people are accessories in their own disinformation campaign.
That is our current situation, and it is no sure thing that either truth or democracy survives.
Investigations of fake news have reported that it is a commodity -- primarily a way for its perpetrators, many of whom are young people overseas, to earn money by blasting out ludicrous material for which there is an audience, and in that respect it is no different from many of the so-called "alt-right," white nationalist sites. Commodity or not, fake news has already played a role, perhaps a substantial one, in Donald Trump's election, especially since his campaign was aided by Russian hackers and trolls disseminating falsities -- everything from Hillary Clinton using a body double to Pope Francis endorsing Trump to ongoing charges of voting irregularities to Clinton heading a child-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria.
There is now a Gresham's law in news as in money: Phony news pushes out real news.
We have been heading in this direction for a long time, not because people necessarily love the outlandishly scurrilous or because they are joyfully conspiratorial (though both of those things are probably true), but because it is to the benefit of the right wing, as I have written in earlier posts, to disrupt truth. Conservatives have a near-monopoly on that disruption. A Buzzfeed analysis of fake news found only one viral false election story from a left-wing site.
America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the results are anyone's guess.
Stephen Colbert, during his famous White House Correspondents Dinner appearance, quipped that "it is a well-known fact that reality has a liberal bias." It was a joke, but one with a very large grain of truth. The Drudge Report, Breitbart, Fox News, Alex Jones and others in the right-wing media have been peddling their own peculiar version of reality for a while now. It isn't, I think, that any of those outlets or their correspondents necessarily believe the hogwash they deliver. (Well, maybe Alex Jones does.) They have been playing to an audience living in its own paranoid fantasy. But even that may understate their rationale. I doubt Drudge and Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon were in the fake news business to make dough from morons or to rouse right-wing rabble. They were in the fake news business to destroy real news and create a vacuum into which they and their like-minded allies could march. If you think this is a paranoid fantasy, just look at the election results. America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the results are anyone's guess.
Still, right-wing fake news could be quarantined. No one beyond Fox News' aging white male audience took it seriously as a provider of news. What helped break down the thin walls between the right-wing propaganda press and the purportedly real press were social media, which is how Americans -- particularly young Americans -- increasingly receive their news. I won't rehash the recent debate over whether Facebook bears some responsibility for disseminating fake news. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's defense is that the social media behemoth is not a media site but a connection site, and it doesn't monitor the items to which its users connect. This is a frail defense and a conscienceless one, like Craigslist saying that it had no responsibility for ads offering child pornography.
But here is the thing about those Facebook election stories. That Buzzfeed survey I cited found that as the campaign headed toward its climax, fake news on Facebook outperformed real news in terms of engagement. Or put starkly: Facebook was purveying more blatantly false stories to millions of users -- stories that Buzzfeed also found were largely targeted at Hillary Clinton -- than real news. Readers of those stories clearly wanted to think the worst of Clinton. Facebook gave them more reason to do so. Trump's election, then, is due partly to Zuckerberg's dereliction and to social media's nonchalance when it comes to truth.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided.
In this most surreal of years politically, you have to take a step back to grasp how surreal it has been journalistically too. Of course, truth, even in the mainstream media, has always been insufficiently and carelessly applied. The news media are a business, not a public service, and a large part of that business is providing what the public wants. Still, though I may be naive in saying so, I don't believe that most mainstream journalists have a predisposition to lie. To take the path of least resistance, perhaps. To lie, no. I am sure that in some way most of them feel they are serving the truth, not just their publication, network or website. They understand that truth is the webbing that holds everything together -- our only way of making sense of things. That understanding is what separates them from Fox, Drudge, Breitbart and more straightforwardly fake news sites.
At least that is the way it was before this year and this election. Fake news is intended to slash that webbing. It is not intended to pose an alternative truth, as if there could be such a thing, but to destroy truth altogether, to set us adrift in a world of belief without facts, a world in which there is no defense against lies. That, needless to say, is a very dangerous place.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided. They are made for each other -- two nihilists in a pod. Trump's modus operandi is to make things up, which has placed a special burden on traditional journalism. I hadn't imagined I would ever see a headline like this one in The New York Times, much less a headline about a president-elect: TRUMP CLAIMS, WITH NO EVIDENCE, THAT "MILLIONS OF PEOPLE" VOTED ILLEGALLY.
With no evidence.
In the headline.
Basically, editors are now compelled to fact-check every Trump pronouncement -- before even getting to the body of the story. The alternative is how The Wall Street Journal titled its article on Trump's baseless charge: TRUMP TAKES AIM AT MILLIONS OF VOTES.
Notice how easily the fake slips into the factual. But can one honestly expect every editor and reporter to challenge Trump this way every day? We all realize the media will soon tire of it. The Times already has. (And keep an eye on how NBC News treats Katy Tur, far and away the best reporter on television, and see if they demote her or let her continue fact-checking Trump.) "Post-truth" is what the Oxford English Dictionary anointed as the word of the year. Welcome to post-truth America.
Like many depressed Americans, I have pretty much stopped watching or reading the news since the election. Partly, it is because I can't face the oncoming catastrophe of a Trump presidency and the way it will undo 50 years of social progress. Part of it is because I can't face the fact that the truth is a shambles, and with it, our democracy.
The basic principle of fake news is that when you can believe anything, you wind up believing in nothing. This is a revolution. But you can only place a portion of the blame on the fake news confabulators, on their Russian compatriots, on the "alt-right" white supremacists out to destroy multicultural America, on the traditional conservative press, which happily ballyhooed anything that attacked Democrats, true or not, and on the mainstream press, which, with its on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand coverage gave fake news a purchase rather than battle it tooth and nail. You can't even lay the entire blame on the congenital truth-destroyer Trump.
The larger portion of the blame lies with the citizens of the nation that Donald Trump insists only he can make great again. Fake news thrives because there is a lazy, incurious, self-satisfied public that wants it to thrive; because large swaths of that public don't want news in any traditional sense, so much as they want vindication of their preconceptions and prejudices; because in this post-modernist age, every alleged fact is supposed to be a politico-economic construct, and nothing can possibly be true; and because even rationality now is passe. Above all else, fake news is a lazy person's news. It provides passive entertainment, demanding nothing of us. And that is a major reason we now have a fake news president.
Democracy can wither under all sorts of forces. But those forces seldom come from without. They almost always come from within. Perhaps the most powerful force is also the most subtle and seemingly innocuous, one that you would think unlikely to take down a great nation: laziness. We are a lazy people now -- too lazy to hear anything we don't want to hear, too lazy to defend the truth against those who hope to subvert it, and, finally, too lazy to protect our democracy.
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