Words for Sale

This blog is a companion to my recent (July 29^th) When Too Much Creates No Choice at All, which dealt with how consumers increasingly using subject matter filtration to deal with too much information. Today, society seems to focus so heavily on the reconfiguration of American media that has turned both our political system and our very understanding of the world around us upside down.

We watch as mega-info-conglomerates (an amalgamation of “search, shopping and social media”) swallow advertiser dollars like a herd of tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs devouring hapless prey, siphoning off revenues that used to support old-line, mainstream newspapers and magazines. News outlets are seemingly forced to “choose sides,” and the fight for contracting ad dollars has shifted traditional media outlets from purveyors of facts into purveyors of distorted reality catering to demographic segments allergic to the truth. Distortion sells. Fake news makes money. And attacking and undermining a free press is quite okay with our leadership.

So what if, somehow, segments of mainstream media have devolved into the propaganda arms of autocrat wannabes? We are witnessing a wholesale battle waged by the incumbent political party (the GOP, which controls both houses of Congress, the presidency, most state legislatures and governorships) to decimate and denigrate any media sources critical of their policies. The liberal press, often equally distorted, finds itself increasingly alone and marginalized. Those struggling to maintain a middle, “fair and balanced” path face harsh attacks from both sides.

The hard reality is that trying to be a neutral reporter of what is really happening around the world is a dying business, at least in the United States. Global reporting is expensive. Field reporters with access to first rate camera crews cost. Sometimes, where the government resists the proclivity to dictate editorial policy, government subsidies and support fill the void. Think CBC in Canada and BBC in the UK. That model would clear not work here. But where government steps in to fill the void, most of the time, we face a simple “voice of the state” propaganda machine. The Iranian, Russian and Chinese model. Don’t think that is viable here either. Sort of.

The fly in the ointment, one that threatens the most viable check and balance in a democratic state – a neutral, free and unrestrained fact-seeking press – is dying. Because the underlying financial infrastructure for good journalism is eroding in favor of a “whatever the consumer wants to hear” economic force plus a loss of traditional subscription and combined advertising revenue, hard fact-gathering is rapidly becoming an economically unsupportable pastime. Where these purveyors of mass media neutral reportage used to be able to earn their own financial support, today they often must depend on the largesse of mega-wealthy players (“press barons”) who buy and support these journalistic structures as a matter of power, civic duty, charity or a combination of those elements. They also bring their control and editorial bias, picking people who reflect what they want the world to see and believe.

One of my regular readers, Sara Legon, brought to my attention a well-presented article by Alex Pareene (the last editor of Gawker) in the Winter 2018 edition of the most prestigious Columbia Journalism Review. Pareene initially points out the obvious and takes it from there: “The press baron model works out so long as people want to be press barons. Generally, billionaires buy or start media outlets either for money or influence. There are ostensibly benevolent examples, of course. After personally purchasing The Washington Post, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has received a great deal of credit for investing in serious investigative journalism and giving the paper the resources to achieve major ‘digital growth,’ as the press releases say. I worked (oh so briefly) for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, home to lots of great journalists given the resources necessary to do important work. I know Omidyar believes strongly and sincerely in the importance of independent journalism to a free society…

“But with Google and Facebook sucking up the majority of the ad money, going into publishing eventually only makes sense if you have particular things you want published. I have no doubt that Bezos and Omidyar believe in the missions of their organizations, but they are both quite upfront about not wanting to run them as charities. They both want to ‘save’ journalism as a business. The trouble will come when the billionaires who think that way discover that, even if they once had one very good idea that made them very rich, they probably don’t have the one good idea that will ‘crack the code’ of making it profitable to run a large and expensive news-gathering organization. Those who initially decide to fund journalism out of a sense of selfless civic virtue will get bored or get tired of losing money, leaving only those funding it for some other, probably political purpose. (The Guardian is currently engaged in a fascinating experiment to see how long a rich man’s money and the economic laws of compound interest can be used to sustain a money-losing, public-interest-serving journalism shop.)

“The ones who are doing a pure influence play—and have enough money stockpiled to afford not to care if it works as a business—have the advantage over everyone else. The fact that Gawker had the readership and revenue to sustain itself didn’t, in the end, make a whit of difference to the people who made the decision to kill it off, just as the Gothamist network’s modest profitability made no difference to [Chicago Cubs, TD Ameritrade founder and pro-Trump Joe] Ricketts [the billionaire who rolled up a lot of small, local news outlets and then in a fit of pique at a unionization effort, just shut it all down] —and just as, in another sense, the financial viability of Breitbart News means little to billionaire backer Rebekah Mercer, nor that of The Federalist to whichever wealthy interests are secretly bankrolling that conservative publication. In this world it makes more sense, from the billionaire’s perspective, to fund Breitbart than own DNAinfo. Both will probably lose money, but one of them might help get a president elected.

“In retrospect, it seems inevitable that American journalism’s professional norms around fairness and ethics emerged at a time when newspapers and magazines were good investments for normal financial reasons. Safe investments attract safe corporate investors. Corporations like clear standards of conduct and don’t like offending huge numbers of potential customers, which is how Yellow Journalism gave way to ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’ and the mainstream media as we knew it. The market played a big role in determining content. A big city paper could lean a little to the left or the right, but it couldn’t go full–John Birch or all–in Yippie without losing the thing that gave it power: monopolistic access to the eyeballs of the city’s literate adults.

“New economic rules determine new forms. We’re already seeing market forces that have nothing to do with audience preference—let alone ‘public interest’—drive changes in how news is gathered and reported. After building what resembled newsrooms of yore, Mashable, Mic, and Vocativ eliminated dozens of editorial jobs in the now familiar ‘pivot to video,’ in spite of the fact that readers, being readers, prefer text: Most literate adults can read a paragraph much faster than it takes for a preroll advertisement to load and then hear that paragraph get read aloud over stock photography. But major brands have expressed their spending preferences for video inventory and thus media companies seek to satisfy their demand. No one really believes it’ll work, where ‘work’ means preserve thousands of jobs gathering news as opposed to crafting branded content videos tailored to the latest Facebook algorithm changes.

“This is the dark timeline: Journalism-agnostic media investors learn news can’t ‘scale’ and then jump ship just as soon as they’ve finished killing off both the corporate and independent legacy press businesses, leaving the fate of the industry to ungodly rich people with very idiosyncratic personal agendas.

“What’s happening to the press is reflective of the broader transformation of our society. Rule by supposedly benevolent technocratic elites is giving way—in large part due to the fecklessness of those technocrats—to straight plutocracy. And really, that only makes sense in an era in which everyone feels like their lives are, in important and fundamental ways, in thrall to the whims of a few mega-rich people. Our cities promise to remake themselves to please Bezos. A few GOP donors threaten to close their checkbooks, and the entire federal tax code is sloppily rewritten. Chris Hughes sneezes, and The New Republic catches a cold.”

Fueled by the open and unlimited campaign contribution 2010 Citizens United vs FEC Supreme Court decision (where most of the relevant donations go heavily into media expenditures and support) and accelerated by the shifting economics of modern American journalism, the biggest question is whether democracy can survive when voters simply cannot discern the truth, shun contradictory reporting or just don’t care. That Twitter and Facebook faced plunges in the share value at their seeming inability to be the constant carriers of falsehood might suggest progress, but we are not remotely close to an American society that votes based on facts and truth. It’s bleak out there!

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the face of job-crushing automation/artificial intelligence, the plunge of American power and influence on the global stage, does this destruction of neutral journalism tip the scales toward an inevitable end of the United States of America as a viable democracy?